Should we worry about the "death of handwriting"?

No more than we worry about the death of hand-sewing, or the death of baking bread.

Handwriting is a skill that was essential in the past, and which is becoming less and less so. Like hand-sewing, it’s something that is simply not worth the effort for most people to master, because there are ways of accomplishing the same end that require less of a time commitment. Like baking bread, it’s tremendously satisfying, and the result is better than the usual alternative, but it’s a labor of love rather than a necessity. In the end, it will most likely be kept alive by enthusiasts, and if there is ever a need for it, people can learn it again.

I don’t think it’s a huge concern, since people obviously can still write in print. But, it is sad.
I remember using a computer in kindergarten, and I was born in 1986. I have terrible handwriting, it’s sloppy and large…I rarely do cursive because I get nervous about my skills. Growing up, it was always known that if you went to catholic school, you had nice handwriting and if you went to public school you had sloppy handwriting. This is why my husband gets the job of writing all our thank you notes.
It is probably due in part to the use of computers, and that schools want nothing but to have the highest test schools, like the article says. It’s a shame, but what can we do?

Even when I was a child (which was before Gen X), my handwriting was never very good. i could print neatly, though, and usually chose to do that.

I for one have nice handwriting that is a print/cursive combination. My daughter started learning cursive in school last year and they’ve changed it a lot. It’s not so frilly looking and a lot easier to do than the cursive I learned. I don’t think it’s something we need to worry about. It’s just modern life. Even when I was in high school 15 years ago we didn’t write out our essays, we typed them on computers.

I practiced my handwriting when I was in middle school, but haven’t seen the point since then. I write legibly and can write neat if I don’t hurry, and that is good enough. @knitfroggy That is odd, mine is also a print/cursive combo and I don’t know anyone else until now that does the same.

For the record: I produce extremely legible script if I’m not hurried, and I can produce a scrawl that only I can read if I’m rushed. I actually enjoy the act of writing, and I’m a fountain pen enthusiast as well.

I worry about it. I don’t think it should disappear altogether.

I wouldn’t worry about the loss of handwriting no more than the loss of manual fiber processing, traditional farming, quilt making, etc. Even nowadays calligraphy is a craft similar to the others, and I foresee basic handwriting joining it as a novelty. To those who study and practice these “forgotten” crafts, it will still have value, just as someone may value a cashmere sweater versus an acrylic one.

Simply put, we communicate much better via digital means, perhaps in part due to not having to decipher each other’s variances in writing style. It is well worth the loss of individual handwriting style for the gains in comprehension.

Who knows, maybe the popularity of handwriting will come back once the web standards exist for (and the website supports the feature of) having your own custom font follow you around.

@knitfroggy and @BBSDTfamily My handwriting is also a combination of print/cursive!

I rarely handwrite anything these days, other than shopping lists and thank-you notes. I do still write letters to my grandma because she doesn’t have email. I guess I could type a letter and print it out, but that feels too impersonal.

I don’t think handwriting will die, because I know my own children are expected to learn cursive in school. As much as they will probably end up typing on computers, they’ll still have to write to pass notes in the hall. ;) I think it would be sad if handwritten notes and letters continue to fade away. I enjoy emails from my friends, but a letter in the mail is much more special. Now I’m going to make my daughter sit down and write a letter to her great-grandma!

Handwriting isn’t really vital to any kind of industry or career, so in my opinion it’s not as important as the loss of, say, literacy.

Also I’m the only person my age I know of that writes in cursive, and I get made fun of all the time . . . :P

I never had computers in school, so everything was written by hand. Hell, we would get detention for bringing a calculator to school. Of course, I went to school back when we had to ride dinosaurs back and forth, twenty miles in the snow, and it was uphill and against the wind both ways. =)

I take pride in my handwriting, unless I am signing my name, which I have to do in my job about fifty times a day. My signature starts out good, but is a scribble at the end. If I don’t have a computer handy, I write things out on paper (stone tablets are so expensive nowadays) and I have my own form of shorthand that it seems only I can read.

I often write scribbles and shorthand in my notebook, when filling out the occasional form or mailing label, or writing a personal note. But handwriting at length isn’t something I’ve done in a long while.

As @cwilbur and @dynamicduo put, the only thing to be worried about here is scary, scary change. People will use whatever is most useful to them and to push in any other direction is silly.

You know who has the best handwriting? People who have spent a lot of time in jail.
Ya, I know you wouldn’t expect it, but it’s true.

I don’t know what they teach now-a-days, but I was taught cursive at 3 before print. Now I write with a mix of cursive and print, so my early teachings pretty much have no influence on how I write now. My point is (lol) that I doubt the “death of handwriting” is a big problem.

In sixth grade we had a few weeks where the teacher timed our ability to take down dictation in cursive/script. Just this short time of drilling made me much faster at writing, and I am grateful. I can take fast notes when I need to, all I need is a pen and paper.

If you could see my handwriting you’d know that I killed it several years ago.

I’d be curious to know how this shift away from handwriting in general, and cursive in particular, affects our neural structure. Surely all of that fine motor skill and hand-eye coordination training develops capacities in the brain that are transferable to other activities. But then, maybe those other activities are going away too. Technology makes it less and less necessary to direct our hands with precision; we just develop automated ways of doing what only well-practiced hands could accomplish a century ago.

My instinct tells me that this isn’t a good thing, that there’s a dimension of human experience that’s being abandoned too rashly. I wouldn’t mourn the demise of handwriting if I saw that we were still maintaining that link to our hands in other ways, but I’m not seeing that. Anyone who has bothered to acquire a degree of mastery of any fine manual skill, writing included, knows that there’s a primal satisfaction in it. The hand is, in a real sense, the mind’s principle connection to the material world.

I’m still crying over the loss of the clay tablets and those cute little reeds we used to etch the words.

Oh, by the way, have you heard of the new Clay Tablet Technology that translates entire documents easily?

If you can’t read it, then I would worry.

Yeah…especially the death of mine

People still write calligraphy with quill pens, so it won’t entirely die out.

I think it’s shame that handwriting is going out of fashion, but more worrying is the demise of spelling and grammar. This text-speak that people use is awful – I cannot read some of it!