I’m embarrassed how poor my handwriting has become. It was never good, but it’s become worse. I struggled to write neatly in primary school; now it’s impossible.
I can print letters okay, but cursive script is atrocious.
Today I wrote Christmas messages for some key contacts. I could barely read them myself. I blame two factors:
1) Typing. I’ve typed far more than I’ve written over the past 20 years. I barely write at all now, except short notes and my signature.
2) Work. I never learned proper shorthand, but developed my own version. It gives me useful notes of conversations, meetings and interviews. Only I can read it, so it’s almost like writing in code!
So, between lack of use and “writing” an alternative script I figure that I’ve lost the art of cursive script. Whether I need to rediscover it is debatable.
These articles might be of interest:
Sloppy handwriting is not necessarialy bad because it is a reflection of you at the time of writing. Most printers say they print because it is faster but actually it is not because of all the starts and stops. Also I have seen printing that is harder to read than the person’s cursive. The main problem is that people forget how to form the cursive letters when they don’t use it much. Printing is harder to analyze than cursive but the first thing it shows is that they disconnect from others and do not want others to know what they feel thinking in this way they cannot be hurt by others.
Thanks for that insight Carole; makes a lot of sense.
Carole makes a good point — there are cursive letters I’m not sure how to make. Isn’t the capital ‘Q’ sort of like an odd-looking 2? That’s now I remember it from the chart in grade school.
My writing is a combination of printing and cursive. And there are a lot of things I’ve written that I can’t read a day later.Â
When I was in high school I was told, by the girls, that "I had nice writing for a guy."Â It fell to pieces in college when I had to write fast to take notes.
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