It's plain that handwriting is becoming a lost art. It was already in the process of becoming less important when I was a child, and the increased prevalence of easily accessed computers has made it increasingly less important to the children of the world. As a result, it is slowly disappearing from the skill set of many young people.
As someone in the word business, you might expect me to lament the loss of longhand, and decry how the children of today are not learning the skill. Other writers certainly have, including Andrew Coyne of the Calgary Herald, who wrote a lengthy column describing how longhand is a vital part of his creative process. That might be true for him, but I have realized quickly that it is not a particularly important part of my own life.
Every column I have ever written, including this one, begins and ends on a computer. There is no longhand at all in the process. In fact, in any writing I have ever done, there is a bare minimum of longhand, apart from an attempted novel that died an ignoble death. There might be notes written out, but my own personal process is centered around typing above all else.
How could this be? Coyne insists that something of value would be lost if he couldn't write things out, and that is likely true. But that is how he started, and it is always best to work with the tools with which you are most familiar. The act of writing is simply the process of translating one's thoughts into a block of prose, preferably prose which others can easily decipher. As a result, whichever tool is most comfortable to you is going to be the tool which is going to get the best results, because it's one less barrier between your mind and the page or screen in front of you. The less you think about the physical method, the easier it is to do.
That means that for people growing up surrounded by screens and for whom typing is second nature, that's going to be the easiest way to translate ideas and concepts into text. It also means that for some people, handwriting is going to be the easiest path, since that is their own favorite tool.
That's all handwriting is, a tool. It's the same thing with a computer, that too is a tool. Everyone will have different preferences for which tool they use, and many will profess the advantages of their preferred tool. If I attempted to set my ways by using longhand, as Coyne suggests is vital to his process, I would get nothing but a block of scratched out words and some wasted paper. If he tried to work like me, he would likely have a blank page at the end of the day, because of the way he works, and the way he feels more comfortable.
The slow death of longhand is somewhat inevitable, because the people of tomorrow will have grown up with touchscreens and keyboards, and that will be the form of communication most comfortable to them. To ask them to change because of your own preferences is foolish, because it ignores the differences between people. I know I'd never be able to transition fully to a touchscreen keyboard, but many people will be perfectly fine with that change. Others will likely be more comfortable solely with voice. In the end, as long as we use the best tool for us, it's fine.
