Over the span of my career, I took a lot of hand-written notes. I had a pocket notebook that I carried when I made suicide response calls. In the notebook, I recorded important information such as the names and contact information of survivors, the name of the victim, notes for my colleagues, and other information. When I met with people to plan special services such as baptisms, funerals, and weddings, I took notes that later would inform the services that I crafted and led. I developed an interview technique for grieving families that helped me repeat some of the important things they told me about their loved one in the service honoring that person’s memory. I jotted notes about the books I read and the research I did. I took minutes at meetings, made lists of tasks to be accomplished, and kept lists of books I wanted to read.

I became a collector of notebooks and padfolios. I still have a stack of half-sheet pads in my study that I use to jot notes when I am participating in meetings. I was slow to obtain a tablet computer and when I did, one of the features that attracted me was that the one I chose has a pen device with which I can keep hand-written notes on the device. During the last few years of my ministry, I used the tablet computer to record hand-written notes when planning services for the church. Over the years, I learned to take notes with a laptop computer, and I used it to take meeting minutes, but it seemed too intrusive when I was visiting with people in more intimate settings such as visiting with grieving people. Somehow the tablet with its pen was a more suitable way to take notes.

I have a kind of hybrid note-taking style. Sometimes I print using block letters. Sometimes I write in cursive. Often I will mix both writing styles in the same sentence.

Here is the thing: I can read my own handwriting. When I go back over my notes, I have no trouble remembering the mood of a meeting or the content of the notes I took. One the last three years, I have worked to clean out old files. I have come across hand-written notes that are decades old and I can still read them and understand their meaning.

I don’t think that my penmanship is particularly neat. In fact, I have a clear memory of when my penmanship took a turn when I was in the fifth grade. Like other people my age, I went to school in a time when penmanship was a subject. We spent school time practicing drawing loops and scrolls and imitating the letters in our penmanship books, matching stroke for stroke until we produces lines of perfectly shaped letters. However, when I entered the fifth grade, I noticed something particularly interesting. My father had partners in an airplane that he operated. One partner was a doctor. Another was a dentist. I admired those adult men, who were educated, articulate, and talented in multiple ways. They were successful in their careers and they were promoters of aviation. I wanted to be like them when I grew up. And all of them had horrible handwriting. I remember studying their signatures, trying to make out individual letters that spelled their names. I copied my father’s signature and crafted my own signature - the one I use today for all legal documents - from the way my father wrote his name. I came to the conclusion that creative, intelligent, and educated men didn’t bother with perfect penmanship - they adopted their own style. I worked on adopting my own style. And my grades in penmanship plummeted. I remember a teacher writing on a paper, “You used to have beautiful handwriting. What happened?”

Nonetheless, the change came late enough in my life that I had already learned to write well enough that I could read my handwriting.

Times change. Our children grew up with access to computers at least from their teenage years. We bought computers for both of our children as high school graduation gifts that they took with them when they went off to college. They developed keyboarding skills and conduct much of their business using computers. They are proficient with a wide variety of electronic communications. I can’t make out our son’s signature at all. I guess I can discern the capital I of his first name, but that is the only letter I can make out. He can hand-write notes that I can read, and I can read the notes he writes in a greeting card, but some of his other writing is illegible to me. This has not affected his career. He is very good and very successful at what he does.

Eileen Page, a handwriting consultant from Massachusetts, who specializes in forensic forgery and suspicious signatures, wrote, “I’m finding now signatures are becoming almost logos and more designs and symbolic than actual letters.” She goes on to say that any lingering reverence for neat penmanship, especially cursive, may have more to do with nostalgia than with practicality.

In 2010, cursive writing was dropped from the common core standards for public education in the United States. Children are no longer required to learn that style of writing in school. There was some controversy over that change in the standards, but it has persisted in schools across the United States since that time. Today’s high school seniors have not been required to learn cursive writing, nor have they had to learn how to read cursive.

There are many famous and important documents that are written in cursive. The original Declaration of Independence was written in cursive, as were other important historical documents. I assume that since cursive writing is no longer part of the core curricula in public schools, reading cursive is becoming a lost art as well.

The invention of the typewriter and the printing press were probably decried as the end of handwriting, as are the technological advances of today’s computers. We receive many notes and letters, including holiday greetings, via electronic communication without any handwritten notes, including signatures. Legal documents can be electronically signed using computer generated signatures.

However, I had the Palmer Method drilled into me at an early age. Despite my somewhat unique writing style, I can still write a neat cursive sentence. These days, I practice a bit more. I hand write notes and cards to our grandchildren. I print for them, but as they grow older, I plan to switch to cursive. It might just teach them how to read an old document some day.