Words, words, words

I’ve discovered a good reasons to keep my tapping fingers well calloused: my handwriting has gone been so far neglected that I am entirely out of practice.

In days of letter writing, everyone had beautiful handwriting. The more you wrote, the more your handwriting improved. As your handwriting was beautiful, you enjoyed writing and took the time to keep it fun. The process of committing thought to written words took more time and thought than typing.

Now that everyone has a keyboard, thoughts are typed out incredibly fast. Our fingers fly over the keys, but they have lost the ease and ability that comes from using a pen as a writing instrument. The strangeness of a pen or pencil in my hand reminds me of my early childhood, and the sensation of taking a pen or pencil up in my hands for the first time.

With handwriting, too, the written word would have no effect on anyone unless it was read by another, or read aloud to another, or repeated in words written on some other medium…the written word has the problem of being in physical form, must be seen or repeated, therefore must be meaningful to the one doing the reading.