Illegibly yours

Penmanship just isn't that important for most gen X-ers.

There wasn't much time devoted to teaching proper penmanship. While we had the lined paper and the uber-big caricatures of what the letters should look like, writing in longhand wasn't stressed. I always felt it was faster to print than write in cursive. I attempted to use cursive, but I never mastered it.

Sporadically you come across someone who still writes in cursive. I think they must have had the nuns "instilling" the importance of legibility.

Thinking about my previous entry about celebrity and requesting autographs I thought about how illegible autographs are these days. The musicians quickly scribble their name on the CD jacket. Perhaps this evolved out of signing numerous albums for fans and wanting to get through them quickly instead of distinguishing each letter of their name. Nowadays you're lucky to pick out the first letter of their first and last name.

I have fallen into this laziness/expediency as well. I blame a few things, seeing as it clearly isn't my fault but some external factor.

The digital age has led to more typing than writing by hand. Word offers a number of fonts if I really want to make it look like I wrote a note or paper by hand. The large shift to digital writing came around high school. Why write twice? I can type up my thoughts in the 'ole word processor, spell check, save and print. While typing seems more efficient I believe it removes a step from the writing process. Whenever I write on paper I have more time to reorganize and collect my thoughts. I am not focusing on the red and green squiggly lines under my prose. Instead I doodle my own "art" in the margins. Also by writing things out you are forced to edit what you wrote when you eventually type up what you wrote.

The other thing I blame is the credit card signing machines in stores. I used to try to distinguish each letter of my name but now it's a big A followed by one of those wavy lines, a break and another indecipherable line. It makes no difference in the store if my signature really looks like my signature. Unfortunately, my real signature now resembles the one on the credit card machines.

Go here and see if you would have been able to match the scribble to the scribe. My theory is that over time signatures have become less decipherable and more unique (perhaps to combat forgery). We surely have come a long way from John Hancock.