Has the computer hurt legible handwriting?

I learned proper English and basic mathematics through Final Fantasy, not school. But what the hell do I know; I have a computer.

I doubt it. My father never used a computer and his penmanship was practically illegible to everyone except for Mom, who typed up his business letters. It was the same for my sister who was an English teacher. How someone’s penmanship turns out just seems to be their style.

What concerns me is that grammar, spelling, punctuation and sentence/paragraph structure are so poor. I sometimes have to read something more than once in order to understand the message through all of the errors.

P.S. Punctuation can be deadly:
“Let’s eat Grandma!”
“Let’s eat, Grandma!”

As a writer who learned penmanship (which I never mastered) and grammar (which I did) in pre-computer days, I firmly believe the computer—i.e., email, IM and Twitter—has undermined both. I especially mourn the dying art of proper grammar. Nonetheless, my years in copywriting taught me that clear, concise communication is more important than the form it’s in. So if short bursts of text get one’s message across, I can live with that. One caveat: words should always be properly spelled.

I can only speak for myself and I can barely read my own writing these days. And I think it is because I rarely write anything except grocery lists in longhand. For weeks now I have been thinking about writing a letter to someone who does not have a computer and I just never get to it. I believe it is because I hate to take the time to sit down and actually write carefully enough that someone will be able to read it.

My handwriting was always crap. That’s why I preferred to print things out. On a dot matrix printer.

I don’t believe that the ball point pen is ideally suited for hand writing, and the hard tipped fountain pens of today are not much better. If you search for vintage fountain pens on ebay, you will see there is a big demand for old fashioned, flexible nibbed pens of the thirties and forties. One of the reasons being, when handling such pens you suddenly have command of the ink flow and your writing takes on a new character as you vary the force applied to the nib. You find yourself treating the text as a work of art, whereas something jotted down in biro isn’t really worth the same effort, it almost always looks like a scrawl.
The opposite applies to punctuation I think. My grammar skills are very limited, but I find myself making much more effort in correcting my mistakes because of the internet. When younger, nobody read my musings except myself and my teachers, today I have all you lot to contend with.

It is possible to simultaneously hurt handwriting while improving the ability to produce readable text. The solution is merely to type (and print if necessary) one’s messages. Handwriting is frankly an inferior form of communication, although it can be an expressive art. If you really want to understand the meaning of a piece of writing, chances are you’d choose the computer-rendered typography over the hand lettered script any day. If you have any doubt, consider the following two versions of the declaration of independence. See how far you get in the hand written one.
http://theinnerdoor.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/usa_declaration_of_independence.jpg
http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/freedom/doi/text.html

Not in the police business. we still have to handwrite all our reports. my witing was so bad, that many years ago, i just began printing all my police reports by hand. i was pretty fast at it.

Doctors were doing it before the dawn of the computer age.

I never learned penmanship . I have hideous handwriting and Love seeing other peoples’
attractive handwriting.

I came up with my peculiar style of cursive all on my own ;)

Let me put it this way; before there were computers in schools, many of my teachers gave up and told me to get a typewriter.

I can print legibly if I slow down, but most of the time I can’t even do that unless I write at least three times as big as I normally do, feeling like a four-year-old the whole time. (I can print two lines on a single line of college-ruled paper with ease, but most people can’t read print that small.) Writing the alphabet in cursive with any degree of legibility takes me (literally) 5 minutes (which is still quicker than when I was taught cursive) whereas I can print it out in seconds… if nobody else has to be able to read it. I was taught ad nauseum and my handwriting is still bad.

What I think has happened as a result of computers is that we stopped caring about spelling, grammar, punctuation, or decently expansive vocabularies. Either that or we all got dumber and the presence of computers was merely coincidental, though I will allow for the possibility that there were idiots all along and they were just hidden until we developed a medium with a wider audience.

@jerv: I agree with your final four clauses, although I wouldn’t call (all of them) idiots.

There’s just so much more opportunity to read things that annoy you these days, be it spelling or grammar errors, insensitivity, a poorly turned-out phrase, knuckleheadedness or trolling.

As for @Hypocrisy_Central‘s question about handwriting, I was taught to hold a pen in the same way a right-hander would, with obvious disastrous consequences for legibility given my left-handedness. I also had to teach myself cursive writing, as my first two years of education left me about a year behind the kids at the much better school I moved to when I was 7. This, combined with my already odd handwriting style combined to make my handwriting euphemistically ‘unique’ – legible if I’m writing for others, but usually a scrawl only legible to myself.

I don’t think handwriting is getting worse per se. As has been said already, most of us these days use cheap writing implements. I would also add that the majority of the time we don’t hand-write much of consequence – essays, formal letters, ledger sheets, etc… This doesn’t necessarily make our handwriting worse, we just have fewer opportunities to care about what we write.

My penmanship has always been awful! The computer saved many fine people from having to decode my cryptic scrawl! I write just as horrible now as I ever did.

Maybe it’s the Dr. thing?

To those who believe they have unreadable chicken scratch if someone was trying to find a location because they did not have GPS and had a hard time following your verbal instructions and asked you to write them down which street(s) to take any landmarks to watch out for, could you do it or would you have to beg off for lack of a PC, laptop and printer?

Probably. Just like texting is hurting spelling and grammar.

@josie Wat U meen?

i pwn j00 allz lawlz

@jerv I h8t 2 tell U this Jerv, but if U keep that up we will have 2 kick U out of da lagoon.