Writing letters on paper
We are The Keepers of the Dying Cursive. We should do more handwritten posts.
Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards.
About six months ago, I realised that I had no idea what the handwriting of a good friend of mine looked like. I had known him for over a decade, but somehow we had never communicated using handwritten notes. He had left voice messages for me, emailed me, sent text messages galore. But I don’t think I had ever had a letter from him written by hand, a postcard from his holidays, a reminder of something pushed through my letter box. I had no idea whether his handwriting was bold or crabbed, sloping or upright, italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash.
It hit me that we are at a moment when handwriting seems to be about to vanish from our lives altogether. At some point in recent years, it has stopped being a necessary and inevitable intermediary between people – a means by which individuals communicate with each other, putting a little bit of their personality into the form of their message as they press the ink-bearing point on to the paper. It has started to become just one of many options, and often an unattractive, elaborate one.
October 10th, 2012 at 14:34
I miss cursive writing sooo much that I’m willing to send a letter to anyone in the world so I can write in cursive again.
Typing on a laptop can be exhausting.
October 10th, 2012 at 15:41
Thanks for the link.
October 10th, 2012 at 23:09
I splurge on nice paper and journals to make up for my bad writing attempts and even worse handwriting.
Soon, I will excavate my grade school notebooks. The highlight of my Grade 3 life was finally being allowed to use ballpens because my penmanship finally passed the standards. And no, I won’t mention the fact that it was already the 3rd quarter of the school year.
October 11th, 2012 at 02:55
My handwriting is terrible. The general response is “Uy! Doctor ka ba? Mukhang reseta yung sulat mo!”