I just dropped a thank-you note in the mail this morning, not only handwritten, but in cursive. Now, it is true that I am old.

> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad?

Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill".

Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day.

I believe this is trying to judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, in a lot of regards.

YMMV.

My handwriting was especially bad even before smartphones, so I'm glad I rarely need to write anymore.

PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup.

In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

for me, the end of handwriting wasn't where/when I learned it, I learned cursive in kindergarten, and continued it for many years. it wasn't until I ran into teachers who valued time over accuracy that I faulted (it's not defaulted) and started writing scratch (which I can't even read!), and then typing.

now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".

I do a lot of writing by hand, and I have books and loose papers to write in, and several pencils and erasers. I also use the computer for writing, but perhaps just as often I write by hand.

I love writing cursive, there's a zen to it.

I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think.

I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw.

It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.

I don't write often anymore (since I can touchtype much faster), but on the occasions when I do, the "trick" I've found is to write big (like, think of how you'd want to write, then enlarge 2x2 or even bigger). This allows me some latitude when lines or curves go awry (which on smaller writing would be too obvious), and also visually dampens (since the "font" is so big) the amount of off-alignment of the letters.

I'm a software developer, so I type a lot. Typing is very practical for throughput and speed.

But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook.

Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems.

I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.

While I do a lot of typing, I still tremendously value hand writing. Whether that be journaling on a (somewhat) regular basis or sitting down to flesh out a concept and do some deeper thinking, I find nothing quite matches the experience of putting pen to paper.

Perhaps ironically, back in college studying data structures and algorithms, the best way I found to really grok the concepts was to write the code out by hand. Sample size of 1, but there's something about that process of having to slow down that really benefits my brain in a way that typing / dictating can't reproduce.

Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to fully delete things from the internet make us feel digital materials are well protected. The persistence of this data basically boils down to magnetic fields. Without power, these will degrade much faster than even papyrus.

Assuming civilization as we know it today does not persist, how much of the knowledge and culture we've created will be recoverable in the future? We have more books than ever, but what about first-hand materials, journals, notes? I can't help but to feel that digital sieves like Google and the Internet Archive are our Library of Alexandria moments in waiting.

I don't think handwriting will go away, it might become a "proof of work" in an age of artificially generated texts. I recently started including the manually written manuscripts (that I make on my reMarkable) with my blog posts to show folks I actually wrote them. See https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/

When everybody is jumping towards AI and digital texts, what remains may become more valuable. I don't know, but am keen on finding out.

Given that blue books are likely to make a comeback in college as one solution to AI based cheating, I think that rumors of handwriting's death are somewhat exaggerated. Unfortunately that means that the ability to write in cursive might become a class marker, but given that being literate is likely to also become a class marker, not sure it is worth worry about >_<.

There's a thing in China where younger generations have to write out the pinyin for certain words when writing notes by hand. (I'm not sure if it's because they've forgotten the characters, or just how to write them. Maybe a little of both?)

So for example, if someone is jotting down a grocery list, they'll write common words like rice or milk in Hanzi, but then struggle to remember the characters for deodorant, and just write it out using pinyin.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about it there as well. Kids these days!

As someone who values fast typing, and optimizing it as a way to minimizing the gap between thought and implementing it (e.g. from smart auto-completes to vim mode, etc ) I can hardly fathom how any like minded person can willingly throw away this amazing tool called hand-writing.

Sure, it doesn’t „scale“ into large texts as good as a keyboard, but beats „the digital“ still when it comes to immediacy, expressiveness and intimacy.

hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun.

This whole discussion seems to be driven by modern intelligentsia dismissing that they themselves most likely used cognitive foundations built by their hand-writing as a starting point into their own current skill-realm. For the vast majority of people (the non-intelligentsia) hand writing is an essential tool, and we shouldn’t deprive them and our kids of developing the cognitive links that come with using it.

In short: You don’t use keyboards for small or quick amounts of texts, just like you wouldn’t handwrite a code-base.

IMO The bigger „threat“ to hand-writing is proper voice assistants.

I thought about this idea a while ago: handwritting is also important for ideographic system like CJK, because that's how new character are invented and circulate.

I haven't written cursive for years and inspired by this article just tried it out and it still works! I never had a pretty hand writting and it's still just as ugly but very much functional.

Generally, I still do hand writing in terms of visualizing software with pen and paper but not in cursive but print letters as glace value is much more important here than information density and speed of cursive.

I find these fears really unfounded tbh. If we really need to hand write I think anyone can learn this skill in couple of days as we still have great hand dexterity, maybe even better than previous generations.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0].

[0]: https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/