The End of Handwriting

I'm a software developer, so I type a lot. Typing is very practical for throughput and speed.

But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook.

Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems.

I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.

PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup.

In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill".

Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day.

I believe this is trying to judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, in a lot of regards.

YMMV.

While I do a lot of typing, I still tremendously value hand writing. Whether that be journaling on a (somewhat) regular basis or sitting down to flesh out a concept and do some deeper thinking, I find nothing quite matches the experience of putting pen to paper.

Perhaps ironically, back in college studying data structures and algorithms, the best way I found to really grok the concepts was to write the code out by hand. Sample size of 1, but there's something about that process of having to slow down that really benefits my brain in a way that typing / dictating can't reproduce.

I haven't written cursive for years and inspired by this article just tried it out and it still works! I never had a pretty hand writting and it's still just as ugly but very much functional.

Generally, I still do hand writing in terms of visualizing software with pen and paper but not in cursive but print letters as glace value is much more important here than information density and speed of cursive.

I find these fears really unfounded tbh. If we really need to hand write I think anyone can learn this skill in couple of days as we still have great hand dexterity, maybe even better than previous generations.

I don't think handwriting will go away, it might become a "proof of work" in an age of artificially generated texts. I recently started including the manually written manuscripts (that I make on my reMarkable) with my blog posts to show folks I actually wrote them. See https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/

When everybody is jumping towards AI and digital texts, what remains may become more valuable. I don't know, but am keen on finding out.

I just dropped a thank-you note in the mail this morning, not only handwritten, but in cursive. Now, it is true that I am old.

Given that blue books are likely to make a comeback in college as one solution to AI based cheating, I think that rumors of handwriting's death are somewhat exaggerated. Unfortunately that means that the ability to write in cursive might become a class marker, but given that being literate is likely to also become a class marker, not sure it is worth worry about >_<.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0].

[0]: https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/

I love writing cursive, there's a zen to it.

I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think.

I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw.

It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.

https://archive.ph/is4BJ

I don't write often anymore (since I can touchtype much faster), but on the occasions when I do, the "trick" I've found is to write big (like, think of how you'd want to write, then enlarge 2x2 or even bigger). This allows me some latitude when lines or curves go awry (which on smaller writing would be too obvious), and also visually dampens (since the "font" is so big) the amount of off-alignment of the letters.