Starvard.
Starvard University · Penmanship
Two crafts, one hand: Palmer's flowing everyday cursive for speed, and Johnston's broad pen lettering for beauty.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Writing by hand is like learning to dance with a pen. At first your fingers grip too hard and the letters wobble, but there is a trick: the movement should come from your whole arm, swinging loose and free, not from stiff little fingers. This course teaches you that swing with fun drills, loops and ovals, until ordinary handwriting turns quick and neat. Then you pick up a special flat pen and learn to make grand, beautiful letters like the ones in old books. Soon a blank page will look like an invitation instead of a test.
This course joins two famous teachers who never met. A. N. Palmer taught America to write quickly and clearly for business, using big, rhythmic arm movements drilled a few minutes a day. Edward Johnston, working in London, rescued the art of formal lettering by studying medieval manuscripts and the broad edged pen that made them. Palmer gives your handwriting speed and ease. Johnston gives it beauty and structure.
You will do Palmer first, because a relaxed arm and a light grip help with everything after. Then you will slow right down with the broad pen, learn why its strokes are thick one way and thin the other, and build Johnston's rounded foundational hand letter by letter. The course ends with capitals, spacing, and one finished page planned and written by you. Fifteen to thirty minutes of daily practice, Palmer's own prescription, is enough to change your hand within a few months.
The whole course in brief
What your hand will learn in this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Palmer's whole method rests on one idea: write with the arm, not the fingers. In what he called muscular movement, the forearm rests on the desk on its muscular cushion and glides the pen across the page, while the fingers merely hold and guide. Finger writers cramp, tire, and slow down. Arm writers can write comfortably for hours, which is why Palmer trained clerks this way.
Set up before you write a letter. Sit square to the desk, back straight, both feet flat, with your eyes a comfortable distance from the paper. Turn the paper slightly so your forearm points naturally toward its center. Your free hand holds the paper steady and moves it as you go, so the writing hand stays in its easy zone instead of reaching.
Hold the pen lightly between thumb and first two fingers, resting on the middle finger, with no pinch and no white knuckles. Palmer's test is relaxation: shake your hand out, let the arm feel heavy and loose, then begin. For the first days, practice the gliding movement in the air and on paper without forming letters at all. Movement first, letters second, is the Palmer order, and skipping it is the one mistake that ruins the method.
Lesson 2
Drills look like scribbles and work like scales on a piano. Palmer starts every learner on two movements. The first is the continuous oval: a slanted, compact oval, about two writing spaces high, repeated in an unbroken chain across the page, driven by the forearm swinging freely. The second is the push pull: long, straight, slanted lines drawn back and forth without lifting the pen, which teaches the same swing in its simplest form.
Palmer's instructions are precise. Keep the ovals on the correct slant, never tipped backward. Keep the rhythm even, counting quietly if it helps, and value lightness over darkness: the pen should glide, not dig. Work in short sessions of fifteen to thirty minutes of true movement rather than an hour of tired fingers.
Here is a first week that works:
Judge drills by freedom, not prettiness. When the arm swings without your thinking about it, letters will inherit the ease.
Lesson 3
With the arm moving freely, Palmer builds letters out of the drill strokes. His business hand is plain, unshaded, and fast: oval based letters like o and a come straight from the oval drill, and straight stem letters ride the push pull line. Every letter joins the next in one continuous line, because lifting the pen a hundred times a page is wasted motion.
Hold four things uniform and your writing will look tidy even at speed: size, slant, spacing, and alignment to the baseline. Palmer is relaxed about the exact degree of slant. He says slant needs no special study and will take care of itself if the position and movement are right, as long as your slant is consistent. What he will not forgive is a page where every letter leans a different way.
Practice in this order: single letters in families, then joining pairs, then words, then full sentences copied from a book you enjoy, then your own thoughts. Write real things daily, lists, notes, and letters, using the movement in all of it. Palmer warned that pupils who drill beautifully and then write carelessly all day never improve. The method only works when it becomes the way you write everything.
