AW: Writing Head and Face in Punctuation

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
October 9, 2010

> On Oct 9, 2010, at 10:10 AM, Stefan Wöhrmann wrote:
>> Hello Cherie, Val ... 
>> Perhaps it is also a question of "habit"  and  "personal style" - You know
>> that I add many head circles if I need to document the information coming
>> from the mouth ... same thing if I would like to focus on change in eyebrows
>> or  facial expressions not connected with spoken language ....  so I write
>> and read the head circles from left to right - 



Hello Stefan -
Regarding your first comment above...

Thank you for your comment. I think your writing looks terrific...(I have attached an example below)

Since your documents are oftentimes written horizontally from left to right, Stefan, and since the Mouthing is based on the way the mouth looks when Mouthing spoken language words, and spoken language words are usually written left to right, it only makes sense that you write Mouthing from left to right.

For my personal style of writing, I write with the flow of the direction of the writing...but I do not expect anyone else to do this...this is totally flexible and each writer's choice...

If I am writing in vertical columns in three lanes, then I write fingerspelling vertically.

If I were to go back to writing horizontally, from left to right in SignWriter DOS, then I would write fingerspelling from left to right...

I go with the flow of the direction of writing...

And if someday we can write down-diagonally, I would write the fingerspelling in a down-diagonal direction.

I mention fingerspelling because that is our only real experience with the idea of writing in the flow of the direction of writing...I am guessing that it feels better to write multiple faces in the direction of the flow of writing too, but I do not know yet...there has not been any real experimenting or research on this issue, testing it with readers yet, but I suspect that is why I liked Cherie's writing of the sign for SPIDER, because I know the document was written vertically in three lanes...

More later answering your second point, and Andre's question too...I will be back in a few hours - thanks to you both for your questions and discussion...look forward to it...

have a great Saturday, everyone!!

Val ;-)

PS. Here is a screen capture of some of Stefan's wonderful writing of Mouthing and signs in vertical columns, which is located in the German SignPuddle. See below:

http://www.signbank.org/signpuddle/index.html#sgn-DE

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