Suggestions for Writing
1. While learning to form the letters, write larger than usual. Once their shapes are thoroughly mastered, letters will be written fast without undue distortion.
A sheet of guide-lines can be inserted beneath your writing paper if you need them.
2. Use pencil, or a ball-point pen, or a nib pen giving only slight variation of stroke-thickness. Test your pen and your size of writing on the eight small-curve letters out to err. If your pen is too broad to write these clearly, either change it or write larger.
3. Cultivate an upright rather than a sloping handwriting. It will be more like printed letterpress and more distinguishable.
4. Make Tall and Deep letters about twice the height of Shorts, to allow for the inexactitudes of free handwriting.
5. Leave ample space between words. Write the letters of each word closely together. Avoid linking letters unnaturally.
There is no need to link letters at all. But it frequently happens that the end of one letter naturally runs into the beginning of another; and the alphabet is so designed that this cannot produce alternative readings. Junctions or links can occur only along one of the double guide-lines (used or imagined) within which Short letters are written. No links are permissible between the guide-lines, nor above them, nor beneath them.
Fast writers are likely to make such natural junctions as these:
-- in which it is easy to recognize these separate letters, and no others:
6. Be sure to distinguish properly between these Short letters:
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7. While taking care, avoid over-anxiety. Avoid cramped fingers and heavy pressure of pen on paper. Only with a light touch will you write well, freely, and fast. As soon as hand or brain is fatigued, take a rest.
Little and often -- but very often; that is the way to practise. You can practise on a newspaper's margin as happily as doing its crosswords. Earnest practice for a single week enables one to write with assurance if not with speed. You will be surprised at the brevity and simplicity of Shavian writing.
8. Re-read your practice writing. Learn by your own writing and spelling slips. Make sure that a reader would not hesitate.
9. If you have already learnt to read this book's Shavian pages without reference to any key, you will have no difficulty in spelling when you write.
10. This is a good first exercise in spelling and writing: From the Writers' Alphabet take the first pair of letters (consonants) and, from its righthand column, the first three pairs (vowels). Write down all the words these will make. A few minutes will show you how simple spelling is, and you will have mastered once for all the shapes of eight letters.
11. You can be perfectly understood without spelling quite 'like a book'. We shall all tend to spell words as we see them printed; but nobody should complain so long as spelling is intelligible. To communicate -- more easily, sensibly, economically -- is the whole purpose of Shavian writing.
12. Mutual encouragement helps. Interest yourself and fellow writers by joining an 'ever-circulator' as page 15 invites you to do. It is the way to get sufficient reading as well as writing practice. Have a shot at it; and good luck!
KINGSLEY READ
Abbots Morton
Worcester
1962
