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handwritten letters

Years ago, when I was just starting out as a newspaper reporter, I worked at a paper run by publisher Dave Lawrence. Although he was in charge of a large, busy daily metro newspaper, he often took to the time to send out handwritten notes when someone’s work particularly pleased him.

They arrived in stiff, yellow inter-office memo envelopes, closed by a string, and were known around the newsroom as ‘Dave Raves.’

I’d been at the paper for a few months, working the night desk, and was pretty sure he had no idea who I was. A couple of my stories had made the front page, but mostly I wrote minor briefs and obituaries that got tucked away in the back sections.

And then one day, I came in to work and found, in my mailbox, one of those little envelopes from the publisher’s office. It was a handwritten ‘Dave Rave’ praising an obit I’d recently written about a local cartoonist. Read More –>

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Conversations About Handwriting

by TonyB on September 21, 2011

• Researchers at a U.S. university are working with the FBI to compile a database of donated handwriting samples to use in handwriting analysis programs.

It’s being run through the English Department of West Virginia University, which is conducting two-hour “collection sessions” with volunteers.

From the university’s website:

The goal is to compile an anonymous data set to be used by WVU and the FBI to study handwriting and the unique characteristics of writing styles. Handwriting can profile human behavior in the areas of social skills, thinking styles, work habits and the way persons deal with stress. Handwriting is a unique snapshot of an individual’s current state of mind, body and feelings. Read More –>

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Conversations about Handwriting

March 28, 2011

• Apparently, the chief regulator of school exams in England has declared that tests should be conducted on computers, rather than with pen and paper. As Ofqual head Isabel Nisbet sees it, handwritten tests are “invalid” means of measuring the progress of children raised on technology. So, James Preston has published a succinct rebuttal against [...]

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Conversations about Handwriting

March 2, 2011

• St. Louis Today took time recently to highlight a woman who still manages to make a living with her handwriting. Barbara Winnerman has been a professional calligrapher for 35 years, and still gets enough work to stay employed full-time, she told the paper. I stay busy designing wedding invitations and addressing envelopes throughout the [...]

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Conversations About Handwriting

March 17, 2010

• Parents in New York are so obsessed with getting their kids into the right schools that they are hiring occupational therapists to teach their pre-schoolers how to write, according to the New York Times.

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Conversations About Handwriting

February 24, 2010

Lots of good stuff for you this week: • No wonder people in the Victorian era seemed to write so many letters. The New York Times has a very interesting article about how mail was delivered 12 times a day in London back then. You could receive a letter and respond to it the same [...]

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Conversations About Handwriting

February 17, 2010

• One of the most beloved items of Maswood Khan’s childhood was a red fountain pen, he tells readers in an opinion piece for The Financial Express, waxing nostalgic about the days when he wrote and received handwritten letters.

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Say "Thank You" With a Note

January 7, 2010

Back home from the holidays and trying to decide whether to send out a round of handwritten thank-you notes? Of course, we highly recommend it. Thank-you notes only take a few minutes and are all but guaranteed to make your friends and loved ones feel a little extra post-holiday warmth. Plus, they give you yet [...]

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Conversations About Letter Writing

December 17, 2009

Lois Bouton, a 90-year-old retired schoolteacher in Arkansas, is known as the “Coast Guard Lady” because she’s been writing letters to Coast Guardsmen around the world since the ’70s, according to a local TV station.

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