I finally found an old thread where this fits. Last night I was drawing some diagrams with a soft pencil and got sidetracked practicing cursive. I thought my handwriting had completely deteriorated, but took it slowly and it was just as good as ever. I was surprised. The person in the article below argues it wasn't keyboards and typewriters, but the ball point pen, that ruined cursive. I never could write well with ball point pens. You have to hold them more vertically than a pencil. I think most of us learned to write cursive when fountain pens were still around. How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive writing "In her book Teach Yourself Better Handwriting, the handwriting expert Rosemary Sassoon notes that 'most of us need a flexible way of writing—fast, almost a scribble for ourselves to read, and progressively slower and more legible for other purposes.' Comparing unjoined print to joined writing, she points out that 'separate letters can seldom be as fast as joined ones.' "So if joined handwriting is supposed to be faster, why would I switch away from it at a time when I most needed to write quickly? Given the amount of time I spend on computers, it would be easy for an opinionated observer to count my handwriting as another victim of computer technology. But I knew script, I used it throughout high school, and I shifted away from it during the time when I was writing most. "My experience with fountain pens suggests a new answer. Perhaps it’s not digital technology that hindered my handwriting, but the technology that I was holding as I put pen to paper. Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it."
My penmanship has always been horrible. It has improved with old age since I recently discovered that if I moved the pen instead of the paper ...............
When it comes to writing cursive, a friend used to tell me, "Some people write and some people draw." My mother drew her words. It took her forever just to sign her name, but she had beautiful handwriting. Mine was so bad the 6th grade teacher notified my parents that I needed to fix it. I started practicing while watching TV at night, and got to be pretty good at it. When I got bored I switched to the left hand, just in case I ever needed to (lol), and learned to be legible at that also, but very slow. I definitely have to "draw" doing it left-handed.
Yes, mine has changed. but still very readable. Schools stopped teaching cursive writing years ago, I found that disappointing. In jr. high I practiced my handwriting daily. It was even a bit of a contest among some of us girls. My first real job, I was hired because of my handwriting. My printing is much worse than long hand write out. I confess, I do not like writing anymore, it hurts the old hands, and so I scribble it out in a hurry.
My handwriting has always been atrocious. I used to get near-failing grades in Penmanship in early elementary school. As an adult, I would almost cry at my inability to read my own notes taken during night classes at community college...and that was printed!!! Nothing accelerated my career more than computers and teaching myself how to type. Like it or not, appearances matter. And as @Teresa Levitt said, I have gone to the grocery store and puzzled at one or two items I've written on my list.
@John Brunner You are in good company....maybe you should draw pictures! Michelangelo's Handwritten 16th-Century Grocery List
Or Robert Frost ... Why Can’t Anyone Read Robert Frost’s Handwriting? (2008) "This week’s controversy [revolves] around the accusation that the work of an editor shows ‘roughly one thousand’ errors. That is the charge leveled by James Sitar in the October 2007 issue of Essays and Criticism against Robert Faggen’s The Notebooks of Robert Frost, the first scholarly edition of the poet Robert Frost‘s personal notebooks." The images in the New York Times show that it’s nearly impossible to establish any 'true' reading of Frost’s often unreadable handwriting. Can Faggen be accused of incompetence when faced with texts as messy as these? [The link might not work on all browser settings.]