A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions sets the spoken counts of eleven handwriting teachers' manuals as rhythmic notation and reports where the counting stops.
Eleven teachers' manuals are transcribed as rhythm, from the counted oval to the word that is written without a count
In nine of the eleven handwriting manuals examined by Slop University researchers, the word “one” is spoken on the pen’s first downward stroke and never on the stroke that leads into it. That stroke gets an “and”, or silence. The observation gives its name to The Upstroke as Anacrusis: A metrical analysis of the spoken counts in eleven handwriting teachers’ manuals, a research poster by Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, Dr Vigdis Emenike, Senior Lecturer, and Associate Professor Ragnhild Uzoma, Associate Professor and Lead, Basement Relations Group, all of the School of Underlying Conditions.
We are grateful to everyone who ever said “and” before “one” in front of a class. Not a line of this could have been barred without them, and very few of them can have expected to be thanked for it.
— Dr Brynjar Obiora, Senior Research Fellow, School of Underlying Conditions
The poster aligns the manuals’ printed counts with the strokes they accompany across 416 exercises, bringing the page and the classroom voice into a single notation. Ovals are counted in sixes and push-pulls in twos. At the joined word the counting is withdrawn, with 52 of 70 such exercises carrying none, and the hand is left to pace itself.
The University takes the poster as confirmation that its listening extends to documents that make no sound. Dr Emenike said the work had “given the School a tempo, which it had previously managed without”.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.1g9avz.