The Lost Art of Handwriting

As I sat down to write thank you notes to my recent committee chairs, I realized that I’m woefully out of practice when it comes to hand-written notes. My once-beautiful handwriting has turned ugly and I make mistakes that can’t be corrected by backspacing and typing again.

There was a time in my life when I wrote lots of letters, many of them long missives, to my nearests and dearests of the moment who were somewhere else. I sought out beautiful stationery, sometimes perfumed, and even used various colors of ink in my fountain pen. I explored existentialism with Steve, an elusive search for love with Duke, and home-grown poetry with Joe. As I licked the stamp and posted each letter, there was always the question of when the response to my letter would arrive. Such a different mentality than the way we currently correspond in E-mail, where communication can be almost instantaneous.

After the High Holy Days concluded, I decided that appreciation should be conveyed in a form more permanent and tangible than e-mail.

I visited Capitol Hill’s newest card shop Groovy DC (on 8th St SE) to find the perfect note cards. What I love about this store is the fact that you are not overwhelmed with choices. Instead there were but three boxed possibilities, each of which was quite unique. I happily purchased two of the three.

The three or four sentences in each of my thank you messages had to be crafted in my head before putting pen to paper. I found myself saying: write SLOWLY, make it FIT in the space, no CROSSOUTS. Yikes! These things are hard to do.

What I realized is that for me writing by hand has become the mode of last resort – used only when a keyboard or a Blackberry is not available. In the process, I have simply lost the art of handwriting that for so many years supported communication of the written word.