Handwriting

THE CAP ON the upper-case J is back. That's a good thing. Opinion about the cursive capital Q is mixed, but no one likes the simplified upper-case M. It's Thursday noon at the National Catholic Educational Association convention, and a group of teachers from St. John the Evangelist School in northern Baltimore County is discussing arcane details of handwriting over Caesar salad at a downtown hotel. These teachers prove that handwriting lives, despite the computer juggernaut. Two children from their school have won Maryland championships this spring in the National Handwriting Contest.

The judge presiding over the case involving a ballot referendum on slots at Arundel Mills decided this afternoon not to allow expert testimony on handwriting analysis as part of an effort by the project developer's lawyers to prove fraud in slots opponents' successful petition drive. The issue arose because of Judge Ronald A. Silkworth's decision to treat the hearing as a judicial review, which limits the type of evidence that can be introduced in court. "As this court already noted.

Everybody knows that Microsoft rarely innovates. You know the knock. While companies such as Apple Computer roll out bold and original hardware and software products, Microsoft relies on tweaks to its world-dominant Windows software. Of course, there's something to be said for this approach. Rather than launch some radical product, why not add a heap of features to a product that already has a loyal user base tens of millions deep? That's the philosophy that guided Microsoft in the development of its upcoming Tablet PC technology.

Alice Ann Koontz, an acknowledged expert in the field of dyslexic education who also played a key role in establishing programs at the Jemicy School in Owings Mills, died Friday of cancer at her Roland Park home. She was 82. Ms. Koontz, the daughter of Arthur B. Koontz, a lawyer and prominent Democrat who was a West Virginia gubernatorial candidate in 1920, and Mary Watson Sipe Koontz, a homemaker, was born in Charleston, W.Va., and raised at Burkewood, her family's estate overlooking the Kanawha River.

The way you dot your "i" and cross your "t" might determine whether you get a job someday.A growing number of businesses are relying at least partly on graphology, the study of personality through handwriting, as a screening tool in corporate hiring and restructuring."

No one answers the telephone these days at the International Association of Master Penmen and Teachers of Handwriting.Elementary school principals no longer hold sessions on handwriting at their national convention. Calligraphers are looking for second jobs. Cursive, it seems, may be cursed."My child never really learned how to do cursive, and it was something that troubled me for quite a while until I realized he had segued right from printing to the computer," says Andrea Oseas of Cambridge, Mass.

I'VE BEEN STOPPED cold at moments during these days of frenzy. And what a pleasant little break it is, in the midst of the post office stamp lines, the anguish when the electric train breaks, or the glass Christmas ball plunges, to get a little blessed freedom from tension. What cuts these days' idiocy is sight of handwriting -- personal penmanship I recognize at a time of the year when you actually get mail that is not addressed by some automated inkjet. One of these out-of-the-blue moments happened the other night.

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- The far-fetched idea seemed to be the last chance: Magnify the handwriting of an unknown murder suspect and plaster it on billboards.But the novel roadside attraction led to a suspect in the torture murders of a mother and her two daughters -- and, police say, may have uncovered a serial rapist and killer who led a double life reminiscent of Ted Bundy's.A day after the billboards went up, a tipster led police to their suspect.He is Oba Chandler, 46, a balding, blue-eyed, blue-collar charmer, married at least six times, father of at least nine children, who was indicted by a grand jury last week in the 1989 deaths of Joan Rogers, 36, and her daughters, Michelle, 17, and Christie, 14.Police call the killings the most heinous in the area's history.

CHERYL STAIR Handwriting coach and pediatric occupational therapist AGE --41 SALARY --An estimated $33,000 from the Carroll County Public School System Infant and Toddler Program and $75 an hour at her private practice. YEARS IN BUSINESS --18. TYPICAL DAY --There is no such thing. Stair works for the school system three days a week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). She then has private appointments with children Monday and Wednesday evenings and on the weekends in her Eldersburg office.

It's National Handwriting Day. Do you know where your penmanship has gone?If you're like most of us, those precise t's and p's and capital Q's you learned in grammar school disappeared years ago, replaced by a scrawl even you can hardly decipher some days."

