We are slaves to the printed word, but only handwriting conveys real beauty

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/20/printed-word-handwriting-meaning-calligraphy

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When did you last write a letter, that is really “write” one? I still struggle to handcraft thank-yous and letters of congratulation or commiseration. I take reporting notes and scrawl messages, but often cannot decipher the result. My speed-writing has long gone and I cannot imagine my fingers surviving a student essay. A page of sustained writing is a calligraphic car crash.

Related: Signing off: Finnish schools phase out handwriting classes

It is little surprise that schools across the western world are giving up teaching “cursive”, joined-up writing to you and me. Last month the Finnish education system decided that children need only imitate printed letters while concentrating on “developing digital skills”. In the US, where joined-up script once seemed as sacred as the constitution, almost all states are making cursive a mere option. A conference about handwriting in schools three years ago found that only a third of teachers were still using cursive, with 8% using print and a majority using a “hybrid” of the two. Swirls, loops, ascenders and descenders appear to be the stuff of yesterday, gone the way of hand signals when driving, and sewing on buttons.

Britain cannot be far behind. The national curriculum, that bastion of the old ways, still insists that children “be taught to write with a joined style as soon as they can form letters securely with the correct orientation”. Yet last year a poll found that a third of respondents had not put proper pen to paper in six months. They saw no need. Why use five fingers when a thumb will do? Why risk indecipherability when any fool can read txt?

The ultimate test of any means of communication is whether it communicates efficiently. Writing is a language, like any other. Those who thought the written word would die out with the explosion of mobile phones were plain wrong. Telephonic communication is reportedly on the wane. We prefer to text, so the experts say, because such contact allows us to be more distant, less committing and therefore safer. The internet has seen a huge revival in the use of the written word – just not in the handwritten one.

I am relaxed about this. I can fly without understanding aerodynamics. I can drive without mending a car.I can use a computer without being able to code or write algorithms. We all have enough innovation with which to keep pace without being burdened with past practices. If we no longer have to write by hand, why try?

The Finnish thesis is that, provided pupils can write the elements of an alphabet, cursive is confusing gibberish. They never see cursive on a screen (except with cursive programmes) and have enough trouble messing between capitals and lower case, with capitals reputedly also on the way out. Now that we can talk into our mobiles and see what we say printed out, in time there will be no need to fumble over the qwerty keyboard. Indeed the survival of the qwerty board itself – designed by Victorians to avoid the typewriter arms of adjacent letters clashing in motion – must be the most extraordinary past relic to survive into the computer age.

Most American debate on the subject has switched to the advance of hybrid. The organisation Handwriting Without Tears says cursive has anyway evolved to being “simplified without curly qs and loopty loops”. Under hybrid some letters are joined up and others not. Some lower-case letters mix with capitals when they are roughly the same, or perhaps when they are not. The one doubt is how long teachers can tolerate such anarchy. There is talk of a “period of transition” from cursive to print, or of a sudden change, as when Sweden switched to right-hand driving in 1967. Teachers crave rules.

For all that, handwriting remains one of the few practical handicrafts to which humans still adhere. Cursive script may be as useless to the generality of pupils as algebra and the periodic table. But it connects hand and brain in a task of active engagement: what used to be called penmanship. It is an act of aesthetic creation.

Oriental cultures attach great significance to the art of writing. I once visited an elderly master of Dari calligraphy in a backstreet of Kabul. He crafted his exquisite letterings and hung them on the walls, where they sold for high prices. In China a mastery of characters is thought to be essential for a cultured person. To watch someone write the world’s loveliest scripts – such as Hindi, Arabic, Persian or Thai – is to watch the most fluid human artistry. Perhaps it is no accident that the 2014 winner of the world handwriting contest was an Indian, Amol Jayant Sharf. He contrived to turn a page of essentially ugly English letters into a thing of astonishing beauty.

Even such writing is highly stylised. The cursive taught to American and French children is so formalised that, in my experience, all hands tend to look the same. The glory of English handwriting is its chaotic expressiveness. (I recall my school trying to teach us all an immaculate italic. It was a glorious failure.)

A love letter conveys its message in its calligraphy, declaring itself in curls and swoops, in size and tilt

Handwriting should be free. It is the outward manifestation of an individual personality. For instance, computers may claim to “read” personal signatures written in single letters. One day they will prefer digital prints or eyeball recognition, but such signatures have all the character of a train timetable. We love to sign our names with a unique and possibly indecipherable squiggle. It is our icon, our private hieroglyph.

Handwritten text is an expression of meaning. A love letter conveys its message in its calligraphy, declaring itself in curls and swoops, in size and tilt, in long pauses and fast scribbles. Claims that a handwriting analyst can really “decode” such script are to me dubious. What I am sure of is that any communication confined to printed fonts loses a wealth of significance in translation.

I suspect that the triumph of printed writing will be short lived. Perhaps it is paper and post offices that are on the way out, and handwriting on screens will catch on. Perhaps separated letters will merge back into the cursive under the demand for speed. New scripts and spellings will evolve. Writing will change, like any language, fashioned by practice to the conveyance of sense. Please just let it be beautiful.