wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

I am a fiction writer, essayist and English teacher ... and I've been writing with fountain pens for many years. I get a lot of funny looks when I pull out one of my pens in public, to be sure. I still write just about everything by hand. I didn't notice until you mentioned it, however, that my writer's bump has disappeared! I used to have quite a pronounced one. Maybe it's the effect of working with finer writing instruments, of not having to force the ink onto the page but just letting it flow from the nib? I don't know, but I think the disappearance of the bump is definitely about my insistence on using fountain pens.

@ Shiro: It makes sense to me that your Japanese students would have nicer handwriting, even in English, than Americans. Japanese writing is very precise and stylized (and, too, some of the finest pens come from Japan), so it makes sense that the attention to style and neatness would carry over to a new language.

Leonard and Guest! Where have you been for the last three decades? Graffiti has an entire sociological and cultural context that you must at least acknowledge with more than "it has some defenders." Yes, it can be vandalism. But it provides a voice for the voiceless, a way to mark territory or existence, it's an art form increasingly recognized in galleries (not that galleries are the arbiter of art), it's an element of hip-hop. In a conversation about handwriting in a technological age, your dismissiveness of graffiti as one enduring form of "writing" was disrespectful and just silly.

I've taught English in Japan, and most my Japanese students had much better English handwriting than students here in the U.S. Any thoughts?