The best way to describe my elementary school experience with handwriting is frustrating. Emotionally, it was quite scarring. The description sounds dramatic, doesn’t it? But put yourself in my shoes and think of it, what kind of feeling did you think it would be if you went through the pain of writing your name on a conventional board (a chalkboard) and was quite pleased with how it appeared, just for your teacher to come around and wipe it off because you wrote in capital letters?
Tell me, would it not be hurting to see Fail (as in big F) on your second grade cursive test report on the basis that your Qs and Ys were not curly as they should be?
On the other hand, those scenarios were uncommon since penmanship classes themselves were not frequent – I spent substantial time in the school computer laboratory mastering the keyboard as I played the typing games. Prior to obsolescence (supposedly) of pen and paper due to technology, handwriting exercises were seen as highly essential. Things are different now. The present generation communicates via typing and texting, and some of us that learnt to handwrite virtually everything put in a lot of struggle to unravel our muddled scrawls.
Without doubts, the value that was placed on handwriting before now has dropped; but, to what extent has it dropped? And the big question is, to what extent should we care about the decline of the importance attached to handwriting?
Giving Improvement a Chance
A lot of people would want to point fingers on computers for the less importance attached to handwriting. However, the decline gradually crept in with the advent of manual typewriters. However, handwriting went through transformation and came to its present state – cursive form (fewer flowery type); the transformation started from ornate to calligraphic penscript.
Perhaps you’ve learned penmanship while in school; if you did, then you must have taken Palmer cursive lessons – a style that enabled faster as well as better enhanced writing when compared with the styles that existed before. The style featured fewer swirls and curls. Students were taught the new cursive by teachers in lessons lasting less than a half-hour, or at most one hour.
However, with the advent of typewriters which pointed to a shift in writing trend, the time allocated to penmanship was reduced substantially so that students would have more time to concentrate on mastering typing skills. By the time we were ushered into the 90s, computers had already become popular at home and in work places – as a result less priority was placed on handwriting lessons.
There are certain times when the crisis of life strikes – such crisis like the life-threatening ailments, severe accident, mid-life crisis or the crisis of losing a dear one are awakeners. These life crises have a way of waking up those who have been operating on autopilot lifestyle, to make them assess their manner of life. 
