Our Handwriting Has Gone To the Crapper

TW: My handwriting was never good. Now it is barely legible even to myself. Kids today are barely even learning how to write cursive. As the article says (although I did not clip much of the historical stuff), handwriting has always evolved. Try reading a 19th century letter. I am not particularly concerned by this latest evolution.

I will just offer a shout out to my parents who forced me to take a typewriting class in high school (that would have been in the BC period- before computers). At least I can type on a keyboard pretty darn well, which in this day and age is all one really needs.

From Time:
"...I am a member of Gen Y, the generation that shunned cursive. And now there is a group coming after me, a boom of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have even less need for good penmanship. We are witnessing the death of handwriting.

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.

...Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 15.

...Technology is only part of the reason. A study published in the February issue of the Journal of Educational Psychology found that just 9% of American high school students use an in-class computer more than once a week. The cause of the decline in handwriting may lie not so much in computers as in standardized testing. The Federal Government's landmark 1983 report A Nation at Risk, on the dismal state of public education, ushered in a new era of standardized assessment that has intensified since the passage in 2002 of the No Child Left Behind Act. "In schools today, they're teaching to the tests," says Tamara Thornton, a University of Buffalo professor and the author of a history of American handwriting. "If something isn't on a test, it's viewed as a luxury."

...Is that such a bad thing? Except for physicians — whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year — penmanship has almost no bearing on job performance. And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand..."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1912419,00.html