An elegy for handwriting?
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
You want a fountain pen! And for anyone else interested in handwriting more, I recommend taking up fountain pens as a hobby. It's fairly inexpensive to get into, as hobbies go (though of course you can spend unhealthy sums at the top end), and I have done a lot more handwriting since I took it up, to generally positive results.
The main reason they are so nice is that, compared to a pencil or especially a ballpoint pen, a good fountain pen requires very little pressure to write with, and so results in much less pain and cramping in the hands. I can write multiple A5 pages with a fountain pen and not even notice, whereas with a ballpoint pen my hand starts to hurt after about ten sentences.
The reviewer mentions Thomas Aquinas, whose writing was notoriously illegible. She might have mentioned Napoleon as well, or quoted from Middlemarch
"At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk. Fred wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line--in short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret when you know beforehand what the writer means."