Is the art of handwriting dying out?

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7907888.stm

Coincidentally I was thinking about this the other day. I was trying to recall when I last wrote anything more substantial on paper than a few brief notes in block capitals during a meeting. I came up blank and still have no idea.

I never did really learn to write very well. I know perfectly well how to write in theory but legibility has always been a feature notable only for it's absence. Even my block capitals often come out barely legible. Partly because I'm prone to attempt to join them up. I recall writing joined up numbers in Maths at school. A teacher once described my handwriting as looking like a drunken spider had fallen in a pot of ink and then wandered across the page. Come GCSEs I was turning in essays done on a word processor. (*)

I have in the past joked that my poor handwriting skills are an attempt to cover up my poor spelling skills. Sometimes my spelling appals me to the extent that I wonder if there is some sort of course I could take. It hasn't yet appalled me enough to seek out such a course though. I just carry on accepting the spellchecker's corrections and failing to learn from my mistakes. I had to spell check the word appals. For some reason the spellchecker is marking learned as a mistake and suggesting totally different words instead thus causing me to seek a second opinion, because even though I thought I knew how to spell learned my confidence in my spelling ability is such that I have to check. It turns out that learned is a perfectly valid word which means exactly what I thought it did but according to askoxford.com it's the American English variant of learnt. So not only am I a poor speller I also use Americanisms. At least I still spell colour with a u despite having been forced to write it as color in every programming/scripting/mark-up language I've used over the last twenty years.

(*) This was circa 1990. Sometimes using what I think was a Compaq Portable II . Last time I looked my Dad still had the machine tucked away in a corner of his office so I must check next time I'm there. Also a BBC Micro Model B with a word processor that was on a ROM chip. I've spent about ten minutes on Google trying to remember the name of it. Possibly it was called VIEW. Software that comes on a chip and you have to open your machine up and install it sounds like a crazy idea in retrospect. We also had an art package that came on a ROM chip which I know was called Super Art.

Mike Willis : 26 Feb 2009 22:09 |  Comments (0) |  Report a problem