let us document the way we write and be at peace ...

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
September 12, 2011

Hello Everyone!
I have only glanced at your messages today because I find them stressful. Later when my health improves I will read them in detail. What a lively conversation!

SignWriting is a real writing system, and one of the ways you can tell that, is that people write it differently around the world, and they feel passionate about it. When someone feels so passionate about the way they write, it means that they have been investing a lot of time and energy and practice into writing and teaching it that one way, and that means it is really being used - I am proud and honored that you all are using SignWriting so much that you have your own very intense need to write it your way, and bravo to that! I like to see everyone writing their way - and we all can read the way we write.

One thing I must make clear. We all have a right to write SignWriting the way we write. Of course you are welcome to disagree...no one is asking you to agree with anything...

It would be dishonest of me, if I told you that I like the Parkhurst Thumb rule. I never used it, because it was developed after the DAC and I had already been writing for a long time in a different way, and now DAC member Adam Frost and I are documenting the way the DAC influenced the writing system back in the late 1980's and early 1990's. Adam is one of the Deaf people who is carrying that tradition forward. The DAC meetings at my home in the early 1990's cemented my way of writing, and it was a very different way of writing than the Parkhurst's rule. It is based on the direction of the majority of Action Fingers rather than the thumbs.

I want to share with the world, the way the DAC and I write, before I stop working. I need to do less now for health reasons, and I want to document the way I write so you all understand it, even if you do not write that way yourselves...It still needs to be documented out of fairness to all the wonderful Deaf people I worked with...

So please know you are my dear friends and please, for my sake, let us not worry about anything - we are blessed to know each other and to share with each other - and I respect and honor all of your decisions...I also feel honored to have worked with the DAC members over the years -

Val ;-)