The "Death" of Handwriting?

This BBC article today is only one of many I've seen in recent years about the "death" of handwriting. Naturally it's all overhyped: "A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts." On the contrary--we've replaced the more tedious forms of handwriting, like lecture notes and weekly letters home to Mother, but we're still a society whose members in large part need to be physically "literate," and where there's still a place for hand-written text.


Case in point: letter-writing. To be truthful, I actually belong to that old vanguard (or rearguard) of people who send things to each other through the Postal Service. It's partly self-congratulatory ("Look! We're vintage!") but there's an intangible joy in reading a letter that somebody once bent their head over and scratched their pen on. While I write emails I'm also doing ten other tasks, but when I write someone a hand-written letter I devote to them all my attention, if only for ten minutes. And besides, you just can't leave your lover a romantic email. There are rules for such things.

There's also a pleasure in developing a distinctive style of handwriting. ALG once told me my handwriting was beautiful (I don't agree), but in any case it's nice to know that my writing is confidently different from anyone else's. A practical mixture of cursive and shorthand, with g's, y's, and j's connecting and a penchant for illegible r's. It's cute! It's fun to obsess over. But it's also a strong physical intimacy with the medium that we may have lost during the transition to electronic typing.

It's true that schoolchildren today are texting almost before they can write. My county was the first in the nation to provide public school students with free laptops in middle school. (It was a mitigated failure--middle schoolers can't take care of anything, much less electronic equipment they don't own.) And it's simply easier to type most things than to write them out. But for the foreseeable future, there will be a reason for elementary schools to teach handwriting skills and for professors to prefer handwritten exams. Handwriting offers a connection with the written word that we can't easily grasp when our letters are just ones and zeros in disguise.

What do you think? Am I too old-fashioned? Is it better for everyone if elementary schools teach typing skills instead of handwriting? Or is there still a place for the pen?

[JCG]