Among the unwitting casualties of our increasingly techno-mad society: good penmanship is becoming an endangered species. So notes Claire Suddath in the latest issue of Time...
I can't remember how to write a capital Z in cursive. The rest of my letters are shaky and stiff, my words slanted in all directions. It's not for lack of trying. In grade school I was one of those insufferable girls who used pink pencils and dotted their i's with little circles. I experimented with different scripts, and for a brief period I even took the time to make two-story a's, with the fancy overhang used in most fonts (including this magazine's). But everything I wrote, I wrote in print. I am a member of Gen Y, the generation that shunned cursive. And now there is a group coming after me, a boom of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have even less need for good penmanship. We are witnessing the death of handwriting.This takes me back to 1982, when Mrs. Casanega was teaching us in second grade how to write in cursive. By the end of the year, I felt like John Hancock himself. I'll always be grateful to her for giving us this skill (and I hold only myself accountable for that hideous beast of illegible scrawl that has arisen from my hands over the years... sigh).
Anyhoo, 'tis an intriguing commentary from Claire Suddath. Perhaps it's time to reinvest in teaching handwriting? Much like the samurai of old, I'm inclined to believe that it lends itself a certain self-discipline to the pupil and practitioner. A small detail to be sure... but a little refinement more often than not goes a long way in the scheme of things.
