Umberto Eco on Penmanship

The Italian author notes that "most kids – what with computers (when they use them) and text messages – can no longer write by hand, except in laboured capital letters" — The lost art of handwriting. Of the old days, he writes:

My parents' handwriting was slightly slanted because they held the sheet at an angle, and their letters were, at least by today's standards, minor works of art.... My generation was schooled in good handwriting, and we spent the first months of elementary school learning to make the strokes of letters. The exercise was later held to be obtuse and repressive but it taught us to keep our wrists steady as we used our pens to form letters rounded and plump on one side and finely drawn on the other.

"The tragedy began long before the computer and the cellphone," he says. "The crisis began with the advent of the ballpoint pen."

"The art of handwriting teaches us to control our hands and encourages hand-eye coordination," he writes, noting also that "writing by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down."

One of the most pleasurable teaching experiences I had here in Korea was when a student who was going abroad to study asked me to tutor him personally in handwriting, as he had heard that many American professors still use it on blackboards and in comments on papers.