If you were born before 1980, it’s likely you are writing in code.
That’s right. Cryptic code.
We have a young houseguest staying with us. She’s nineteen. I literally have t-shirts older than she. Needless to say, having her with us has been an education, on both sides.
The other day, she watched with fascination as I sat down with pen and paper and slowly, over the course of the day, wrote a letter, by hand.
The fact that my correspondent and I had never met didn’t seem to faze her–in this day of social media, it’s commonplace. Nor was the idea of sending a letter by snail mail particularly foreign; presumably she’s sent a bill payment or a birthday card in her lifetime. She was curious about the slowness of the process, that it took several sessions at the desk to complete a single letter, but that wasn’t the big issue.
No, what really puzzled her was something much more basic.
My handwriting.
I’ve seen this young woman write. She’s penned lists, written down addresses, and jotted the odd note. But when she looked at the four pages of my letter, each covered with the even, regular lines of my handwriting, she was baffled. She stared at the words, was able to pick out one or two, then shook her head and gave up. My letter, perfectly legible to me (and also, I presume, to my pen pal–no complaints from that quarter) was simply incomprehensible to our young friend.
Now, to be fair, my handwriting isn’t the best. It’s a loopy hybrid that stands upright like printing but is connected at several points like cursive. I never mastered true cursive handwriting; the only ‘D’ grade I ever received was in Penmanship, back in the days when that was still a category on report cards. As a result, my cursive is a laborious, uneven, misshapen series of flattened loops and struck-out errors, and I hated it. Thus, whenever it was allowed, I printed the words in my reports and school papers.
And in my letters.
I’ve written letters for nearly a half-century. Most of them were written in pursuit of love, but I also wrote to pen pals and distant relatives. I enjoy the act of writing, and with time and practice, my childish printing became more distinctive, more fluid. Block letters relaxed and blended together. Ascenders and descenders acquired a subtle flair.
I like my handwriting, and have never had complaints about its illegibility.
Until now.
Our young friend writes almost nothing by hand. She types lighting fast, even when using only her thumbs. She taps at a keyboard like a pro and can cut-and-paste URLs from Reddit to Facebook in a flash. She never uses text-speak like “ur” for “you are,” choosing instead to type out the entire words, often with full punctuation. She’s not lazy.
She just doesn’t write a lot, or read a lot of handwriting.
Her generation was raised with a mouse and a keyboard instead of a pen and paper. They will thumb-type an email and hit send in the time it takes me to collect my thoughts about what I want to say. They may never write a letter, may never even write a grocery list (there’s an app for that).
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it will change who they are, and how they see the world. To them, the world is ephemeral, here and gone in a flash. Their youthful writings will be saved on storage media, if saved at all. Their selfies will be stored in the cloud. Exes will dump their emails by the thousands, destroying them with as much thought as went into their making. Their journals, if they have any, will be part of the blogosphere, not wrapped in satin or leather and stored on a shelf.
I have letters that are eighty years old, collected from relatives. I have letters of my own by the boxload, from old lovers and good friends both living and dead. They are a tangible and permanent record of my history. They are a thing that will remain when I pass away.
My fear, though, is that we–you and I who are now of a “certain” age–that we are the last generation, the last humans who will know the thrill of receiving an envelope in the mailbox, who will think before we write, who will appreciate the poignancy of a dusty, ribbon-bound stack of perfumed letters. I fear that our “disposable” mentality, where every appliance and every gadget that fails is discarded and replaced instead of being repaired, will extend to our interpersonal relationships. Our interactions will be only “of the moment,” and will never achieve even the limited permanence that paper provides. We will tweet, we will hook up, we will hang out, but a year after, a decade after, will we remember? And if so, what will we remember?
I know that the words I write are not important to anyone else, but they are important to me. I know that the love letters I have saved will not touch the heart of others, but they touch mine. I like being able to hold them, to see the sketches in the margins, to read the words of my beloved, to hear them speak to me with the voice of youth. Holding a tablet with a bunch of old emails…it’s just not the same.
