The death of handwriting

Ann Wroe considers the dying art:

We have come to think of typing as faster than writing. That may or may not be so. Some research suggests that the conjunction of brain and writing hand is possibly more efficient. A study by the University of Washington in 2009 found that schoolchildren wrote faster, and wrote more, when they had to compose essays for ten minutes with pen on paper rather than on computers. The word “cursive” means running; it was invented to avoid time-wasting lifting of the stylus or the pen, with a series of fluid joins and, in the most hectic styles, looping ascenders and descenders.

In the early 19th century, when people corresponded several times a day by letter, quasi-tweeting the state of nerves, weather and tea-invitations from hour to hour, quill and pen must have raced across the paper at prodigious speeds. The handwriting of Percy Shelley sometimes approached horizontal in the effort to seize inspiration on the wing. It raced, dived and disappeared like a river under thickets of deletions. In that age of poets, though, the Muse was often hindered by the pen, blunting, splitting, spitting ink or, as John Keats complained, making blind “e”s. The sheer act of writing caused so much frustration that any maker of a primitive computer might have been besieged. And who is to say that the poetry would have been worse?