sws0001_Abstract	5/21/14, 2:24 PM

ABSTRACT
Presentation 3
SignWriting Symposium 2014

“Ways to Write Sign Languages by Hand with SignWriting”

by Adam Frost frost@signwriting.org

ASL Professor, San Diego Mesa College & University of California San Diego (UCSD), Linguist, ASL Wikipedia & SignWriting Editor

SignWriting  has  been  written  by  hand  since  the  very  beginning.  With  the introduction  of computers,  writing by hand has gone into disfavor even to the point  that  many  have  believed  that  writing  by  hand  takes  too  long  and  is impractical.  There  have  been  many  ways  of writing  by hand  that  have  been almost forgotten. I have been fortunate enough to have the need to write by hand at times, and to have close workings with Valerie to recall many of those methods and how to incorporate them into modern use. This paper will explore some of those ways as well as some of my own that I have developed in the process.

First, we will cover the ways of writing to match the way computers print, but we will not stop there like most people would assume. We will go through various levels of simplification making it less cumbersome to write by hand. By the time we have gone through  several  layers, we will arrive to what I personally  use when jotting down notes. We will not get into shorthand as it was introduced in the 1980's  or after, since shorthand  is not a one-to-one  correlation  with print making it useful for other purposes.

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