This year I am rediscovering penmanship. It’s become a lost art and I aim to redevelop mine back into its former glory.
It’s been a problem for a few years now. I would write something in cursive and then go back later to read my notes and find myself challenged to decipher what I had written. Some notes were no big deal. I could sort of figure out what I meant. Other notes were critical and taken during unexpected moments on client projects where a keyboard was not close. Those were the times I would find the most frustrating.
Once upon a time I had beautiful and easy to read cursive handwriting. What changed? Well, these days I mostly write on a keyboard or using my mobile phone. So, it would seem that the whole “Use it or lose it” saying is quite true. Writing in cursive has become less frequent so even though I know how to write in cursive my ability to actually do it in a legible way has become somewhat lost.
Weird, right?
This is something that has been mostly a minor annoyance. Then I heard about a young highly educated college graduate from a prestigious university finding it difficult to express their thoughts during a job interview. So much so that the interviewer asked if the young man was okay. His response?
“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”
Here is the post from X which recounts this in greater detail.
https://x.com/gregisenberg/status/1869202002783207622
When I saw this post on X, I was stunned. Is it true that still developing humans who are “outsourcing” their thinking to AI are now challenged to communicate without AI? Even though that young man was 22, his brain is continuing to develop until age 30. Here is a research article to give more details about brain development.
Then I began to question whether there were skills I had lost and immediately thought about my handwriting skills…or lack thereof.
I grew up in an age without computers. Outside of the spoken word, pen and paper were the way I learned to communicate with the world. First with print and then through cursive. Which was a much faster way to write. As a Gen X, I grew up with traditional education and the birth of the computer and internet age. So, I have one foot planted in the “old ways” and have been part of growing the modern way we communicate.
So, I immediately knew that redeveloping my penmanship was something I should absolutely dedicate some time to. However, I know one of the reasons I don’t like to write is because the pens I have are too small for my hands and not comfortable for writing any length of time. Which meant I would need to find new pens to write with if I wanted to take this personal challenge seriously. And I do.
The photos you see are first the small pens I had in my house.
Then the larger pens with a nice soft grip.
And finally the big fat short pen with a nice rubber grip.
I tried all three of the new pens and the fat pen was the clear winner.
The last photo is of my first writing with the new fat pen. The cursive writing you see is the one I hope to improve this year. Wish me luck!