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When I was in high school my mother made it her life’s
work to convince me to take a typing class. As her reasoning rarely
involved girls, which I viewed as my own life’s work, I wasn’t
interested. Besides, why would I need to type?
I am now in my 40s and don’t consider myself
particularly ancient, but typing then was for secretaries and old
ladies who wore their hair in a bun. The hulking contraptions that
passed for computers communicated by punch card and were mainly for
science geeks. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life – or
what life wanted to do with me, for that matter – but was reasonably
sure I wasn’t going to be a scientist or a secretary.
I was right about that, though I’m glad I finally caved
in and took a beginning typing course. I did this because it was
the only class I could take with my girlfriend due to the difference
in our grade levels, but I let Mom have the victory and never told
her the pathetic truth.
Old-fashioned typing has evolved to keyboarding, a skill
necessary for many jobs, including mine. But will it also kill off
handwriting, just as some think Homo sapiens wiped out the
Neanderthals?
It has certainly wounded my own Neanderthal-like script,
if not quite finishing it off. Worse, educators are noticing a
significant decline in penmanship among children, especially
cursive.
Most schools have cut back the time they spend teaching
cursive and many have switched from the traditional “Palmer” method
to a semi-block style called italic or “print cursive.” A small
number of schools have dropped cursive completely.
This would have delighted me in third grade, but now I’m
not so sure. There’s something personal about cursive script that
doesn’t come across in 12-point Times New Roman font. And as small
as they’ve gotten, word processors can’t go everywhere and batteries
don’t last forever.
Almost every elementary school teaches keyboarding,
starting as early as first grade. Kids too young to keep track of
their lunch boxes have laptops that cost more than my first car, and
type everything except the notes they pass in class. Those they
send by text message on cell phones.
I thought electronic personal digital assistants might
keep handwriting alive, if only the chunky block letters most of
them can read and convert to typed text. However many PDAs now come
with keyboards so small that you hold the thing in your hand and
type with your thumbs. If these catch on it could be the end of
even block letters.
I’m doing my part to at least keep block lettering alive
while considering getting my first PDA, a model about the size of a
cell phone. You could hide the keyboard under a couple of postage
stamps, and since I’m not sure my pork chop thumbs can navigate the
keys I want to be able to write on the screen with a stylus. The
scribbles would be converted to typed text using so-called
“handwriting recognition” software.
The problem is that I barely recognize it myself. I
have typed everything for so long that my handwriting skills have
pretty much withered away.
As a test, I tried writing the alphabet in cursive. I
did reasonably well with lowercase letters, but missed F, J, K, Q,
and Z in uppercase. I’m glad Mrs. Smith, my third grade teacher,
didn’t live to see this. At least I think she didn’t; she seemed
about 106 at the time.
Mrs. Smith aside, handwriting may soon join butter
churning and candle making on the junk heap of forgotten life
skills. It’s not over yet, but the Times New Roman font is on the
wall.
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