Claire Suddath has an article at Time.com entitled “Mourning the Death of Handwriting.” At issue is not the act of writing by hand (though that is in decline too) but rather writing in so-called script or cursive.
Suddath identifies 1980 as a line of demarcation–people born after that have rougher handwriting and almost never write in cursive. She attributes the decline to a shift in educational emphasis and the rise of the computer.
I started school just before 1980. Early Radio Shack computers were just starting to rear their ugly heads at the school, and we still had to use cursive in handwriting class. I hated it. I never understood why people would prefer to use cursive instead of the print that was universally used in books.
The only rationale that made sense to me was the explanation that cursive is faster to use, since you don’t keep having to lift your pen off the paper. But in my case, it wasn’t any faster, just uglier. My cursive is so bad that I even have a hard time reading it. That may be one of the reasons I never liked the format–my writing is scary to look at.
So I shed no tears for the disappearance of funky Zs and curly Qs. Good riddance.
I’m glad I learned cursive. Today, my cursive is much easier to read than my printed handwriting. I guess I’m in too big of a hurry or something. The Mrs. on the other hand has illegible handwriting, no matter what form. It runs in her family.
Can I blame my writing on genetics? Come to think of it, I don’t recall any close relatives that have particularly neat handwriting, though some of theirs is better than mine.
A more likely explanation, though, is that in my formative school years (1-3 grade) my classmates and I often raced though the handwriting assignments to see who could finish first. I lost then, and I’m still losing from it today.