Mourning the death of hand writing..

I can't remember how to write a capital Z in cursive. The rest of my letters are shaky and stiff, my words slanted in all directions. It's not for lack of trying. I am a member of Gen Y, the generation that shunned cursive. And now there is a group coming after me, a boom of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have even less need for good penmanship. We are witnessing the death of handwriting.

I think, it’s the people born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl. Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don't master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons are decreasing.

Handwriting has never been a static art. I remember we all were excited about the cursive form of writing when we started learning it. But the story ended once we left the classroom. we all go back to sloppy letters and squished words. Handwriting is becoming a lost art.

Why? Technology is only part of the reason. The cause of the decline in handwriting may lie not so much in computers.In schools today, they're teaching to the tests. If something isn't on a test, it's viewed as a luxury. It's getting harder and harder to balance what's on the test with the rest of what children need to know. Reading is on there, but handwriting isn't, so it's not as important. In other words, schools don't care how a child holds her pencil as long as she can read.

Is that such a bad thing? Except for physicians — whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year — penmanship has almost no bearing on job performance. And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand. But with the declining emphasis in schools, neatness is becoming a rarity.I worry that cursive will go the way of Latin and that eventually we won't be able to read it.

I am not bothered by the fact that I will never have beautiful handwriting. We are living in the age of social networks and frenzied conversation, composing more e-mails, texting more messages and keeping in touch with more people than ever before. Maybe this is the trade-off. We've given up beauty for speed, artistry for efficiency. And yes, maybe we are a little bit lazy.