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1 week ago
12
The loss of handwriting skills has far-reaching implications beyond the ability to guide a pen across paper (Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?, 21 January). I have been privileged to introduce students to the manuscript of Virginia Woolf’s essay Women and Fiction, which was later revised and expanded to become the celebrated text A Room of One’s Own. The impact of seeing her hastily scrawled words in purple ink with crossings-out as she sought the perfect word is a joy to witness and something that will never be matched by the typewritten word. What will a literary archive look like to the students of the future, if it only exists as typed words on a screen? I doubt it could ever reach the same level of excitement.
Dr Claire Nicholson
Chair, Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
The disappearance of handwriting is alarming for all the reasons given by Christine Rosen – but while hand-forming letters certainly increases cognitive skills, so too can tracing them. An elderly art school colleague once explained how he’d been trained to draw capital Roman letters as a student at the then South Kensington art school (later the Royal College of Art). Students had been required to trace a large sample Roman capital letter on arrival every morning – until they no longer needed to do so, having internalised all its properties, at which point daily tracings of the next letter began. Every student left the school able to draw Roman letters freehand. It would seem that even a thing drawn, even “mechanically”, is a thing better remembered and understood.
Michael Daley
Director, ArtWatch UK
Christine Rosen writes so well about the many ways writers benefit from writing by hand that it is surprising how little she writes about the ways readers of a handwritten note will benefit. Graphology may be derided as a pseudoscience, yet there are graphologists able to read much of the character of a writer from their handwriting. My late father employed a young man who was clearly in the wrong job. He sent a sample of his handwriting to the graphologist Marianne Jacoby, who declared that he should be in journalism or finance. He became City editor of a national newspaper, in a career he would not have contemplated had his handwriting not given such a clear insight.
Alan Sekers
London
I started using computers 50 years ago and have, gradually and thankfully, almost abandoned handwriting. In the late 1980s, I spent three weeks learning to touch-type, and have never looked back. Christine Rosen is missing out on the joy of being able to read without trying to laboriously interpret handwriting.
She is also missing out on the joy of writing fast enough to keep up with your own brain. Investing signatures – and, by extension, handwriting – with meaning? Never, not in my world.
Alan Gough
Manchester
Christine Rosen’s piece on handwriting stressed its utilitarian value in developing focus and concentration. However, even if one is not a calligrapher, there is a tactile pleasure in using pen and ink and seeing one’s thoughts flow from head to hand to paper.
Making thought visible is the essence of creativity, and we lose that when we do not form our words by hand.
Dr Emile de Sousa
Stoke D’Abernon, Surrey
If children generally are not learning cursive handwriting, the question arises: how will the scholars of the future be able to read and interpret the handwritten documents of the past?
That this is already a problem was demonstrated recently when my husband received a plea from an American scholar specialising in the works and life of George Eliot. She wanted retired teachers to transcribe some of the author’s letters, as her students were unable to read cursive writing.
Marie Paterson
Nuneaton, Warwickshire
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