Secrecy within Pen and Paper: On How to encrypt Handwriting
May 8, 2025
In the golden age of data breaches, it becomes incumbent upon authors to renounce digital systems and rely instead on the traditional pen and paper to store information. However, writing on paper is not a foolproof method either, as prying eyes abound. Therefore, a few tweaks must be made to filter out uninvited readers.
Why Encryption?
Writing is cathartic. The more an author inhibits himself from writing down his thought, the more he fails to purge his bad thoughts. An author could come across a thought or an idea that is interesting, but too unethical, or sometimes too repugnant. This distasteful character of this thought or idea makes him forego writing it down, and eventually the memory of it decays. This is where he has to deploy encryption methods to provide shelter for his thoughts and keep them secure.
The three encryption methods for handwriting are deliberative bad handwriting, personal nomenclature, and constructed writing system.
Bad Handwriting
The easiest and cheapest method of handwriting encryption that has been practised by (not sure if deliberate) history’s greatest personalities ranging from Napoleon to Einstein1. To master this, the author has to write hastily or purposefully distort the character of letters. The author must be able to comprehend what he wrote. Contextual clues could help him if he finds himself struggling to read what he wrote. An aspect of the bad handwriting method is words could be abbreviated to reinforce the illegibility.
Personal Nomenclature
This method requires the author replace specific words or names to a new one so that a prier will find it challenging to interpret their meaning. It is suggested to use a word that is not related to the original word. For instance, if the word the author wants to replace is ‘sun’, he should not be using words like sol, light, star, etc. Sometimes, numbers could denote names of people.
A protocol is suggested in this method, but if the protocol reaches the wrong hands, the handwriting could get compromised. Besides, when a new word replaces an old word, it gets replaced in the author’s mind as well. As time passes, he could forget the original word. What this means is that he could accidentally reveal the new word to someone he talks to.
Constructed Writing System (Neography)
Neography is the art and craft of creating new writing systems2. This method makes the handwriting so secure that only waterboarding and blackmailing could compromise it. It involves creating a new script on your own. If this is too difficult and time consuming, the author could consult existing scripts and tweak it to fit his system. However, the author must keep in mind that a good decoder could compromise his system if he leaves out clues. Like with personal nomenclature, a protocol is suggested in this. If the author is concerned about the protocol reaching the wrong hands, he could write a few familiar sentences in his newfound script somewhere that he could revisit, like on his desk or wall (Please don’t write “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”). If the author still finds it difficult to learn the script, flashcards could help.
Conclusion
Of all the three methods mentioned above, the constructed writing method is the most efficient. This lets the author embrace the catharsis provided by writing down what he feels liberates him. Learning a script from scratch could be an ordeal, but the returns make it worth it. An author who mastered his new script could abbreviate, deploy bad handwriting and monikers within his new script to make the decryption more difficult.