Nerdology • Mourning the Death of Handwriting

Mourning the Death of Handwriting

Great article from Time Magazine about the death of handwriting:

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl…

Really good read if you’ve got the time. I can say that my handwriting is terrible and that I haven’t written in cursive (aka script) since elementary school. I would absolutely blame our reliance on computers. If I have to send a note to someone, It’s in an email or a text message. If I have to take notes I open up notepad on my phone and type it in there. As more and more devices have full keyboards we will need to hand write things less and less. For better or worse, handwriting is dying.

The upside is that everything is readable when it’s typed. The downside is if you have to write something down, chances are someone is going to have to read it… and if your handwriting is illegible your notes are worthless. The other downside to typing is it lacks that personal feeling. You can get a sense of a person by how they write. Certain people (not me) have a grace to the way they form and connect their letters. I tend to print with the occasional word appearing in all caps… even if it’s not the emphasis. Also, for some reason, if a word that begins with a ‘t’ or an ‘h’ I will capitalize that first letter. Don’t know why. I’ve just always done it.

Now that I say all this I’m feeling guilty that my penmanship is poor. I’m gonna go write something…