Not long ago people worried that nobody writes anymore. They recalled an era when friends and colleagues poured their hearts out to each other in letters. Even today, the unfathomable word count of the Internet notwithstanding, discovery of a handwritten missive in the snailbox from a friend or loved one continues to stir in its recipient anticipation and wonder. Other letters, those thick ones requiring two postage stamps, may sometimes raise a quiescent sense of dread. It turns out that conveying sadness and regret (and other frailties of the human condition) takes more words. For the writer who’s merely writing to thank you for a good time had, well, the space of a three by five card may be all that’s needed.
Yet as personally felt as a handwritten letter may be, it’s too often its own problem. Some writers cursive style I simply cannot read. Misspelling doesn’t bother me; words or whole phrases crossed out doesn’t put me off; if the ‘^’ character appears mid-word to correct a spelling, fine; or if the writer feels the need to shout in all caps, I can excuse that. What I find difficult to brook is penmanship that looks like it was trained on the Dead Sea Scrolls! If I hear one more person pine for the return of cursive writing instruction to the classroom…I can’t predict my behavior. Marshall McLuhan once famously claimed that the communication medium itself is more important than the message it carries. This would suggest that writers writing in the “medium” of glamorous cursive styles believe their flowery “Qs” and indecipherable loop-de-loop letters encode their own meaning. It’s like saying in the spoken word that dolphin-speak is its own meaning. If you’re a dolphin, maybe. Or a crackpot republican (fun begins around 40 seconds in). For the rest of us old schoolers, if you want to reach out to us hand-writers, yes! by all means. But please print next time. Your words mean things, not your penmanship.