I was at my mom's house earlier today and noticed some notes she had written. I was again struck by how beautiful her penmanship is. As a kid I always admired her handwriting and did my best to make mine match hers. By high school I had developed a pretty good hand myself, and took a great deal of pride in it. But looking at my mom's writing earlier today made me realize how far mine has slipped. I really got me thinking, and after weighing all the factors, I came to two conclusions...
- I should have better things to do in life than contemplate life-altering issues such as penmanship.
- The quality of my handwriting has decreased steadily since I began using computers on a daily basis.
That's right, it's the computer's fault. That's my story and I'm stickin' to it. When I used to write by hand all the time, good handwriting was easy to maintain. Now that I write so little, it's not. I need to make it a point to work on the issue.
After doing a quick Google search on penmanship, I found an interesting article about the dying art of penmanship from CBSnews.com a couple of months ago. It also brings up computers as an issue, but one of the main points they make is that penmanship itself isn't being taught anymore. Obviously penmanship shouldn't be the highest priority in school these days, but it's still a shame that it seems to get so little now.
You know, another thing just struck me... programmers have long been striving to solve the problems associated with handwriting recognition in order to allow users to bypass the keyboard for input in favor of simply writing directly on a computer screen. It has proven to be a difficult problem to solve, and is still far from easily usable by the masses. The most usable form of handwriting recognition today works best when interpreting printed individual characters rather than cursive. The problem with being able to interpret cursive is simply the wide variety of individual cursive writing styles. Therefore people using today's handwriting technologies are actually being discouraged from using cursive, and encouraged to print. Likewise the less people use cursive, the more their cursive-style handwriting erodes -- making it even more difficult for a computer to interpret. Sounds like a vicious circle to me.
But rest assured, someday someone somewhere will blame Microsoft.