Penmanship: An Archaic Phenonomen?

Pen and paper are becoming an abstract idea!

Be honest, when was the last time you wrote anything by hand. By anything I mean more than one sentence? You can scoff all you like, but unless you are a student, writing by hand is not needed anymore in our modern times.

It is very sad but true. Writing letters to friends and family is done by email...that is if you are lucky because the fashionable form of communitction tends to have a brevity of content. How else can you convey your sentiments in 144 characters?

We have also grabbed this lazy and easy form of lassoing in our friends with one Facebook entry
( typewritten of course ) with both hands. I can still remember going through my address book and writing Christmas cards for the chosen lot. Depending on how conscientious you were, you might have written up to 50 cards. Hand written, I might add. Of course that was eons ago!

One ray of hope is that our generation still writes proper sentences on our social platforms. Rarely do you see an abbreviation on someone's missive if they are over the age of 35. Words to us are important to express ourselves. With any luck it will rub off through osmosis to all and sundry in our social stream.

Jump to the next generation, and their entries on any social platform is prefixed by a hash tag and a few phrases. The even younger lot tend to skip words altogether and only use photos to convey what's happening in their life.

For all I know, this sudden love of not using words might be the real cause of our youth not reading books ( novels etc ). They simply don't understand them. How could they, if they only use abstract words and emoticons in their communications. Of course the folk at Amazon are way ahead of this trend, because they make sure that if you read anything on a kindle-device, you have an automatic dictionary on screen.

Writing by hand has many facets. The right instrument makes our penmanship that much more legible and more fun to write. When I use a fountain pen, miraculously my penmanship neatens up and is far more legible. Of course, not having much opportunity to write by hand, it takes great concentration to form neat letters.

Let's hope that the art of penmanship will make a comeback and along with it the art of using individual words to create sentences that describe your feelings without needing to appendix an emoticon...

Biggi

Amazon.de/at:Montblanc Füller Agatha Christie FP 4810 Ltd. Edit 1993
Amazon.com:MontBlanc Meisterstuck Le Grand Platinum Fountain Pen with Medium Nib (2851)