Is handwriting a dying art?

How often do you pick up a pen and write something, by hand? A quickly scribbled phone message whilst your boss is in a meeting, brief notes on your timesheet, your signature at the bottom of an invoice? Now take a look at the last thing you wrote down, is it legible?

The article on the BBC New Magazine, “The slow death of handwriting” highlights how something we all used to toil over at school is now slowly becoming extinct, at least in an adult working world.

Now, I’m a little removed from primary and secondary education and I have no children of my own to draw reference from but remembering my own school days we used to have a lesson a day that was purely focused on handwriting practice. When my primary school switched to teaching the cursive form, us kids would have to perfectly form each letter over and over again until each character was uniform. I used to be very proud of my handwriting. I’m more proud of my handwriting when I was in my early teens than I am of it now. Why? Because now I’m a touch typist and the keyboard is my fountain pen.

At the top end of “generation Y” I started using computers at school from about the age of 10, firstly for educational games at primary school and home (anyone else have a Sinclair ZX Spectrum?) and then in IT classes at secondary school. At university, everything was done on the computer.

It’s a shame because I used to really like taking the time out and writing things by hand. When I do take the time my handwriting can be quite legible. But generally I don’t and it’s like a pigeon has jumped in an ink well and scratched it’s pesky feet over the page. Don’t believe me? Take a look at my attempts at the pengram “How quickly daft jumping zebras vex” on TwitPic. Can you tell which one I took a little more time over?