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Orono Weekly Ornes. Wednesday. November 22. 2000 - 9 BLACK ARTHUR BLACK THE WRITE STUFF I heard an expert . on orthography rattling on the other day over the airwaves of the CBC about the computer - - specifically the grievous effect the infernal machines are having on the penmanship of The Nation's Youth. Now, I've done my share of m itching and boaning over computers but responsibility for the way I write with a pen is not on the list. My handwriting was illegible illegible long before computers infiltrated our lives. I've been spectacularly unreadable for as long as I can remember. Well, almost. Like most of us, I spent the first five or six years of my life unable to use a pen and paper to produce anything you could actually make out. Then school kicked in. Under the tutelage of a succession of vigi lant and unforgiving old bats, I learned to clutch my pencil in a white- knuckle death grip and labou- riously scrawl out the - letters of the alphabet, painfully progressing progressing from crude (and frequently frequently backward) block letters letters to that oversized, looping cursive script they all insisted we master.. By the time F was 12 or thereabouts, I had quite a nice hand, actually. Neat and flowing and easy to follow. My teachers were impressed. Even my mother bragged about it. But the next thing I knew I was in high school and I suddenly had to take a lot of notes quickly. I didn't have time to worry about how my handwriting looked, or whether anyone else could read it. By the time I got out of high school, I knew fragments of trigonometry, a smattering of history, was intimately acquainted with the innards of pickled frogs, a couple of dozen French verb declensions declensions and what a dangling gerund was. I could even recite Marc Antony's funeral eulogy. What I couldn't do was write about any of it, because my penmanship had regressed and deteriorated to a preschool preschool level. A note from me looked like it had been written by a seven-year old suffering from advanced hypothermia. My handwriting was so pathetic, several people mistook mistook me for a medical practitioner. practitioner. Which has always mystified mystified me-- how doctors can get away with writing prescriptions prescriptions that look like they stuck a bail-point between their toes and dashed it off. Bad enough that they're writing in Latin shorthand and metric meas urements -- flagrant illegibility illegibility should not be the third horseman in this mix. The doctor with bad handwriting is a comedic stereotype, but why are we laughing? These are people who are supposed to be meting out specific drugs and dosages that could be the difference between life and death. I can heF the pharmacist on the witness stand now; "Oh, 'Aspirin'! I thought he wrote 'arsenic' -- sorry." And it looks like I'm not the only one who's nervous. The Metropolitan Medical Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey is now herding practicing practicing doctors into a classroom for the purpose of teaching them how to write all over again. That's right - handwriting classes for doctors. And what's more the doctors are lining up to sign on. Why? Perhaps it's the fact that a recent study shows up to 25 percent of medication errors in the US are related to illegible illegible handwriting. Or maybe it's that lawsuit that was settled settled in Texas last year. The one where a jury ordered a doctor, a drugstore and a pharmacist to pony up $667,000 to the family of a man who died as a result of a misread prescription. Which reminds me of the old joke concerning a physician physician notorious for his lousy penmanship who replied to a dinner invitation with a scrawled note that looked like it had been written by a man operating a jackhammer with his other hand. The hostess couldn't make out a single word of it. "I've got to know whether or not he's attending" she complained. "Simple" says a friend. "All you have to do is take the note down to the Pharmasave. Druggists can always read doctors' writing." Desperate, the hostess hurries hurries dovvn to the Pharmasave. She'goes to the prescription counter and hands the note over. The druggist glances at the handwritten note, grunts, then disappears into the back room. "Getting a second opinion" figures the hostess. Five minutes minutes later the druggist comes back out to the counter and hands a small vial to the host- *ess. "That comes to $10:95" says the druggist. "Oh, and good luck with those hemorrhoids." hemorrhoids." 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