In this paper, the characteristics and classifications of current used pen gestures are investigated. And characteristics with “good” and learnable pen gestures are analyzed through literatures and a questionnaire. Afterwards, the concept of “meaningful pen gesture” is presented according to the consideration whether there are tight relationships between a pen gesture and the corresponding command existing. And the meaningful pen gesture is divided into three categories: directive, object-metaphor and conventional. At last, an experiment is performed to validate the advantage of the meaningful pen gestures designed in this paper. The results show that the meaningful pen gestures are easier to learn and to use. These results can be interpreted by the dual-coding theory, and can be one of the basic guidelines for designing pen gestures.