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Think tech killed penmanship? Messy handwriting was a problem centuries before smartphones
By Misha Teramura, University of Toronto
Handwriting is dead. At least that’s what a New York Times article announced in 2023 in its postmortem investigation “What Killed Penmanship?” But there was no doubt about the culprit: technology.
You’ve probably heard something like this before: the more time we spend using our phone screens and keyboards to type out everything from emails and texts to grocery lists to wedding speeches, the less we put pen to paper and the worse our handwriting gets.
News articles over the past decade from the BBC, The Wall Street Journal and The Atlantic meditate on what we’ve lost by relying on typing alone, from meaningful thank-you notes to the basic skill of writing legibly altogether. Even those who once took pride in their cursive penmanship might now find their own handwriting all but impossible to read. As one CNN headline damningly asked: “Has Technology Ruined Handwriting?”
Articles like these imply that bad handwriting is a uniquely 21st-century condition, a symptom of our dependence on smart phones and laptops, one of the myriad ways our minds and bodies are being rewired by the ubiquitous technology that surrounds us. But as someone who studies the world of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, I’ve found that bad handwriting is not a new phenomenon at all.
Historical cacography
In 16th- and 17th-century England, the vast majority of documents were produced by hand. Even after the spread of the printing press in Europe transformed how books were produced, people still used ink and quill pens to write out the letters, financial records, legal contracts, marginal annotations and scattered jottings on which daily lives depended.
But even in an age when people frequently wrote by hand, messy and at times illegible handwriting was still a common problem. They even had a word for it: cacography, calligraphy’s evil twin.
In countless letters that survive from the early modern period, writers apologize for their bad handwriting.
Read Full Story https://theconversation.com/think-tech-killed-penmanship-messy-handwriting-was-a-problem-centuries-before-smartphones-231144