Since his death several weeks ago, I've received a number of calls and e-mails from former students of Tom Longstreth, the celebrated St. Paul's School English teacher and coach, who was a much-beloved figure on the school's Brooklandville campus for 41 years. Tom was also my former neighbor and a prolific daily walker who could be seen striding along the streets of Riderwood, ramrod-straight and wearing his trademark khaki pants and blue button-down Oxford cloth shirt. In the warm months, he'd add a crumpled tennis hat to his wardrobe, his only concession to the elements.

If you've never been to Homewood's historic outhouse, ya gotta go. The brick privy is open to the public through the end of March as part of a special exhibit - Next to Godliness: Cleanliness in Early Maryland - that explores housekeeping and personal hygiene in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The outhouse graffiti came later, between 1897 and 1910, when Country School for Boys, the school that later became Gilman, took up residence at Homewood. So it's not technically part of the exhibit.

Dear guys in prison: Thanks for all the letters, and thanks for all the letters, and thanks for even more letters. I am reading them all. Honest. It takes a while, but I read them. (OK, some I skim a little, but I try not to miss the highlights.) A few observations: You all get passing grades for penmanship. Obviously you have had time to sharpen this skill, and it shows. No letter has been chucked because its handwriting gave me a headache. So far, so good. Secondly, I'd like to commend most of you on your writing - that is, your ability to communicate exactly what you wish you hadn't done in the past and what you say you want to do in the future.

Practice may not always make perfect, but in Peter Schultz's case, it can make you the best at handwriting in your class - and in all of Maryland, for that matter. The second-grader at St. Agnes School in Catonsville was one of three Baltimore County pupils and one of seven statewide to win the 15th annual Zaner-Bloser National Handwriting Contest. The contest, sponsored by an educational publisher offering penmanship instruction, judges the slant, shape, spacing and size of contestants' lettering.

CHERYL STAIR Handwriting coach and pediatric occupational therapist AGE --41 SALARY --An estimated $33,000 from the Carroll County Public School System Infant and Toddler Program and $75 an hour at her private practice. YEARS IN BUSINESS --18. TYPICAL DAY --There is no such thing. Stair works for the school system three days a week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays). She then has private appointments with children Monday and Wednesday evenings and on the weekends in her Eldersburg office.

Former state Sen. Robert R. Neall created a big stir with a recent letter to the governor. It predicted disaster for the city's plan to bail out Baltimore schools. But here's the real shocker: the 2 1/2 -page letter was handwritten. People who didn't like what Neall had to say were quick to note that the letter was longhand, as if that discredited the message. Asked about the letter, the first words out of Mayor Martin O'Malley's mouth were that this kind of correspondence "used to be typewritten."

MAINTAINING attractive, legible handwriting might seem obsolete in a world dominated by computers. But Lauryn Fazenbaker, an 11-year-old pupil at Charles Carroll Elementary School, knows otherwise. Her proper penmanship recently won state-level recognition from Zaner-Bloser, the nation's leading publisher of handwriting texts. "If I wrote sloppy, no one would know what I had to say, if I had something really important to say," said Lauryn, who will receive a $500 savings bond, an engraved pen and an award plaque for her achievement.

Writing with a pen and paper seems so old-fashioned in a world of e-mail and word processing. But with the approach of National Handwriting Day on Jan. 23 -- the birthday of Declaration of Independence signer John Hancock -- it is a good time to consider that there is more to our handwriting than meets the eye. Just ask Katherine Mainolfi Koppenhaver of Joppa, a certified document examiner. Working with her husband, William, she has built an independent business identifying, and often testifying about, handwriting forgeries, document alterations and other shams.

I've been sorting through and rearranging some of my oldest books, a fall housecleaning chore that can chew up a morning if you open their spines and leaf through their pages. I did. There went the day. These books are from a category I preserve. Some are my own schoolbooks, others belonged to family members I often recall. The book that caught me off guard was the well-worn geometry text my grandmother, Lily Stewart, inscribed with her signature. It must have been handed down to her younger sister, my godmother, Marie, who also signed the book.

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed, by Patricia Cornwell. Putnam. 352 pages. $27.95 Rich and vainglorious from writing blockbusting detective fiction, Patricia Cornwell has applied her considerable funds and fertile imagination to the realm of true crime, choosing, as she would, history's most celebrated case. Without troubling to consult, credit or contradict a wealth of investigation over the past 114 years, Cornwell claims to have finally caught London's legendary serial killer, Jack the Ripper.