Suddenly, I have the handwriting of a doctor.
It may be an old cliché that physicians have bad handwriting. I haven’t received anything handwritten from any of my doctors in years – everything is a computer printout or sent electronically now – but I know that doctors used to have bad handwriting. I remember not being able to read their prescriptions and hoping, praying the pharmacist could.
I’ve been trying to get back into writing cursive more. I write with a pen more than I type on a keyboard, but for too many years I’ve been “printing” everything, except for my signature, of course. But even that had gotten to the point where I had to pause slightly when connecting two of the letters in my first name because I don’t sign my name quite as much as I used to. I wanted to fix that and write the way I did when I was 12, 21, 30. (I still have my original social security card from when I was a kid, and my signature was so fancy and legible!)
But Bob, you’re thinking to yourself right now, why do you care? Who writes anything in cursive anymore? Who signs anything? Who still writes paper checks? Who writes letters?
The answers to those four questions is “me.” Call me old-fashioned, call me a traditionalist, call me nostalgic (translation to all of those phrases: “old”), but I still think handwriting is important.
I’ll sometimes watch a news story or a YouTube video where a younger person is writing something and they’re holding the pen all wrong! The bulk of the pen is pushed up against the fleshy part of the hand, and it seems like their whole hand is wrapped around the pen. They’re not using their fingers enough and it looks rather uncomfortable. I think, no wonder kids don’t write much anymore — they don’t even know how to hold it normally in their hand. Or has the way you hold a pen or pencil, like everything else, suddenly changed for good, and the way that we older people hold it is now the “outdated” way?
I did an informal poll with some younger people recently, and most of them just don’t write anymore (or never did). It’s not that they never write, and they have to use a pen at some point at work. But they certainly don’t write letters; if anything needs to be said it can be said in a text or social media post (or phone call if they absolutely must), and while they may have to physically sign something once in a while, a signature doesn’t have to look good or be consistent. Just scribble your name! It’s official!
Isn’t signing something one of the ways we distinguish ourselves from one another? Isn’t there an almost personal pride in having a signature? Am I in a small minority of people who likes to write checks and have that record? What about reading our people’s handwriting, especially older documents or family recipes? Will people be unable to do that in 20 or 40 years?
There’s hope, though. As of March of this year, over half of the states now require students to learn cursive. Yes! And because of AI cheating, many teachers are actually making kids write longhand in those old bluebooks.
As I’ve always said, a digital problem probably has an analog solution.
I wrote something down recently in one of my notebooks, a reminder to myself. I assumed it was pretty important because I had circled it, but when I looked at it a week later, I couldn’t make out what it said. I knew it was two words and the first one started with an “m,” but beyond that I was completely stumped.
I had it narrowed down to a handful of possibilities:
“Monkey scenes.”
I’m not even sure what this would mean. “Scenes” as in scenes from films and TV shows? I doubt I wrote that, though I believe all films and TV shows would be improved by adding a monkey.
“Modem selling.”
Remember when we tied up our phone lines when we wanted to get online, and modems made that screeching sound?
Maybe selling modems is a perfectly reasonable side hustle, but it’s not something I want to do, so I’m sure that’s not what I wrote down.
“Model starting.”
I never had the patience for putting together models when I was a kid. Sure, I remember assembling a couple of the Aurora movie monster models, but for the most part I just didn’t like the whole process of reading the instructions, getting the pieces just right, the gluing. (I didn’t have the patience for jigsaw puzzles either.) To this day I’m not good working with my hands, so I really doubt I made a note to myself to suddenly start doing models at my age.
“Muffin salad.”
Apparently, there is such a thing as a muffin salad, but I didn’t know that at the time so I doubt that’s what I wrote down.
“Money saving.”
Yeah, right. As if writers know how to save money!
I did eventually figure out what I wrote down. Are you ready? It was “Modern setting.” I’m currently writing a novel, and I made this note to remind myself to set the story in contemporary times instead of the 1950s as I had originally planned.
I know, it’s anti-climactic. I kinda wish I had written down “monkey scenes.” Maybe I’ll add one to the novel.
Become a Saturday Evening Post member and enjoy unlimited access. Subscribe now
