The slow death of handwriting

The slow death of handwriting: "

Christmas cards, shopping lists and what else? The occasions in
which we write by hand are fewer and fewer, says Neil Hallows. So is
the ancient art form of handwriting dying out?

A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts.

For some, that is already the case. But writer Kitty Burns
Florey says the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary,
joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

"When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours
in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at
the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them," says Ms
Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and
Fall of Handwriting.

FAMOUS HANDWRITING

King Henry VIII wrote this love letter to Anne Boleyn (pic: British Library)

Jane Austen completed her last novel, Persuasion, in 1816

In 1864, Lewis Carroll wrote his most famous work for Alice Liddell.

Aged 16, Winston Churchill wrote to his mother Lady Randolph Churchill

Jimi Hendrix's lyrics for Machine Gun were written in 1969

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She argues that children - if not this generation then one soon to
come - may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare
occasions in life they need to communicate by pen.

The way handwriting is taught has undoubtedly changed. At Ms
Florey's school in 1950s America, a nun beat time with a stick as the
class copied letters from the blackboard. It was not a place for
individuals. There was a right way to form letters and very many wrong
ways.

For much of the last century British schools ran in a similar
way. At my primary school in the 1970s, whole classes were devoted to
work being 'written up for best' and I remember a story coming back
unmarked because I had crossed out a single word. I wonder what my
teachers would have made of a James Joyce manuscript.

Crossing 7s

Many found the experience tedious, but for left-handers it could
be torture. Often they were forced to write with their right, while
their 'bad' hand was tied down.

More than a century of children turning out letters by the yard
produced a great conformity. In the 1940s Ealing drama, Went The Day
Well?, a contingent of German soldiers sets up camp in the English
countryside, disguised as Royal Engineers. One reason they get rumbled
is that a soldier writes a "7" with a line through it. "Why should they
form their figures in a continental way?" a villager asks.

If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day Registrar Ruth Hodson Send us your handwriting

These days, the shape of a child's ovals, loops and slants matters
less than what they write. 'Content is everything,' says Mark Brown,
head teacher of St Mary's Catholic Primary School in Axminster, Devon.
'The emphasis is much more on having a go, and expressing yourself, and
getting the ideas down.'

He says letter formation is still taught in the early years of
primary school, but the appearance of handwriting takes less of a
priority as children get older, provided it remains legible.

Some parents expect handwriting to be drilled in the same way
as they experienced themselves, but Mr Brown argues the content of
children's writing has significantly improved as a result of the change
in emphasis, and that they write far more at school than they will as
adults.

Scrawling

So once we leave school, does it really matter? Apart from the odd shopping list, do people still need to use a pen?

Some do. Registrars of births, deaths and marriages have been
recording life's significant events in their usually impeccable writing
since 1837.

Writer's hand: Not a word crossed out in this instance of Neil Hallows' writing

'All registrars are conscious that they follow a long and noble
tradition,' says Ruth Hodson, interim registration manager for
Peterborough City Council.

But even their fountain pens will soon barely be heard
scratching on the registers. Under a modernisation programme, an
increasing amount of the information is being entered directly on to a
computer.

Ms Hodson is unsentimental. 'If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day.'

But perhaps handwriting gains its greatest importance when it is
least legible. The reputation of doctors for scrawling was enhanced by
a study in the British Medical Journal which found medics' writing was
considerably worse than other healthcare workers or administrative
staff. Poor writing has often been blamed for medication errors.

Gwyn Williams, a junior doctor in Carmarthen, says that despite
technological advances, a great deal of clinical communication is still
handwritten.

Remember this?

'We have to write so much, on so many occasions, with the clock
ticking. The end result is so difficult to interpret that even I have
to concentrate on occasions to work out what [I have written].

'There doesn't seem to be any other logical way of doing it.
Typing clinical notes on a computer seems so cumbersome in the limited
time available that I can't see how it would work.'

In many jobs though, a person can go for months, even years, writing only the odd phone message in their own script.

Nevertheless, some employers still ask for a handwritten
application, or a sample of writing, although the Chartered Institute
of Personnel and Development warns employers they need to be clear
about the reason for that, to avoid accusations of discrimination.

10-page letters

There are those who see handwriting's slip in educational
priority and increasingly eccentric role in the workplace as evidence
that, in the West at least, we are forgetting an ancient art form.

A panic, perhaps, and one witnessed every time the dominant
style of writing changed or a new form of technology seemed to threaten
it. An early typewriter led the Scientific American in 1867 to marvel
that "the weary process of learning penmanship in schools will be
reduced to [writing] one's own signature and playing on the literary
piano".

Maybe a couple of times a week [pupils] could produce something handwritten that is judged partly on its legibility, or even its beauty Kitty Burns Florey

But look at the decline in letter writing. The students I knew two
decades ago who knocked out 10-page letters during a morning in bed
have probably not yet written 10 pages of handwritten prose of any kind
this year.

For Ms Florey, the answer should start in the classroom. Not a
return to the nuns with sticks, but for children to value handwriting
by learning a simple, legible, attractive script from the start - in
her view a form of italic - and then keep reinforcing it beyond the
early years.

'Maybe a couple of times a week [pupils] could produce
something handwritten that is judged partly on its legibility, or even
its beauty.'

Adults too can improve their writing, in a matter of weeks with
a textbook and expert advice. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has said that
if he had not taken a calligraphy course at college, he would not have
thought of putting multiple typefaces on the Mac.

Perhaps the best argument for keeping our pens is that
otherwise, in a society that is recorded in more detail than any which
came before it, we will leave plenty of data but very little of our
personalities behind.

Our descendants may struggle to read our letters, but they'll never even see most of our texts and e-mails.

SHOW US YOUR HANDWRITING 1. Here are three examples of handwriting, courtesy of the Magazine team (in ascending order of readability) 2. We've written the pangram: 'How quickly daft jumping zebras vex' and underneath our name and age 3. Now we want you to write the same sentence, with your name and age underneath 4. E-mail a picture or scan of your handwriting to yourpics@bbc.co.uk with the subject line 'HANDWRITING', and we'll feature as many as possible next week

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