… and the Keyboard Killed my Penmanship.
As I’ve been trying to show Ryder how to write his name, I can’t help but notice that my penmanship SUCKS. This morning, as I watched him struggle with loops and lines, I thought to myself – “I’ve written about my crappy writing before, haven’t I?”
And so I hunted up this post from over two years ago. Sadly, my writing has now progressed from kind-of-sucky to sucks eggs.
– July 2010 –
I used to have the most stylized, idyllic cursive handwriting. Even as a young one, adults marveled at my perfect 75° right tilt and fluid curves. Little girls passed notes to me and wanted to be my friend. Boys looked at me and thought… “what a nerd”. (Two out of three isn’t bad.)
But now, after countless years of MS Word, e-mailing, texting – even using apps to assemble my grocery list – my handwriting strongly resembles that of an eleventh grade quarterback. In fact, I sometimes wonder if it’s possible to lose a skill entirely from lack of use, because it’s PAINFUL to write. My hand forgets what to do with a pen. The first few lines are generally passable, with minimal flair. Yes, I can actually form legible words.
By the second paragraph it looks like I had a stroke. The letters all mesh together and run off the page in a sloping line. Painful. And so I’ve adjusted to the sloppiness by keeping all greeting cards to a two-line minimum; no soul-baring notes from moi. When asked to fill out forms, I counter with “do you have a writable PDF version?” And given the choice of hand writing in a journal, disclosing all my secret hopes and dreams – or blogging for the entire world to see… well, I guess we know how that turned out.
What about you? Has your penmanship suffered?