This is my third post for the event #blaugust2025.
The last seven days have been very busy at work. I had a 6am start this morning, which means by 2:30pm, I was headed home. After having lunch, I decided to check the Tech News feed on my Bluesky account and came across this article: The End of Handwriting
I started not to read it, even though the title made me curious mainly because I thought it was about the end of handwriting as a general communicative skill (as in writing letters). There are some poignant quotes in the article which do make sense to me, such as the following;
- Email began edging out cards and letters decades ago. Then smartphones hit the market, and our reliance on paper notes, wall calendars, and Post-it reminders dwindled.
- There are real benefits to learning to hold a pen in your hand and use it.
- …researchers hypothesized, time spent holding devices rather than pencils might be impacting whether kids had all the motor skills they needed to learn handwriting when they entered kindergarten.
Being one that grew up two decades prior to computers and then digital mobile devices that can store the text you generate, I was taught handwriting, cursive included, because it was the norm. Even outside of having to write out all my homework to turn in, I was writing letters to friends and famil, and as a young engineer in the late 80s, was instructed to and taught the value of always writing engineering notes in notebooks (many of which I still have since then). To this day, I still purchase and send out Christmas cards where I have to sign them, in handwritten ink, versus those you can purchase from CVS, Walgreens, Shutterfly, etc with your or your family’s name pre-printed within the card.
Handwriting is an analog approach, not to say that typing and email (for example) isn’t, but the gist of this blog post is more in line with the personal touch of writing a letter or doing such in a card, that I tend to believe is far more personal than anything easily done digitally.
It’s ironic that I came across this article, as a friend of mine since I’ve known since I was 15, and one who I dated for a brief time, happen to keep AND show me some pictures of a FEW letters I wrote to her in college. It was weird to see what my handwriting looked back then, something I’d forgotten. Never in cursive, but the photos were clear enough that I could read the thoughts I conveyed back then.
In addition to this analog approach, there is the type of stationary used, even (for some) the type of writing implement used (fountain pen, anyone?) that defines the whole art of writing. Oh, scented letters to that man or woman you were involved with? Yeah, that too…none of which can be done digitally.
The digital approach is far more easier, expedient, and takes less effort, I get it, you get it, but the art is lost. Maybe it will resurface, like vinyl records have… Time will tell.
Thanks for the read. Oceans of rhythm..
Fresh
