"'My first reaction was horror,' Florey said in an interview at her home, 'then I thought, 'Why would anyone use handwriting in today's world?' I write my books on the computer. I discovered two schools of thought: One is that it wouldn't matter if nobody learned handwriting because we all have computers, and the other is that this is an interesting, historic, valuable, and beautiful skill that has been around for thousands of years, and we are just tossing it out.'"
This is Kitty Burns Florey talking about her book Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting. But, the second argument—the argument for the value of handwriting—just is not that convincing. It is like arguing that electric lights have spoiled our ability to appreciate the beauty of candles or that recorded music has caused us to lose our appreciation of the concert hall. It may be quite true, but one can imagine someone saying, "Ah, yes, I wish I did have the time or the opportunity to go to a concert and be able to hear Angela Hewitt play Bach, but not living in London or New York, the CD is the best I can do—in fact, it is amazing that I can have access to this music whenever I want," &c.
The better argument is for the necessity of handwriting. But, perhaps nobody actually believes this argument anymore. I began this blog with a quotation from Orwell on this subject. In the society depicted in Nineteen Eighty-four handwriting is suppressed by the government, and Winston Smith's discovery of it is a turning point:
Actually he was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write which was of course impossible for his present purpose.
George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-four Part I
Winston Smith wants to set down his thoughts, "the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years." But, confronted with the blank paper, his first reaction is an inability to write anything, and second, a stream of "rubbish" written in a rush "in sheer panic." However, the act of writing this incoherent fragment changes something in his mind.
The curious thing was that while he was doing so a totally different memory had clarified itself in his mind, to the point where he almost felt equal to writing it down.
I suspect that this is what many people besides Orwell felt about writing. Writing was an essential part of the job of thinking. And for Orwell, something that an oral medium like his imagined "speakwrite" could not duplicate. Is it the same with the computer? Perhaps. I am one of those people who write on the computer all the time, and yet remain somehow unconvinced that is as good for the process of thinking as handwriting. Typing on the computer is more convenient. It is necessary and unavoidable for my work, but it is detached from the mind in some hard-to-define way.
