encoded notions

Tim Bray thinks that handwriting, as a fine art, is seeing its last days. I would have to agree with him.

Regarding the formal teaching of the physical skill of writing, the typical progression in my grade school began in kindergarten. There we practiced drawing block letters on small sheets of paper with large line seperation (and the dotted mid-lines). It took time to train the dominant hand to have the fine motor control necessary to bring the lines smoothly to meet other lines, to draw curves, to stay within the guidelines of the paper.

As we progressed upwards in grade level, the dotted mid-lines disappeared, and the inter-line spacing shrank. The handwriting gods had declared that we reduce our enormous letters into a more confined space, further refining our guiding finger motions with pencils. Just as we had mastered the art of drawing block letters, or printing as it soon came to be called, our teachers threw us a literal curve ball and taught us about this mysterious beast known as cursive. A singsongy swing of the pencil could reproduce pictures which resembled the block letters we could identify with, but these new forms had so much more pizzazz than their more uptight brethren.

The classrooms had references hung from the walls showing the different strokes that would generate the cursive letters—to remind us in case we forgot how to draw these wonderful forms. Of course, once we had learned this new way to write our thoughts and answers on paper, we were strongly discouraged from printing our letters, though sometimes I could feel the need to use something a bit less artsy.

Cursive handwriting needs room to flow; confined to the bounds of a line with spacing too small, it looks cramped and the lines cross over each other obscuring the data. Taking history notes in cursive was a pain, and it often left my hand feeling tired. Somewhere towards the end of middle school and the start of high school, the teachers stopped caring. I suppose they figured that if you really wanted to use it, you’d continue to use it. In my experience it would seem that the great cursive experiment has finally started to falter, because I did not know many people who continued to use it on a regular basis.

Tim hints that it may have something to do with the rather rapid rise in computer usage over more recent years. Hell, the WorldWideWeb only entered the global arena in 1992. I only started using any form of Internet connection in 1998. If I had ever seen a utility to handwriting, it was quickly swamped by a torrent of print characters. If you’ve ever seen cursive script characters on a computer screen before, you know what I mean when I say they look “out of place”. They clash with the sharp edges and perpendicular lines of the visual display of a computer screen. In addition, the characters themselves flow together to create words, whereas with print characters they are atomic and only placed near each other to form words (with perhaps a bit of kerning). Cursive characters are a very analog form of writing, and they seem to have been lost amid the vast amounts of digital information that I started connecting with from a relatively early age.

It used to be that a person’s style of handwriting was unique, and it could tell you a bit about the writer. But now that it seems printing and electronic textual communication outranks the stylistic elegance of handwriting, we must rely more on what we say in our text rather than the form our words take. Content versus form. Message versus medium.

I suppose our written voices will need to make up for what was lost with the death of handwriting.