In high school, I routinely envied my best friend's handwriting. It was small, perfectly round, and adorable. And mine just looked fat and bubbly. But as I've grown into my adult self, and as I can go back through my worksheets, papers, and journals over the course of my education from junior high on up (I'm a pack rat! But not so much that I still have elemtary school stuff hanging around.), I can see how my handwriting has developed into what it is today. And I like my handwriting! I have all of my blue books from exams in seminary. I know exactly what my handwriting is going to look like as I flip through them. The first page is clean, my handwriting small, precise, and standing straight up. And then as you continue through the exam, you will see my handwriting get bigger, start to lean over to one side or the other, and letters run into each other in illegible ways. I love writing in cursive. It's fast, it's pretty, and it's distinctively ME. This is why I sometimes have second thoughts about my identity as a blogger - it would be truer to myself to keep track of my thoughts and experiences in a hand-written journal - which I still do, though not as often as I probably should. I also think that my respect for handwriting comes out of my self-identification as a writer. Writing itself is an intimate act, and handwriting is yet more intimate.
So for all of those reasons, doesn't it make sense that I felt surprisingly sad when I read "Cursive writing becomes passe" in the Washington Post?
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