eLeCTRIC PENCILS

jaimeleighfairbrother:

menstrom:

It’s about damn time. I never understood why such emphasis was put on an arcane form of penmanship. They may as well teach architectural lettering… at least it is legible.

Well, this breaks my heart. My mother has beautiful penmanship. Her mother did, too. I spent hours as a child staring at her lovely, lilting letters and practicing my own.

When I am at my least stable mentally my handwriting is large and illegible. When I am at my most stable my handwriting is symmetric and rounded. I have always felt that my voice as a writer and the style of my handwriting are intrinsically connected. You can leaf through the journals I’ve kept over the last decade and see how the shape of my words changes, and reflects the emotion of what I am writing.

I’m no luddite, I understand that life surges forward and that our way of life represents that progress. Still, it is sad to me that children going forward may not know their mother’s penmanship with the same familiarity that they know her scent or her voice.

For me, this fits right in with the dumbing down of America. it goes hand in hand with kids who can’t tell time on a regular clock (yes, my niece didn’t know how to read the big hand/little hand. She’d only used a digital clock), kids who can’t do math without a calculator, kids who think it’s okay to write “Hey gurl, u sur r fine. I got sumthin 4 u. JK LOL”.

It frightens me. I’m sure there are people who will say, “Look at what we’re doing with technology. It means we’re getting smarter.” But no, I disagree. We made advances in technology that have made people dumber and more lazy.

My friend has teenage daughters and one of them asked me to look over a story she wrote for class. This was a girl in like 9th grade. She used the sentence “Lisa ranned out of the room.” I was appalled by it and she said, “They don’t care about stuff like that. They just want you to turn in the work.”

So when people say that grammar and punctuation and all of these basic skills don’t really matter, I want you to go back and read this post and remember that we allowed the next generations to be dumbed down.

You’ll probably have to read it to your grandchildren because they won’t understand the language by then.