So, I was reading the latest issue of Newsweek the other day and I came across an interesting article: “The Curse of Cursive”. It discussed the quickly fading art of…you guessed it: penmanship. In an age dominated by IM, MySpace, E-mail, blogging, and whatever else you can think of, the good old-fashioned technique of getting your point across is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Unfortunate for some. A godsend for others.
Me? I’m split right down the middle. See, I remember when I was learning to write. Those long hours spent at my little plastic-top table in kindergarten copying each letter of the alphabet onto my piece of manuscript paper (Remember those? Exactly. That’s how old we are.) over and over and over until the letters were so engrained in my head that I’d continue on past the paper and write on the desk, much to the dismay of my teacher. Yup, I remember those days. Pure and utter torture. Because while all my other friends were diligently perfecting to dot their i’s and cross their t’s, I gave up somewhere along the way. The heck with it, I thought. My handwriting doesn’t need practice. Not when there are more important things like math I need to figure out. Little did I know that for the rest of my school years, heck, for the rest of my life, practicing was exactly what I’d be doing.
But then I discovered that I had a talent: writing. Kind of ironic, don’t you think? It was third grade. Looking back at it now, years later, it was one of the most atrocious things I’d ever created. But for a third grader, I’d say it was pretty darn good. And so it began. Since computers were not something every other family had then, I was stuck hand writing each and every page, my small hand flying across the paper. My first project in third grade was short, nothing elaborate really although I did go through the trouble of editing it with a red pen the way I was taught by my teachers. The plot was ill-conceived, the spelling horrendous but I got my point across, beginning, middle, and end. I still have the original papers and after taking a peek at them the other day, I noticed a funny thing: my handwriting is almost exactly the same. True, I had a lot more space between letters the way that many kids do when they’re still getting the hang of this strange concept and my y’s were a bit different but other than that, it was a carbon copy. Anyway, I kept up this new found hobby, hand writing each poem and short story that I came up with. And in sixth grade I actually completed my first full-length story. It filled two 70 page notebooks and was no where near brilliant but I hand wrote it. All of it. So that was an accomplishment. The following year, I completed yet another project. This time, it filled a 2-inch binder including pre-write, research, and other information I had regarding the subject. But the age of the computer was fast approaching and as life began to demand more and more essays, reports, and theses, I, along with the rest of the world, gradually got sucked into the vortex of the cyber world.
Which brings us back to my original point: the issue of handwriting’s diminishing importance. Having struggled all my life to make my messy scrawl at least somewhat legible, a part of me wouldn’t be all that depressed if it did just fall off the face of the earth. And yet, the other part of me, the part that spent hours and hours toiling away, furiously scribbling all of my various projects throughout the years, would be absolutely devastated if handwriting was no longer part of our world. Because then what would happen to that individuality that came with everyone’s distinct script? That includes your signature. All of that. Gone. If handwriting disappears from modern society, a small part of what makes us who we are, what makes us human is erased. Furthermore, studies have shown that “handwriting fluency is a fundamental building block of learning”. Without it, I guess you could say that we’d be missing a window or a 2×4 in the metaphorical house of learning.
So the next time you open your computer to send your distant cousin in Weehawken an e-mail or to type up that 50 page report on global interdependence due tomorrow, take a moment to think about your handwriting and the long, agonizing journey you embarked on to achieve a script that is at least somewhat decipherable. You’ll either feel accomplished.
