Recapturing the lost art of beautiful handwriting

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

If you get any post at all these days, chances are it’s a bill, it’s in a brown envelope with your name and address clearly typed a transparent window. And then, once in a very blue moon, a handwritten letter drops through the letterbox, proving once again that what’s rare is truly wonderful.

Even better if the writer has taken pride in their handwriting, and the envelope is embellished with swirling letters and affectations – overflowing with calligraphy that might have been written with a quill.

But the sad reality is that no one really does joined-up writing anymore.

Even if it’s handwritten, it’s all block letters, which of course makes it easier to read – but it’s robotic, impersonal, arguably cold.

Those sweeping curves and letters used to reveal so much about the writer, things a text will never tell you. It isn’t even the text abbreviations; it’s just that anyone can write a text but not everyone can construct a letter.

Remember the hours spent in Junior Infants perfecting those joined-up letters, dotting all those i’s and crossing every t?

Remember the innocent love letters where the i’s dot was replaced by a love heart, where the g’s and the y’s at the end of a sentence could be finished with a flourish that served as a sort of sweeping underlining?

Remember the days when you had a ‘good pen’ that was kept in school; a fountain pen that you had to buy ink refills for, but which just felt so special when you were given occasion to use them?

You concentrated that much harder to make your work legible, and the method became as important as the actual subject matter.

We all had a sweeping signature too – not for autographs but for cheques. Now we sign our life and money away with a PIN code instead of a pen.

The truth is that, for all of the obvious advantages of the digital age, it has cost us the art of penmanship, the exercise of composing a letter or an entry into a diary or just a simple note.

Nobody I know writes out a shopping list these days, but if they did it would be on their phone. A growing number don’t even do that anymore; instead they’ll go online and just tick the box on what they want and have it delivered.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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