I was very interested to read today’s BBC online article on the slow death of handwriting .
It brought to mind the School National Handwriting Competition we HAD to take part in every year during the 1950s/60s. My primary school teacher used to comment that my handwriting was “rather large and sprawling” and so I addressed this by writing in a barely legible teeny weeny script! It didn’t last though as my handwriting today has reverted to its natural state.
I’ve just found the very school report from 1962.
Over the years, I have been guilty of typing letters rather than hand writing them due to speed and legibility and blogposts are typed so my handwriting is restricted to cards, postcards, shopping lists and my diary.
According to the BBC article …
Perhaps the best argument for keeping our pens is that otherwise, in a society that is recorded in more detail than any which came before it, we will leave plenty of data but very little of our personalities behind.
Our descendants may struggle to read our letters, but they’ll never even see most of our texts and e-mails.
So here is the pangram in that article to add a bit of hand-written personality to this blog.
See … it’s still rather large and sprawling.
26 February 2009 at 4:05 pm
Your writing looks fine to me… in the late 70’s my little church school was doing handwriting comps. Needless to say I NEVER won a dicky bird!! My school reports all mention my rather messy work!!
X
26 February 2009 at 4:43 pm
I was very interested to read that article too. Almost all of the people I work with (in a profession where the written word is our only tool) use their blackberry or computer even just for the smallest of notes. It doesn’t sit right with me and I write reams of words, notes and jottings everyday. My writting however is a real scrawl. Your’s looks fine to me.
26 February 2009 at 6:30 pm
What I forgot to mention in my post was that at school we had inkwells and had to write with a wooden pen and a nib!! Needless to say the inkwells were usually full of blotting paper which gummed up the nib.
Later we were allowed to use fountain pens but NOT biros under any circumstances.
27 February 2009 at 4:31 am
The loss of handwriting is sad. I enjoy seeing the personality behind the words when people write with a pen.
Sandie, I covet your handwriting. I can’t even read my own writing! I really wish that I could find an adult handwriting class so that I could correct my scribbly ways.
27 February 2009 at 8:16 am
Who wants to win a “Dicky Bird”!!!!! that Claire is a bit Coockoo….. lol, get it…
That is a very interesting post Beaches, i love reading my old diarys its so good to see all the bits in the margins of books i have read… only for me though, i bet some people wonder what the eck is that! when they get an old book that iv read…..
I remember writing with the pen and inkwell it was fun, but i do remember having ink all over my hands.
As you know i am useless at grammer. My hand writing looks good for the first couple of lines then i scrawl and it becomes a mess.
Yours looks nice to me, then again your all nice so it fits that your writing should be.
Love and hugs MWAH MWAH MWAH MWAH X x X x X x X x X x X x X x X x X
27 February 2009 at 8:45 am
Are other people like me when it comes to receiving cards, at Christmas, for example? I always look at the handwritten address to try to guess who it’s from! Why do I do that? It’s a pretty quick job just to open the envelope and find out.
27 February 2009 at 8:48 am
Angel me ole duck, took me a while to get the Dicky Bird/Cuckoo link but I’m there now
27 February 2009 at 3:58 pm
Your handwriting looks fine to me, I’m more like Angel, a mix of neat and scrawl LOL
I’m impressed by you report too, mine always said things like “lacks concentration” and “could do better with more effort”. But you must have been at a very clever school to be 17th with marks like that!!!!!!!! I’d have put you at the top of the class.
I love guessing who wrote the addy too, and I’m often right!
Love and blessings
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
27 February 2009 at 6:05 pm
Elaine: Thank you for your kind comments. Your comments about “a very clever school” made me smile. One of the pupils in the year above me was a certain Alec Jefferys who went on to become Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys, the inventor of genetic fingerprinting.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alec_Jeffreys
28 February 2009 at 11:49 am
Sandie, I agree completely. I actually looked for a pen-pal so I could write long beautiful letters.
I got on through a craft forum and weve passed letters back and forth from America to here for last last year and a bit!
p.s I love your writing!
28 February 2009 at 11:55 am
Perhaps from time to time we should all do a handwritten post?
28 February 2009 at 5:57 pm
I like the idea of a handwritten post. Handwriting is becoming a bygone skill, it seems. I know mine is horrible now… mainly from lack of use.
~*
2 March 2009 at 7:58 pm
OOOoooo I was in the same form as someone who became a prof in the USA. Sadly he was killed in an accident a few years back
There wasn’t many like him at our school though
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
4 April 2009 at 10:20 am
Just look at the teacher’s handwriting! I have a certificate from the early 1970s for coming placed in the Platignum School National Handwriting Competition. When at secondary school I went through a phase of writing my a’s just like you do. You couldn’t describe my handwriting as grown up, as I don’t join up the letters, although a customer did recently comment on how neat my handwriting was, so I must be doing something right! x