Lost romance of pen and paper

From The Sunday Times
November 25, 2007
Lost romance of pen and paper
India Knight

I used to pride myself on my handwriting until last week when I attempted to write quite a wordy thing longhand। This had never been a problem in the past: like most people I spent my school and university career churning out reams of essays without so much as a sprained wrist. Last week my penmanship gave out halfway down the first sheet of A4 and the careful calligraphy that had pleased me so much as a student degenerated into a clumsy, barely legible scrawl. Also my hand started aching two paragraphs in.

I’m always grumpily pointing out to my older children that their handwriting suggests a chronic lack of education – they write like illiterates, with jerkiness and no fluency in the strokes of the pen, and it irritates me not just because it looks ugly and careless but because, to my mind, it makes them look stupid। I am of a generation (possibly the last one) that minds about such things: snobbishly, but usefully, I can often tell where people went to school through their handwriting and, to a degree, how clever or creative they are.

Well, I could. It seems that all young people nowadays write alike, as though they had two left hands, no brain and no sense of aesthetics. Nobody seems to mind much, but I do.
I don’t expect my children’s handwriting will improve much – why should it, when they can both touch-type and when the keyboard is an integral part of their homework? So it wasn’t entirely surprising to discover last week that the love letter is on its way out – not, presumably, because people don’t have love letter-worthy sentiments to express any more, but because they communicate their desires by e-mail or – the horror – by text, a medium that is also now commonly used for courtship and dumpage (nice)।

The Bradford & Bingley mortgage bank carried out a survey (hard to see what this has to do with bricks and mortar, but never mind) of 1,000 people, which found that just over a third of those aged between 16 and 34 had never written a letter to a loved one, let alone to a lover। Is this not tragically sad? When I was at school, a letter from home could make your day – your week, even – and we used to congregate by our pigeonholes in the morning with a sense of excitement.

The letters I received from my grandmother – more often than not with pressed flowers squished between the layers of cream paper – meant more to me than I can say। An e-mail, although perhaps more immediate, simply wouldn’t have the same effect.

Even today there is a real pleasure in receiving a proper, handwritten letter – it feels luxurious, as if someone has given you a little present and has gone to a flattering amount of effort in order to do so: getting out the paper, writing in ink, sealing it, finding a stamp, walking to the postbox, and all to ask you to tea or just to say hello।

Part of the pleasure, of course, is in knowing the person values you enough not to fob you off with a quick e-mail। This also applies – in triplicate – to invitations: if someone’s going to the bother of throwing a party, you’d think they might run to buying a load of blank postcards and writing on them. Instead, increasingly, you get evites.

While I can appreciate that these are quick, efficient and cheap, they don’t exactly cause your pulse to quicken in the way that paper or card does, especially if they’re corporate and you know that such and such a rich company can’t even be bothered to put in a call to the printers.
Handwriting is a dying art – in 20 years’ time nobody will know how to do it। I don’t just mean they’ll lack the stamina – and it’s easily lost, as I discovered last week – but that they won’t know how to form letters in a way that is both aesthetically pleasing and clear and an enhancement to the content of their letter. Aside from anything else, this will be a disaster for biographers, since most people don’t save their e-mail correspondence to CD for posterity (or maybe some do. What an unappealing thought).

I know only one person who still keeps a diary। Everything else – all those thoughts, emotions, insights, gossip, rants – has become disposable, lasting as long as your computer’s hard drive. Pity the poor latterday Boswell, trawling through the deceased’s correspondence and finding only old gas bills and bank statements.

Having said that or typed it – that’s another thing: my thoughts express themselves much more clearly when I type, which can’t be right and must be indicative of some general thickening of the brain; surely the flow from brain to hand-held pen oughtn’t to be a hardship – the lure of e-mail is undeniable। It’s fun, it’s quick, you can get rid of inbox bores in seconds or just delete them and put them out of your mind, whereas in the past the alternative would have involved many resentment-filled trips to the post office and a waste of good ink.

E-mail is kind to trees, I suppose, and it’s nice to be able to have quick back-and-forth conversations when you’re simply trying to find out something and don’t have the time or the inclination for a circuitous conversation। The fact that both my sons can touch-type will stand them in good stead and it enables them to communicate quickly with their friends without hogging the phone. It has its failures, though: a thank-you note sent by e-mail is better than nothing, but coming from a child I feel it lacks charm.

I also blame e-mail for the general decline in spelling: what need is there to learn it if your e-mail program auto-corrects and your phone does predictive text? And if you are trying to communicate anything complex or emotionally difficult, such as sending condolences, e-mail still feels like an overly casual means of conveying your thoughts।

Not that people try to communicate much any more, either। A slew of them express themselves through the maudlin “poems” or prewritten sentiments of Hallmark cards and their ilk, or abbreviate their thoughts until they are so concise they can be texted, thus: SOZ ABT UR DED DAD (I’m all for being informal but there are surely limits).

This is a plea for a return to pen and paper. Admittedly I am almost fetishistic in my love of stationery but there is nevertheless a real pleasure to be had in writing someone a proper letter and in taking care over it. And it’s likely to end up, well-thumbed and cherished, in some cache of effects for your grandchildren to find – as opposed to expiring when your computer does, lost for ever, disposable and ultimately meaningless.