How is your handwriting?
How is your handwriting these days? Do you even write anything by hand anymore?
Most days, I may pick up a pen at work once at most or grab a pen to jot down a note at home or add to the grocery list that hangs on the refrigerator. Increasingly, though, I end up typing a note to myself in my cellphone.
I remember when I used to carry around a little yearly pocket calendar (remember when they gave those out for free at the Hallmark stores?), and I wrote down everything in that: appointments, work schedule, birthdays, airline flight times. I thought that if I ever lost it, I wouldn’t know where I was supposed to be at any given time.
One day, someone told me I should just use the calendar app on my cellphone, and I was too embarrassed to admit that I didn’t really know how to use it. There was no way it could be as trusty as the Hallmark calendar anyway, right? Boy was I wrong. Once I learned the ins and outs of the app, it was off to the races entering every detail of my week into the cellphone calendar. No need to write anything or carry that little calendar book around in my purse anymore. I still carry a pen in my purse at all times. Maybe that’s a result of being a news reporter for so many years and always needing to jot down notes.
Nowadays, I’ve noticed that my handwriting is not as neat when I have to write a message and sign a greeting card. I remember learning to write on that lined paper in elementary school and getting a poor writing score in sixth grade because my cursive writing had a back slant (I’m left-handed but have no reason why I was writing that way).
Over the past 20 years, the popularity of teaching cursive writing has ebbed and flowed in different states. From what I have read online, it appears no fewer than 40 states dropped the teaching of cursive writing in 2011 but that many reintroduced it in 2016. I remember the first time a young student told me they had “keyboarding class,” and I thought they were learning to play the piano. Currently, just under half of the states require cursive writing instruction in public schools.
It makes me happy to learn there is a national handwriting contest for manuscript and cursive writing open to students from kindergarten through eighth grade. All they have to do is print (manuscript) or write (cursive) the same sentence: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. That phrase contains every letter of the alphabet! Entries are judged on shape, size, spacing and slant, and more than 2.5 million students have entered through the years.
It makes me want to go practice writing my uppercase letters.
Kristin Emery can be reached at kristinemery1@yahoo.com.