Lesson 4
Calligraphy begins with a different tool. A broad pen, traditionally a quill or reed, today usually a metal nib with a wide, chisel shaped tip, makes thick and thin strokes by itself: pull it down and the full edge lands, making a thick stroke; push it sideways and only the corner touches, making a thin one. The letterforms here are simply what that edge naturally draws.
Johnston's advice on tools is practical. You need a broad nib in a straight holder, a reservoir to hold ink on the nib, smooth paper that will not bleed, and dark ink. A sloped board helps too: Johnston worked at a board raised about fifty to sixty degrees, keeping the ink under control and the shaft nearly horizontal.
Before writing letters, do Johnston's nib test on scrap paper. Adjust pen and paper until your vertical strokes come out square ended and the full width of the nib, while your horizontal strokes are as fine as possible. That test proves the nib edge sits flat and square to the line. Test again at every refill. A dirty or badly seated nib cannot write well, Johnston says flatly.
Lesson 5
Johnston built his teaching hand by studying the clear, rounded writing of medieval English manuscripts, the half uncial scripts this course's source book examines page by page. The hand his students developed from those models, later called the foundational hand, is round, upright, and supremely legible, which is why beginners still start with it a century later.
Three habits define it. First, a constant pen angle: hold the nib edge at roughly thirty degrees to the writing line and never roll it between strokes, so every letter shares the same pattern of thick and thin. Second, measured letter height: the body of small letters, the x height, is about four and a half nib widths tall, which you mark by stacking the nib itself up the margin. Third, simple skeletons: letters are built from straight stems and honest round bowls, like the o made as a true circle with a flat top and bottom where the nib angle bites.
Learn the letters in shape families, not alphabet order: straight stem letters first, then round ones, then arched ones. Write slowly, stroke by stroke, lifting the pen between strokes. Speed is Palmer's virtue. Here, accuracy is the whole game.
Lesson 6
Capitals come from a different ancestor: the carved lettering of imperial Rome. Johnston directs students to those classical Roman capitals as the permanent standard of proportion, the same letters you can still read on monuments. Their secret is geometry you can feel. O is a full circle. E, F, and L share one stem and measured arms. M spreads wide, S curves in balanced halves, and every letter was designed to stand alone in stone and still look right.
With the broad pen, write capitals taller than your small letters, at about six to seven nib widths, and a touch lighter: Johnston's tradition keeps capitals slightly narrower and more delicate than beginners expect, so they sparkle over the text instead of shouting. Give them room. Capitals need more space between letters than small letters do, and even spacing is judged by the area between letters, not the gaps measured with a ruler.
Practice capitals in words, not rows of one letter: your name, your town, short phrases in all capitals. Then mix one capital with a line of foundational small letters, which is how they will actually live on your finished pages, starting names and sentences with quiet dignity.
Lesson 7
A finished page is designed before it is written. Johnston treats spacing as a craft in itself: the spaces inside letters, between letters, between words, and between lines all belong to one system. A useful rule from his teaching is that a word space is about the width of one small letter, lines need clear air between them so ascenders and descenders never collide, and margins should be generous, with the outer and bottom margins wider than the top.
Plan on paper first. Choose a short text you love, a poem, a blessing, a favorite sentence. Count its lines, decide the size of your lettering from the nib you have, and rule light pencil guidelines for every line: baseline, x height line, and capital line. Mark the margins. Write a rough version on practice paper at full size to catch long lines and awkward breaks before they reach the good sheet.
Then write the real page in one calm sitting, guidelines down, nib tested, ink flowing. Leave it overnight before judging it. Every calligrapher sees only errors in a fresh page; by morning you will see the whole. Frame it. A finished page is proof your hand has changed.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.
Graduation
You now own two hands: a quick, tireless cursive for every day, and a formal broad pen hand for the pages that matter. Neither stays without use, so keep Palmer's bargain of a few minutes of honest practice a day, and your writing will keep improving for years. Congratulations on finishing, and write someone a real letter to celebrate.
Keep learning
This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
A note on accuracy: Much of what you read at Starvard was created with help from AI agents, working alongside people. We check what we can, but we cannot guarantee that everything here is true, current, or complete. If something really matters, your health, your money, a grade, a job, please verify it with a trusted source before you rely on it.