And sadly, it seems that not only will these mementos of my life not be appreciated, they may not even be readable to those who come after.
k
Reblogged this on Free Tech Life and commented:
After reading this I just tried to write one side of A4, by hand, with a rollerball pen. (Not a ballpoint) As someone who has worked with a keyboard since the 1980s I was shocked to find how my handwriting, which was never that readable to begin with, has deteriorated. I must, use a pen more often! Time to break out the fountain pen and give that a go.
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Some of my more elderly pen pals type up their letters, as their handwriting is completely illegible now. Though our handwriting does deteriorate with age, it also deteriorates with disuse (as you’ve discovered). I find that, even in brief periods of a couple months, when I fall behind on correspondence and/or stick to the keyboard due to lack of time, my handwriting is sloppier until I get back in practice.
The good news (in my case, anyway) is that a few sessions spent in patient, deliberate writing bring it all back into trim.
k
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This reminded me to write a letter to my aunt/godmother, who is in hr eighties, and let her know what’s going on in this part of the state. Thanks.
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It’s funny, I suppose, but now, all my pen pals are also Facebook friends. Yet we still love our letters. It’s a “concentrated” moment, reading a letter. It’s a few minutes when you let a good friend tell you stories and ask you questions. It’s so different from emails and IMs. I’m sure your aunt will enjoy receiving your letter. –k
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Those of us who are into relationships, reading and writing, will retreat to an isolated corner of the planet and write up our last will and testament to our dying civilization.
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It’s the least we can do, eh?
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So sad to think of an entire generation whose undying love is professed–from a keyboard. Rather than those lovely missives I used to get from my college boyfriend when he was overseas, scented with his cologne. They’re missing out . . .
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That’s what saddens me most, too, Kay. I have written and received hundreds of love letters and each one is a microcosm of who we were on that particular day, on that one afternoon. One of my greatest loves was an artist, and she decorated each letter with Cheshire Cat grins and sketched hummingbirds, all according to her whim or the idea of the moment. To replace those with, what? A thumb-drive filled with tweets and emails? There’s a whole world of emotion, a world of _longing_, that comes with the written word, inscribed by hand on paper, and delivered in an envelope. _This_ was touched by my beloved’s hand. _This_ was sealed with her kiss. _This_ exists here and nowhere else. _This_, is unique.
Alas, no longer.
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I was shocked to hear a few years ago that they no longer teach handwriting in schools. That stills unsettles me, considering the pain I went through to learn it. I never had a very graceful style and have always been slightly embarrassed by it, unlike my older sister who has a fluid, graceful style. So I do not miss it at all. And I can type like the wind. 🙂
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My stepmother, schooled in the “Noble Method,” had beautiful handwriting up until her death. My father, trained as a draftsman and lithographer, could summon up that spiky, linear style of blueprints and old negatives. By the time I was in grammar school, it was already waning, though invention (like my “dot finial” style I used on one 1st grade paper) was definitely NOT encouraged.
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They don’t teach Latin in schools anymore either. But they do have a lot more computer classes than they used to. I’d imagine “progess” has been going like that since there’ve been schools.
I still make lists on paper, and I’ll sign a credit card receipt, but that’s about the extent of my handwriting at this point.
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I’m not bemoaning the change in curricula, per se, but rather the loss of a whole range of experiences associated with letters and writing by hand. We are so keen on doing more and doing it faster, that we reflexively look down on methods that take more time.
I could just as easily have been talking about fly-fishing. Same sort of thing. We don’t know how to slow down. We’re forgetting how to be patient, how to deliberate, how to engage in quiet, reasoned, thoughtful conversation.
Not as a whole, certainly, but on the whole, definitely.
Also, in my mind, “change” is not synonymous with “progress.” They sometimes go together, but are not necessarily linked.
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