On five occasions in Pauline literature, the author claims to write in their own hand. In three of the five instances, the autograph is reserved for the final greeting and the greeting alone. In Galatians 6.11 and Philemon 19, however, Paul writes more than the letter's greeting in his own hand, as the comment about his autograph appears well before the closing salutations. This article engages one of these texts, Philemon, and argues that it was written entirely in Paul's hand. The letter was a Pauline holograph. To make this argument, the article first assesses the ‘cheirographic rhetoric’ of Philemon 19. Paul alludes to a type of documentary writing, the cheirograph, that recorded various sorts of financial proceedings. Paul's autographic guarantee recalls validation statements that were integral to this genre of text. Comparanda from the non-literary papyri show that when an author of a cheirograph called specific attention to their own handwriting, the entire document was customarily written in their own hand. The article then turns to the personal nature of Philemon and the abundance of second-person singular forms, arguing that there was a strong preference that personal letters like Philemon be handwritten in Paul's context. Taken together, these two arguments demonstrate that Paul's short letter to Philemon was more likely to be handwritten than dictated.

The educational attainment literature has brought back interest in early American primary schools, and much current research views those schools as superior to their European peers in the education offered to youth. Its emphasis, though, on using school enrollment as the prime indicator of attainment conflicts with the revisionist view of a previous generation of historians who argued that education in the heavily rural and agricultural society of the time should be considered as a process of social reproduction delivered by households, with schools being peripheral for most youth. This article, relying on evidence from statutes, indentures, and a 1798 New York State school survey, finds increased resort to primary schooling over the eighteenth century, attributable not to American exceptionalism but to a transatlantic movement away from scribal-dominated literacy and numeracy toward common use of a standardized written vernacular and “arithmetic by pen.” However, the dependence of households on child labor meant that the Three Rs did not get distributed in either an egalitarian or compact fashion. Small doses spread over a number of years—educational sprawl—best describes the system, and it lasted through much of the nineteenth century.

Increasing numbers of Chinese and Japanese speakers have been reporting that their ability to handwrite Chinese characters has been steadily diminishing, a phenomenon which is most likely a result of the growing reliance upon digital technologies. This so-called “character amnesia” has recently attracted a great deal of concern from a large number of observers, especially within the People's Republic of China. Unsurprisingly, many of the concerned participants involved in the discourse on this issue tend to rely on various empirical means in order to illustrate why they consider “character amnesia” such a worrying phenomenon. This article argues, however, that the bulk of this empirical support is unreliable and/or invalid. The article also suggests possible amendments which could hopefully lead to a better understanding of this important subject.

This study explored the utility of using keyboarding as an alternative to handwriting for students with ASD who experience handwriting difficulties. Participants included 22 students with ASD (M age = 10.83 ± 1.4 years) who had been using portable word processors in mainstream classrooms for at least 6 months to circumvent handwriting difficulties. Teacher, parent and student questionnaires rated perceptions of students’ motivation, ability, preferences and frequency of use of keyboarding as compared to handwriting, helpfulness of portable word processors and factors contributing to or limiting their use. Keyboarding and handwriting speeds were measured in letters per minute. Two short compositions using handwriting and keyboarding were compared in length and quality. Handwriting legibility was also rated. The teacher, parent and student questionnaires indicated that students’ motivation was generally rated as much higher for keyboarding than for handwriting. Teachers and parents predominantly perceived portable word processors as helpful. The group mean scores for keyboarding speed, and length and quality of keyboarded compositions were greater than comparable group mean scores for handwriting. These differences, however, did not reach statistical significance. Keyboarding, nevertheless, was effective in overcoming difficulties experienced by many students in respect of legibility.

Patients with dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) and their matched controls wrote, on a computer graphics tablet, 4 consecutive, cursive letter ‘l’s, with varying levels of visual feedback: noninking pen and blank paper so that only the hand movements could be seen, noninking pen and lined paper to constrain their writing, goggles to occlude the lower visual field and eliminate all relevant visual feedback, and inking pen with full vision. The kinematic measures of stroke length, duration, and peak velocity were expressed in terms of consistency via a signal-to-noise ratio (M value of each parameter divided by its SD). Irrespective of medication or severity, DAT patients had writing strokes of significantly less consistent lengths than controls', and were disproportionately impaired by reduced visual feedback. Again irrespective of medication or severity, patients' strokes were of significantly less consistent duration, and significantly less consistent peak velocity than controls', independent of feedback conditions. Patients, unlike controls, frequently perseverated, producing more than 4 ‘l’s, or multiple sets of responses, which was not differentially affected by level of visual feedback. The more variable performance of patients supports a degradation of the base motor program, and resembles that of Huntington's rather than Parkinson's disease patients. It may indeed reflect frontal rather than basal ganglia dysfunction. (JINS, 1999, 5, 20–25.)