The last poll has ended with 45 people in total who voted. The question was “How often do you write by hand a decent amount of stuff (at least half a page)?”
I was slightly surprised that more than half of the respondents answered “I write tons of stuff everyday”! Why “slightly”: on one hand, most of the readers of my blog are probably avid fountain pen users who write religiously everyday. This makes me somewhat envious.
On the other hand, I thought that in today’s age of technology, most people would use their devices to make notes, to write to one another, or even to draw. I have a MacBook pro, an Android smartphone, and now even an Asus Transformer tablet. At work I use a desktop computer, and the only times I ever write anything at work is when I have claims to sign, or in my lab book, a few words a day on average. Imagine my disappointment when they announced that they might switch everything to “electronic means” and do away with lab notebooks in the near future! In that situation, I can imagine that even my signature will be an electronic scanned bitmap file, which likely means I won’t even have to touch a pen anymore. At home, the first thing I do is to switch on my tablet or laptop to check mails, my social media networks or to chat with my boyfriend online (no, we don’t really talk over the phone). Then when I do remember my poor fountain pens lying lonely in my pen pouch and on my table, I would grab them and scribble a few things, then revert to my laptop again.
So you can expect that my vote was “I try my best to do it everyday”. This is the second most popular vote, with 12 out of 45 who clicked this. Finally, 8 people clicked “probably a couple of times a week… hardly anything to write!” 8 out of 45 is almost a fifth! I’m rather curious, are you 20 people in the same situation as me: too engrossed in technology that you often forget to go “back to basics” and write something by hand? Please leave a comment here if you are!
Now that we talk about writing, it’s about time to set up a new poll.
I remember when I was a little kid in primary school, we used a set of English language textbooks which included exercises for writing cursive, called “Penmanship”. Well, actually, most of the exercises were teaching us how to print each letter correctly, with only a handful of them letting us practise writing in cursive. The capital letters were probably 1 inch tall. Being young and unappreciative of the beauty of cursive, I often felt more annoyed than interested when it came to writing in cursive. I was perpetually perplexed, why the letter “r” in cursive looked like a misshapen “n” instead of an “r”, as in print. I didn’t think my cursive writing was nice, and since my parents write in print, I thought that learning cursive was absolutely unnecessary and completed the exercises just because the teacher told us to. Now I wish I had taken those exercises more seriously… but then again, there were only a handful…
I really write much better in print, but now that I learn to appreciate calligraphy, I am trying to write nicely in cursive too. Often, however, I forget and end up writing in a mix of cursive and print.
How about you? Do you tend to write in print, in cursive, or a mix of both? Do vote in the right sidebar and share your thoughts in the comments section of this post!
I am the founder of this website.
Chemist by day, slacker by night, fanatic of stationery all the time.
I write with my left hand, but can also do the same with my right hand – it just won’t look very pretty.
I always preferred cursive for speed, but it was illegible! I've been practicing italic handwriting (Getty and Dubay) and am still on printing, so that's what I go with now. You can actually read it!
My first instinct is usually to write in cursive, then many people commented on how they could not read it, so I do a combination of both. In letter writing, I try my best to do cursive all the way.
It occurred to me recently that I haven't been using my cursive and it's becoming hideous, so I've been practicing with it more… it's still hideous. I usually go half cursive, half print which seems to be the nicest mixture of my writing!
I voted for 'Both' since I often automatically print stuff when I'm not thinking, but I try to remember to 'go cursive' as often as possible, in the vain hope that my handwriting will improve to the point at which most people can read it!
I find good cursive writing needs you to be relaxed – if I'm in a rush at work and scribble something down in my lab book, even I can't read it!
But when relaxed, there's nothing more heartwarming than producing a nice flowing handwritten letter to a good friend, using your favourite fountain pen.
I prefer print which kinda slurs into cursive in terms of connecting but none of the fancy cursive embellishments. 😀