It's Bad, but It'll Die. So I Like It.
If you don't know whereof you speak, please shut the hell up. This post annoyed me greatly (can you tell?) when it first appeared. Although I personally enjoy handwriting letters and journals, although I also find email to be quite useful, and although I would be better pleased to receive more handwritten missives from friends and relations than I do, anything is better than nothing. So I don't begrudge anyone their choice of medium.
That's not to say that everything would be fine if handwriting vanished. It's not only penmanship that is a learned skill — the ability to read cursive is as well. While I sort of sympathise with future historians I definitely do with current ones, who have nothing but centuries' worth of handwritten documents. And a lot of research notes are kept by hand, some of which (and I speak from experience) are astonishingly difficult to read even when you're familiar with the script. A generalized inability to do so could mean the practical loss of much accumulated information (a loss no less real than if it were material).
Kos is a smart guy, but his snobbery is unbecoming in a Democrat. Let's be clear: while 18th-century copperplate script is beyond most people without significant practice that is arguably unjustifiable, competent (i.e., legible) cursive is not. It's just a matter of accustoming a set of muscles to particular patterns of use – as is riding a bicycle, learning a dance, or speaking foreign words – and then not demanding more of those muscles than they can deliver (i.e., trying to write/dance/speak faster than you actually can). One doesn't wish to bother with cursive? Fine. Don't. But just because one begrudges the effort necessary to do competently something so mundane doesn't make it a useless ability.
Good writing involves not just what but how something is written. The appearance of the writing can have a greater or lesser role in this, too (e.g. calligraphy, both Oriental and Occidental). Printers know this, font designers know this, web designers know this, and so do you (have you ever seen a book/article/website that you found difficult to read because of the font and/or layout?). Imagine how underwhelming it would be to see the Declaration of Independence printed with a Bic disposable pen on a couple of sheets of 8½ x 11" bond. Who would spend three hours in line for that? (The Emancipation Proclamation was done in the 19th century equivalent manner. There was no line to see it.)
So it pleased me greatly to see this.
That's not to say that everything would be fine if handwriting vanished. It's not only penmanship that is a learned skill — the ability to read cursive is as well. While I sort of sympathise with future historians I definitely do with current ones, who have nothing but centuries' worth of handwritten documents. And a lot of research notes are kept by hand, some of which (and I speak from experience) are astonishingly difficult to read even when you're familiar with the script. A generalized inability to do so could mean the practical loss of much accumulated information (a loss no less real than if it were material).
Kos is a smart guy, but his snobbery is unbecoming in a Democrat. Let's be clear: while 18th-century copperplate script is beyond most people without significant practice that is arguably unjustifiable, competent (i.e., legible) cursive is not. It's just a matter of accustoming a set of muscles to particular patterns of use – as is riding a bicycle, learning a dance, or speaking foreign words – and then not demanding more of those muscles than they can deliver (i.e., trying to write/dance/speak faster than you actually can). One doesn't wish to bother with cursive? Fine. Don't. But just because one begrudges the effort necessary to do competently something so mundane doesn't make it a useless ability.
Good writing involves not just what but how something is written. The appearance of the writing can have a greater or lesser role in this, too (e.g. calligraphy, both Oriental and Occidental). Printers know this, font designers know this, web designers know this, and so do you (have you ever seen a book/article/website that you found difficult to read because of the font and/or layout?). Imagine how underwhelming it would be to see the Declaration of Independence printed with a Bic disposable pen on a couple of sheets of 8½ x 11" bond. Who would spend three hours in line for that? (The Emancipation Proclamation was done in the 19th century equivalent manner. There was no line to see it.)
So it pleased me greatly to see this.
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 12:28
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home