Each year on January 23 we celebrate National Handwriting Day. It’s the birthday of John Hancock, creator of the signature seen round the world. Actually Hancock had two different birthdays because there was some calendar fiddling back then, so he had to carry two IDs, each with that famous signature, in case he got carded.
National Handwriting Day was created by the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association, a trade group that doesn’t care whether you become the next John Hancock, as long as you buy more pens and pencils. Unfortunately, pens and pencils won’t help you find out about National Handwriting Day. Instead, you have to type “National Handwriting Day” into a search engine and let AI do the rest.
Each year in the weeks before National Handwriting Day, the newspapers run a heartwarming story on their websites using a font like Times New Roman, about some children somewhere who are learning to write in cursive with pens and pencils on actual paper. And people are supposed think, as they read all this online, Finally, a way to get them off their phones. Or, Finally, a way to get them to actually think about what they’re saying.
To which I say, 🤣. Here’s why.
Handwriting prompts all sorts of heartwarming prose that has no basis in fact. There’s the idea that when you write by hand, your thoughts move organically from your brain, through your fingers, onto the page.
Maybe that works with fingerpainting, but when you use a No. 2 pencil, you're using technology, specifically a rod of graphite encased in wood. Even though it has no batteries or moving parts, that pencil functions just like a keyboard by breaking the supposedly organic circuit between brain and page. If you don’t believe that pencils are technology, try making your own pencil.
Handwriting fans also claim that ditching the keyboard in favor of a pencil forces writers to think more carefully about what they’re saying. But that’s also wrong: like all repetitive tasks – including swimming, driving, or playing an instrument – handwriting is a self-conscious activity only while you’re learning how to do it. If you write regularly, it becomes automatic, like keyboarding, which is actually typing 2.0.
Then there’s the nostalgia claim about writing with a pencil: the old ways are best. But the old ways weren’t always best. The first writers had to make their own writing implements and prepare their own writing surfaces, whereas you can just go to Staples.
And those first-adopters had to convince the skeptics who preferred the old ways that writing was beneficial, not harmful. Plato was one of those skeptics: he thought that speech was better than writing, and he argued that writing would kill memory. Once everything got written down, we’d no longer have to remember anything and the memory cells in our brains would just atrophy. We remember Plato's critique of writing because someone wrote it down.
Then there’s the argument that keyboarding is just too fast. Handwriting slows the writer down, and that must make for better writing. According to this theory, Shakespeare was a great writer because, while he was chasing a goose around the yard to get a quill to write with, he had time to develop the story arc of Hamlet. And while he was grinding oak galls and mixing them with iron to make his ink, he could muse about what “To be or not to be” might actually mean.
The truth is that Shakespeare was probably not a DIY writer. He bought his ink and quills and foolscap ready-made from his local ſtaples. True, he still had to use a pen knife to repoint those quills, because the points didn’t last for more than a few lines, but he probably spent those quill-sharpening breaks cursing the writing technology of his day. Also, like AI today, he used another shortcut: Shakespeare took a lot of his ideas from other writers without crediting his sources.
Maybe handwriting wasn't so important in Shakespeare's day. After all, there are no handwritten versions of Shakespeare’s plays. The only reason we remember who Shakespeare was is because someone printed his plays on a printing press.
As for the myth that handwriting expresses the writer’s individuality, like a fingerprint or DNA: that only works once handwriting stops being essential for entry into the middle class and becomes instead the stuff of hobbyists and amateurs.
In the old days, handwriting meant you could qualify for mind-numbing office work instead of backbreaking factory labor. Gilbert and Sullivan’s Sir Joseph Porter became the Ruler of the Queen’s Navy not through leadership ability, but because he could copy all the letters in a big round hand. The operative word is copy. Sir Joseph didn’t write the great English novel. He spent his day transcribing letters, reports, and invoices that someone else created. As the Pinafore chorus affirms, “He never thought of thinking for himself at all.” To put that in contemporary terms, “Person. Woman. Man. Camera. TV.”
Sir Joseph Porter’s “big round hand” probably looked like this sample from George Bickham’s Universal Penman. Bickham writes, “As a legible and free Running hand is indispensably Necessary in all Manner of Business, I thought proper to introduce these Examples for the practise of Youth, and their more speedy Improvement” (1743, p. 163).
An example of English Roundhand
From the outset, the goal of handwriting was sameness and legibility, not expressive individuality. In order to produce a document that someone else could read, each letter had to be consistent and uniform – every a had to look like every other a, no matter who was writing. The goal was not to make your handwriting stand out, but to make it look like everyone else’s.
To achieve that kind of uniformity, the handwriting lessons of days gone by were repetitive torture sessions. Writers who couldn’t make their letters with precision or who had difficulty writing the same model sentence hundreds of times were shamed and singled out for punishment. Imagine the impact on writers who were left-handed or had poor fine motor skills.
Handwriting was an act of obedience, not an exercise in free expression. Punishments for students who did not obey were physical as well as emotional. There were the demeaning comments from teachers, to be sure. But those teachers also used all manner of trusses and braces like the one pictured above to force a child’s hand into the correct position.
Writing innovations like the typewriter in the late 19th century and the computer in the late 20th changed how the world did business. As a result, handwriting became less and less important and eventually American schools dropped it from the curriculum in favor of keyboarding – though now many children enter school already knowing how to do that.
Finally, there’s the John Hancock defense of handwriting: you’ll need a distinctive signature in case your fans want autographs, right? Or just to prove that you are you.
But signatures are just so last century. My new credit card doesn’t even have a space for a signature on the back. More and more, biometrics like facial recognition, a fingerprint, or an iris scan are replacing the older, less-secure ways of authenticating text.
If you still feel nostalgia for handwriting, don’t despair. Instead of painful and humiliating cursive lessons, with just a few clicks you can download a personalized handwriting font that will even vary the letters to make the writing look more “natural” and less like Sir Joseph’s uniform big round hand.
