I had a favorite aunt, one of my dad's sisters, and we would exchange letters from time to time into my adulthood. My dad died when I was 27 and I lived "up north" so she & I began corresponding pretty regularly. I often included pictures of the kids. She had such beautiful handwriting! She laughed and said it looked like "school girl" writing but everyone thought it was very nice. Anyway, as the years went by she became ill and died. We wrote each other until close to the end of her life. I managed to make it down to see her a few times in those last weeks.

You cannot imagine the value I put on those beautiful, handwritten letters.

Julie--handwriting advocate.

My daughter's generation -- she's 24 -- already has many, many members who not only can't write in cursive, they can't decipher cursive. My daughter, fortunately, can. She had cause to reflect on this when she received a grant to do archival research that included diaries from WWI and realized that most of her fellow students wouldn't be able to read them. There goes the past...

I worked on it for awhile, it got better.
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but as time passed it became rather bad.
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I switched at some point to block lettering if more than just a few sentences. I was rather ashamed of the cursive.
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Now I used computer printing, unless some sort of personal thing seems needed.
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but cursive entails a lot more than legibility. for writer and receiver.

Call me old fashioned, but there is something special about getting a handwritten note in the mail.

And yes - this is consistent with what I observe both in myself and my students.

That handwritten work is quite essential. And I've noticed that my students who choose to forgo it struggle with physics. It is very much about representing the spacial information for the brain.

The big problem with keyboards in my field and in mathematics is that they just can't relate the same detail of information. Ever tried to put a subscript on a variable using a keyboard - it is doable under some circumstances but not here without specialized knowledge. This is just one small example of the issue.

He has been working on his handwriting (printing legibly) all through middle school, but only learned/used cursive in 4th grade. He's interested in Engineering and I showed him some of my father's technical drawings with block printing. All of his 5th-8th gradel assignments have been required to be typed, but they didn't teach a single keyboarding class. It's been rough. He's going to work on his keyboarding over the summer using Type to Learn and hopefully overcome his hunt-and-peck typing.

1. Yes, block printing both upper and lower case are critical. And lead directly to proficiency with the mathematics which will become critical later. The mathematics of Engineering uses many specialized symbols which have very precise meanings yet they are conceived of and drawn free hand and that is one of the avenues that allows for creative thinking.

2. I decided to give up cursive but later regretted it. When doing a mathematical derivation it is nice to have a separate handwriting font than the one used in the equations specifically to distinguish what part is the commenting of the equations and what part is the actual mathematics. Since I gave up cursive and use block printing for everything I can't do this but my professors could!

aka "English Round" writing. She was schooled around 1900.
and my mother's handwriting was much like it.She was 18 in 1945.

I, being a lefty, learned different writing, actually 2 kinds, depending which school I was at.

I hope all those neural circuits got connected in my younger years, because typing make my writing much much more legible.

But my essential tremor is getting worse so it's a struggle.

In my 60's. I haven't written anything other than my signature or grocery notes in a long, long time.

I tried doing the notes on my smart phone but takes so long I forget the 3rd thing I have to get. Need some way to marry the different technologies but with each trying to steal from the other, we're just collateral.

Handwriting gone? RIP, good riddance. Remnant of a ancient time.

Instead we should be trying to come with ways to retain the message, not the messenger.

Same thing with pictures. How many people lose a cherished memory cause they changed phones? And who wants it on a 2 inch screen?

I'm in my early 50's. I learned it and became proficient in it only in the strictest academic sense because I never liked it. Even my high school cursive looks like it could have been written by a third or fourth grader. My signature ( the only time I use it now ) looks strange since it is basic but with pretentious flourish, as if signed by some big muckety-muck.

It's also hard to read, and it is. It's obvious why forms and other documents direct us to "please print". I use my dislike of cursive viciously too: Whenever people hand me documentation to review, those that insist on using cursive I scoff at, hand them back and make them print it.

to make room for cars and then freeways: the Future Is Now, there's no going back to 19th-c. technology (like the, uh, car itself) and we can just invent our way out of any downsides

using a Parker 51 fountain pen made in 1947. I am an oddity.

There are some in this generation who have likely never known that joy. I have kept up a correspondence with an aunt, and with a friend in stir, therefore I have not forgotten how important a tangible item is that you can hold and touch. I'm also one of those who will never willingly make the transition to e-books. Kicking and screaming they'll drag me into that good night!