My mother had beautiful cursive handwriting, and she didn't have to practice much at it. She was taught to write that way while in school, something schools spent a lot of time on back in her day. I came along in the school system half a century later and learned to write fairly well . . . but nothing like her style. My kids came along and can't write well at all, but they ended up with fairly good educations. My grandkids are handicapped when it comes to handwriting, can hardly do it at all . . . but they graduated from high school and went to college.
One of the most respected jobs in ancient societies was that of being a scribe. Not many people were selected to learn to write, but it's a good thing some people learned to write well or we wouldn't have much in the way of recorded history. We still have a few people in our modern society who can actually write beautifully . . . but they are rare. School districts all over America are abolishing cursive handwriting from curriculums, saying it is no longer needed. Needed? Replaced by what? Oh, I forgot, it's being replaced by keyboards and hand held gizmos. What to know what else is being replaced? People who can actually spell and read, and if you want to blame that on anything, you can drop that pile of poop at the feet of our modern educators.
Here are a few analogies for you: 1) We no longer have real photographers because the modern generation of snapshot takers don't know diddly-squat about a camera. They've gone digital, and that has robbed the world of photography of some great photographic art. These days, there is very little art to taking pictures . . . and 2) Modern high tech digital equipment has done damage to what real music is supposed to sound like. It's good, for sure, but it's missing all the things that brought warmth and realism to music recorded the old analogue way. Translate that to writing, and you get the picture. If you can't write without pecking out words on a keyboard, you can't really master the language. Education has taken big strides backward in the last half century, almost to the point where we're now managed throughout by a bunch of linguistic cripples. Good reading goes along with good writing, and if you can't read, you're doomed to ignorance.
I'm pissed off about all this because I've been victimized along with millions of others. The only time I actually write these days is when I have to sign my name to something, and I'm not very good at that anymore. I wouldn't even start to present an argument that we'd be better off if everything was written by hand. We moved past that centuries ago, to the printed word, what generation upon generation of people saw on paper. Those words have now moved mostly to monitors, screens, tablets, laptops, etc. But I remember well the learning experience, of how I used to pour over notes taken in class by hand before taking exams. I remember having to write down the things I needed to remember because seeing the words take shape by my own hand caused them to stick in my memory. I've still got most of those old notes stored away. I've got most of my old papers from graduate school, and I can still remember writing them.
And now, I've written dozens of books, all of them on either typewriters or computers using some fancy digital word program . . . and I can't even remember my own books. You'd think they'd be stuck in my brain forever, but they aren't because in a twisted sort of way they're artificial. I could argue that those books would've never been written if I'd been forced to write them by hand, and that's probably true. I did considerable research on some of those books, now lost to me . . . unless I go back and read the notes I made by hand.
Want to be something special? Be a scribe, and you'll be like few others.
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