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Is handwriting on the decline? If so, does it matter?
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I just spoke to a television news producer about doing an interview for a story he was putting together. He wanted a linguist’s point of view on ‘the decline of handwriting’. I asked what his angle was.
It was: ‘Handwriting is in decline, kids these days can’t write, they just type into devices, what’s the world coming to?’ (I'm paraphrasing.) They were going to feature a comparison of handwriting by senior citizens versus school kids.
Basically, he wanted an academic to go on camera and lament the loss of handwriting. I told him what I thought.
First, is handwriting actually ‘in decline’? If that means ‘disappearing’, it’s obviously not: kids learn to write by hand and they do it plenty. It’s just that they also use devices. Or does ‘decline’ mean ‘becoming ugly’? If so, who is the judge? This all seems like nostalgia.
Second, is the fact that devices are unseating handwriting a case of ‘decline’? It seems like progress to me. Keying words into devices means that every word we type can be effortlessly saved, archived, searched, typeset, shared, etc.
And third, since language is not the same as writing, whether we use a pen and paper or a keyboard when we write is a trivial question compared to that of what we say and how we say it.
So, the ‘decline’ of handwriting is something of a non-issue, and possibly worse: it detracts from more important issues around language skills. EG How to communicate and understand in clear, accurate, and nuanced ways.
After an awkward silence, the news producer said, ‘Um OK what you’ve said makes sense but it kind of detracts from the thrust of the story. And this is a three-minute segment, and that would kind of require us to go to four minutes so thanks for your time!’
It's a shame. They lost a chance to have a nuanced conversation about something people care about. Instead, they want to push the fallacy we try to undo in Linguistics 101: ‘The language is in decline!’ No, it’s not, it’s just changing. And usually for good reason.
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