[BRIEF NOTE] On handwriting's decline

[rfmcdonald]

Norman Geras' comments on the decline of handwriting as something actively practised in reguilar life stick with me. First, Umberto Eco had written about the subject in relation to his own childhood.

The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone.

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art. At the time, some – probably those with poor hand- writing – said that fine writing was the art of fools. It's obvious that fine handwriting does not necessarily mean fine intelligence. But it was pleasing to read notes or documents written as they should be.

My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other. Well, not always – because the inkwells, with which we soiled our desks, notebooks, fingers and clothing, would often produce a foul sludge that stuck to the pen and took 10 minutes of mucky contortions to clean.

The crisis began with the advent of the ballpoint pen. Early ballpoints were also very messy and if, immediately after writing, you ran your finger over the last few words, a smudge inevitably appeared. And people no longer felt much interest in writing well, since handwriting, when produced with a ballpoint, even a clean one, no longer had soul, style or personality.

It should be noted that my generation, coming well after his, assimilated the technology of the ballpoint pen well. I myself preferred, and prefer, the fine-pointed kind. Geras points out that, whatever the aesthetic pleasures, computers are so much better in composing and communicating ideas.

I had a teacher who encouraged us not to begin writing a sentence before having it fully formed in our minds. Maybe. But whatever advantages that brings, they are as nothing compared with the advantages, due to word-processing software, of being able to amend, to reshape text, to shift things around, without having to rewrite everything. If you're a very fluent writer, you may be able to get by without this. But for those of us for whom writing is more like building something, and not a purely linear process, writing by hand can slow you down too much. My pages used to get so full of crossings out, transposition marks, arrows and what not, that I'd often have to do the whole page over again; or engage in what I used to call page surgery - cutting out the OK part and sticking it to another OK part. That kind of slowness I don't miss at all.

That's right, and that's true. Still, I only can edit my extended texts well when they're printed out on paper. And now, more than a decade after my beautiful handwriting was lost in the rush to take lecture notes in university, I still looked at the calligraphy kit I've lying on a table near my desktop. It's closed, of course; I've never opened it.