I've mentioned my little manuscript transmission experiment in the past. I've begun practicing copying Greek text from an exemplar. I've noticed a few things as I've been practicing.

1. I copy Greek word by word as an exercise, I don't stop to read and comprehend the text. That is, I don't read the Greek, translate it, understand it, then write it out. I read the word in my head, then I write it down.

2. Larger or unfamiliar words take longer to process. This stands to reason but I hadn't thought of it before. It also means these words end up written more stretched out because I devolve into letter-by-letter copying instead of word-by-word copying.

3. Smaller and common words are easy to copy. Again, this stands to reason. But it bears mentioning.

4. The letters zeta and xi are hard to write. At least for me they are. But I'm thinking through the mechanics and, at least for my handwriting style, I think I have an easier way to write them. But because they occur relatively infrequently I just don't get practice with them in words.

5. Upsilon and nu end up looking the same when I write quickly. That is, I tend to not point the bottom of my nu when I'm writing quickly; this makes my nu look like an upsilon at times. And that could be confusing to read (e.g. του and τον).

6. It is easy to mis-copy similar sounding words. Since I read the words and hear them in my head then write the word I hear, I find myself making mistakes (itacism, typically) because I mis-copy the word phonetically.

There's more, to be sure, but I need not go into it here. I will, however, swallow my pride and put up a couple of graphics that show my horrible, horrible penmanship. I will say that I'm just writing, not worrying too much about shape or form of the letters (as is evident, to be sure). The first effort was done a few days ago with a fine-tipped roller-ball style pen (a uni-ball Signo).

On my second attempt I used a wider pen (a Bic Mark-it fine point permanent marker) and played around with color. I realized that it will be easier to mark things I'd like to color (e.g., names of God/Jesus in red in this example) on the exemplar than to try and catch it mentally as I copy.

The other brain-dead thing I realize is that a wider nib means I need to write bigger and, likely, less hurriedly. Also: Can you spot the variant inadvertently introduced in the second graphic? The exemplar is Second Timothy in Westcott/Hort without accents and punctuation. I know there is at least one spelling variant and one casing variant, though there are likely more things I've introduced that I haven't stopped to notice yet.

I'll likely play around with a few more copies of things before starting on the copy I'll make for the project.

Update (2006-01-28): Suzanne notes a link with a sample of her handwriting along with further commentary. Sounds like we're running into the same things. That's encouraging. Also, I realized I have another handwriting sample I can link to -- that of P.N. Harrison's Problem of the Pastoral Epistles, which has a handwritten edition of the Pastorals in an appendix. (See 2Ti 1.1-2.1 here) Two years or so ago I scanned the pages and put them online. Check 'em out.