Handwriting

I just noticed something when making out an address on an envelope:

My handwriting has regressed to a level equal or perhaps lower than its quality in grade school.

There are so few tasks these days that require hand-written skills, that I doubt this is an uncommon occurrence. I would venture to say that perhaps the most common occurrence of handwriting these days is when taking notes in grade school – though even in those instances, it is becoming much more common to carry laptops.

As laptop prices continue to drop, and ipads and other tablets make their way into offices, schools and the doctor’s office, schools might choose (and perhaps intelligently so) to focus all of their attention on typing skills instead of handwriting skills. I would argue that typing skills are far more valuable in the marketplace these days than handwriting anyways.

Without the foundation of penmanship courses (do schools even do this anymore?), children won’t even learn the foundation of hand writing skills to maintain the legacy of notes, hand written letters and the like. With a generation with paltry writing skills, there will be even more demand on digital services, which will eventually replace even the most trivial of tasks that used to be handled with a pen and a few scribbles.

And then, maybe in another hundred years, handwriting will be regulated only to a sort of retro-artistic movement. We’ll admire old hand written letters and marvel at the antiquity of pen and paper only from within protected cases at museums.

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