The Lost Art of Penmanship

The Washington Post reports on how the use of computers is leading to a decline in the quality of penmanship: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/10/AR2006101001475.html?referrer=email.
Every advance in technology entails a loss of some previously valued skill. Calculators made the ability to do sums in your head less valuable. The invention of writing was decried because it would lead to a loss of the faculty of remembering epic poems in their entirety. Now keyboards are making penmanship less significant.

When I was a kid, the school put a lot of stock in penmanship. It was part of what we were graded on, at least until high school when we had to type assignments. We practiced our cursive writing quite a lot, and I was especially good at writing in longhand. My grandparents, for whom penmanship had been a big part of their schooling, encouraged me to write well. I loved to write beautifully and especially loved the feel of a fountain pen. I still do, but most of my writing today is done with a word processor.

This was not always the case. Until a few years ago, I used to write my first drafts in longhand. There was something about putting pen to paper that seemed essential to the creative process. The second draft would be done on the word processor with considerable editing and revisions. Time constraints demanded that I abandon the longhand draft and go straight to the keyboard. My typing skills (I still use the Biblical Method: “seek and ye shall find”) had advanced to the point that I could maintain a flow in drafting with the keyboard. Nonetheless, I feel that I lost something when I gave up longhand drafts. Writing seems more like work than play.

There will always be a use for penmanship, but legibility rather than beauty is all that we may require. As long as optical recognition programs can read your handwriting, you will be OK. Flowery and elegant cursive script may turn out to be more difficult for computers to read and easier for computers to generate.