💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2023 › 202306 › 20230609-ashamed-of-my-penmanship.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:54:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I have a confession to make: I'm ashamed of my penmanship.
My handwriting isn't particularly bad: on the contrary, it's quite legible. I dislike it not because it's unreadable, but because it's so utterly generic.
I grew up in the last few decades that cursive and other forms of advanced penmanship were still widely taught in schools. Of course I was first taught how to write in print, and to this day I still form letters using the exact same movements taught to me in my preschool spelling books. We learned a standardized form of cursive around my second year of elementary school.
It's likely we would have continued to refine our penmanship via handwritten essays and writing assignments, but even by the early 2000s, the schools I attended were already beginning to adopt computer-typed assignments as the standard. By the time I was in fifth grade, I was creating science project presentations in Microsoft Powerpoint and submitting book reports typed up in Word. My junior high school soon issued individual laptops to each student, and from the on, I almost never submitted a handwritten assignment outside of math class again.
My handwriting improved quite a bit from my kindergarten days to middle school. But when I look at old papers at my parents' house and compare my penmanship from twenty years ago to that of today, I haven't changed one bit. It's still as blocky, simplistic and formulaic as it was when I was 11 years old.
The biggest reason for my lack of penmanship skills is, obviously, the fact that I write almost all my text on computers. Letters are stored as abstract series of bits, and when it comes time to render those bits as letters again, I am at the mercy of how the computer wants to do it.
I feel this leads to a major loss of individuality. My Gemini clients all use a simple sans-serif font to render all the text I see. There's no variation between each capsule, each user on Bubble or Station, or each thread on Cosmos. I have to pay attention to the URL--and of course lexicographical variation--to notice that I'm not reading the words of the same person.
Simultaneously, my poor penmanship skills reflect a lack of effort to improve. I sometimes struggle with many endeavors in my life, from losing weight to keeping track of my work projects, and my handwriting is just one more area where I could have made progress but haven't. It doesn't help my mood to think that I've owned two fountain pens in the last three years and I still can 't write any better with them.
Finally, handwriting is a beautiful manifestation of not only one's identity and history, but of an admirable desire to connect with the real world. You don't need an Internet connection to write on a sheet of paper. You don't need the time-wasting allure of Facebook or TikTok, the confines of an online service that steals your data--you don't even need a computer, new, old or otherwise. The movement of your hand and the deliberate formation of each character demand a certain mindfulness about your words that a terminal or typewriter don't. And of course, the recipient of any correspondence always feels more connected to it when it's written by hand.
I'm ashamed of my penmanship. But I think even more, I'm ashamed of what my handwriting says about me. I want to disconnect from the virtual world more and appreciate real life. I want to be better about following my commitments through and bettering myself. And I want to more fully embrace my individuality and be less tempted by the trappings of the conforming forces in our world.
I have a long way to go.
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[Last updated: 2023-06-09]