Two Sylvias' Weekly Muse: April 23, 2023

Issue 52

Dear Poets and Writers,

How often do you handwrite? Remember handwriting? You hold a pen or pencil and on a piece of paper you form letters of the alphabet in certain orders to create words. We might sound a bit facetious, but handwriting is almost becoming archaic. You might run across an old letter written by a your grandmother when she was a young girl, and you are in awe at the precision and beauty of her writing. You realize that even as an eighty-year-old woman, she still maintained her graceful script.

What has contributed to the current decline in penmanship? One reason is obvious—most of us now write exclusively on laptops, tablets, and phones. The other reason is that in 2010, due to the widespread use of computers, handwriting and penmanship were no longer included in most school curricula. Many young people under age 25 may have never written anything in cursive, and may also have difficulty reading cursive writing.

And, for those of us who did grow up writing every assignmen…