I've never had good penmanship. I can recall sitting in an elementary classroom, while my classmates were at recess, practicing my handwriting. It was never good.My grandmother had beautiful handwriting. I know many woman, and a few men, who do. My father has decent handwriting as well. He has talked about penmanship while he was in school -- spending hours practicing ovals and slashes, keeping your arm up off the desk.
It's fun to look at old handwritten documents from our past. Many of them have fancy letters with loops and swirls. Much more of what we now call calligraphy rather than handwriting.
I tend to print much more than I write anything. As a writer / blogger / emailer / computer user, my fingers are on a keyboard several hours a day. And, I'm sure, all the typing I do has diminished my handwriting abilities.
Sadly, I'm probably a lost cause.
But what about future generations? What about my young great-nieces & nephews? What about their cursive writing skills?
It appears that cursive writing will become a lost art. With the ever increasing use of the keyboard and the need to teach more important subjects in the classroom, schools no longer see a need to teach kids penmanship.
It makes me wonder what communications will be like in the future. How will kids of the future be after to read the information from the past?
Will everyone in the future need to have handwriting recognition software?
We can see the writing on the wall... it will be neatly printed on a piece of paper and pasted there for all to see.
I write notes more than I type them. My handwriting is less of writing and more of a scratch that only I can read, but if you look close enough you'll see the highly stylized letters formed out of disconnected curves, and ligatures for any two-letter combination involving O.
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