Tag Archives: handwriting

Note to future self

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According to an AP story in the LA Times (registration required), handwritten notes are becoming more prized now that so much communication is handled via email.

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a Guardian article that predicted that handwriting as a skill was in danger of being lost.

Perhaps it will be retained by elites as a “medium is the message” flourish to polite society communications. Public schools will drop it, but finishing schools will teach it, as will adult ed classes in the local libraries. If there are . . . libraries . . .

The end of handwriting?

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In The Guardian this week, Stuart Jeffries asks whether writing by hand will become a lost art, as technology increasingly enables us to communicate without it.

He passes on a bit of history along the way. For example, the Sumarian merchants invented a script 5000 years ago, using “a stylus and wet clay to record the ingredients for beer.” Notes Jeffries, “The endlessly inventive outpouring of human writing thus grew out of commercial necessity.”

Perhaps that observation holds the secret to whether handwriting will die. Does it have, today, any commercial necessity?