the MacLean's method
Tuesday, August 23, 2011 at 7:52AM 
The MacLean’s method of handwriting.
H. B. Maclean, Victoria, c. 1921. Developed in Victoria by educator H. B. MacLean between 1921 and 1964, the MacLean method was used across Canada as the official handwriting method in schools, particularly in the Maritimes, parts of Quebec, Manitoba, and BC. Sources
Text: Shirley Cuthbertson’s “H.B. MacLean’s Method of Writing” in BC Historical News
Photo: Allan Collier Collection
It all looks very odd now, but this is how I was taught: pages of O's done moving your whole arm sliding over the desk with ease. Practice makes perfect, and perfect was entirely without character or identity. When I looked at Jack Layton's wacky little fillips on his highly legible signature – well, this was usually the only place that individuality was added (much later in life than elementary school) to this relentless, flattened commercial script.
One could completely change one's writing style, especially if one went into architecture where you either did drafting printing for the rest of your life, or went to some sort of arty italic calligraphic script. But now, most people don't write at all, except blurted little shopping lists or illegible signatures at the bottom of a VISA bill.
Writing is like drawing, something we don't often do much either these days, preferring to cobble images together with Illustrator and Photoshop – activities that engage a completely different part of the brain than drawing, on paper, with a curious instrument holding either ink or graphite, in the hand.
design, hands, identity, material culture 
Reader Comments (9)
H. B. MacLean visited the Nova Scotia Normal College in Truro at some point in 1960-1961. He spoke to the students and did some of his magic tricks.
Didn't realise he was still alive then. 1959, Craigflower School, grade 4, the demonic Mrs Hemeon moving us from pencil to straight pen. She wouldn't have recognised a magic trick if it leapt up and bit her on the nose. School then was a combination of threat and reward withheld. But I loved the smoothness of the letters formed with the flowing hand. Thank you for this note on H B MacLean.
Henry MacLean was my grandfather
...my gramps. I don't remember him so much for his MacLean method of writing but more for his love of children and the magic he added to every moment I was LUCKY enough to have spent with him. His children grandchildren and great grandchildren were so blessed to have had this extraordinary man in our lives.
I learned HB McLean's method of writing in school in British Columbia, and believe it or not, I still have the same script writing style. I love the smoothness of it. Many of my friends from the same era have similar writing to mine. It has always been the easiest writing to read! Mr. McLean was also one of my aunt's professors in a university in BC. I have a copy of her graduation certificate with HB McLean's signature on it, and I recognized the script immediately when I saw it. His signature was exactly how we learned to write. An amazing moment for me!
I used this method of handwriting in elementary school, on Prince Edward Island. I actually loved this method and got highest marks for my writing. I still use it when writing, even today. I went on from there and got into calligraphy. I honestly believe that the MacLean's Method of Handwriting made it a lot easier to do calligraphy.
I would love to find a copy of the book, if anyone knows where I might find one. Unfortunately, my copy went astray, somewhere through the years.
I found my brother's compendium and wrote about it here: http://www.onsitereview.ca/miscellanea/2013/10/25/macleans-method-2.html
I was going to scan it and make it available, but is was such a long and boring task I have only done about a half of it. However, I shall persist, now that I see there is some interest.
Of all the posts I have ever done on this site, MacLean's Method is the only one with multiple comments. It defines a generation, clearly.
In 1954 I began to learn the MacLean method of cursive writing in a small 2-room school in Martin's Point, Nova Scotia. The school is now the "Schoolhouse Gluten Free Gourmet" http://www.schoolhouseglutenfreegourmet.com/
My teacher, Miss Fannie Crosby, wrote exactly like Mr. MacLean, maybe even a little better! My cursive writing has changed somewhat but at the time, up to the end of Grade 8, I wrote like the "copy book" and was proud of my MacLean style. And now at age 70 I have two school-age children who have learned MacLean cursive writing from me because it is not taught in NS schools. They now can play a game of deciphering different styles of cursive writing by looking at famous signatures on the internet. They were challenged with the signature of William Lyon MacKenzie King but thought Benjamin Franklin learned from Mr. MacLean!
thank you David, for this comment. So many people have responded to the MacLean's Method, it is such a shared experience for a wide post-war generation that I have had to think more about it. I have an interest in the generations just before WWII, during and just after, and how we, in the baby boom, were affected by them.
The way the MacLean's Method was taught was something like how Barbara Woodhouse taught her dogs: no individual will allowed; latent violence simmered; the fear of not having a smooth hand loomed. We as little children were surrounded by teachers who had gone through WWII in various degrees of engagement. There were 40 children in every elementary school class I was in; there were no discipline problems, no one would have dared to act up. I realise now that teachers were quite formidable, the strap was always an option, it wasn't a warm and caring atmosphere. I didn't mind; I quite liked school.
I learned to do the MacLean's Method, and to do it well, but by grade 8 had abandoned the correct angle and the copperplate capital letters. By university it was almost a shorthand spikey italic: still smooth, but mine, not MacLean's.
The beautiful cursive script, the smooth hand –– these are the remnants of the world of the clerk, as in Dickens' Bob Cratchit. Although Cratchit rhymes with scrachit, you can be sure his logs and account books would have been works of art. There was a subtle shift in the 1960s where university streams pulled away from vocational destinations and perfect writing was seen as conformist. There was a kind of snobbery in how one wrote: free spirits scrawled all over the page, it was a sign of individuality. It is like language, I can still write in my MacLean's hand, my 'mother hand', if I want to, but there isn't a lot of writing to be done anymore. My desk however is covered with notebooks, lists and jottings. I write quickly, in a kind of British architect's italic, but my r's are MacLean's, as is the shorter t, the p with the slightly tall spike: some elements never leave.
oh, I forgot to add, the smoothness came from using a straight pen where if you press at all hard the point of the nib catches in the paper and splatters ink all over. Was this a brilliant lesson in coordination? How to judge with such accuracy the pressure of the hand on the page?
Fountain pen nibs generally had that small ball on the end which meant the paper was never nicked, and then subsequently, all the ball point pens just obliterated all that fine consideration of ink, hand and paper. That standby of the detective story where a message written on a notepad and torn off but leaves the writing embedded on the underneath sheet –– couldn't do that with a straight pen, or even a fountain pen.
Bob Cratchit was writing with a quill he had cut himself to suit his writing hand. His touch was literally feather-weight.