As an author, I use a variety of instruments to pen words on paper, in notebooks, or journals. At night I write a grateful list and a few words about my day. I prefer pens to pencils, particularly the gel pens, because they use bright ink and never skip. My penmanship has changed over the years and when I look back at the style of my writing, I wonder if it reflects a change in my personality, who I was, and who I am now. There are people who actually study the loops in letters and can tell you what this tells you about the person who wrote it.

Unfortunately, this is quickly becoming a thing of the past, handwriting that is. It seems that they are no longer teaching this in a lot of the schools. My sister said that she sent a birthday card to one of her grandsons and he couldn't read what she wrote. What?!!?? It seems computers have become so prevalent in the schools and in our society that people no longer feel the need to teach the younger generation to write cursive.

To me, this is a truly sad state of affairs. That we are so dictated by technology that we have no use for a skill that defines not only who we are as a species but that gives us the power to say what we need to say in more than one way (via a keyboard). Every story I write begins with notes from the many journals I fill by writing in cursive. Years from now when I'm gone, if my many notebooks are found, will there be no one who can read them? Will we become a generation that has given up a skill that for centuries defined us as educated and intelligent just because we could write cursive?  I hope not but it seems I may be in the minority.

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