Umberto Eco regrets the lost art of handwriting. Should we follow him in this? I'm not the best person to answer the question perhaps, since even though I spent many years writing by hand before I ever touched a typewriter or a keyboard, my own handwriting has never been much to boast about. Anyway, I'm in two minds. Intuitively I feel that learning to write by hand must be beneficial; but then I wonder how far that intuitive feeling is merely the result of an attachment to how things used to be. One element in Eco's piece that gave me pause was this:
[W]riting by hand obliges us to compose the phrase mentally before writing it down. Thanks to the resistance of pen and paper, it does make one slow down and think.
Somewhere along during my school years, I had a teacher who encouraged us not to begin writing a sentence before having it fully formed in our minds. Maybe. But whatever advantages that brings, they are as nothing compared with the advantages, due to word-processing software, of being able to amend, to reshape text, to shift things around, without having to rewrite everything. If you're a very fluent writer, you may be able to get by without this. But for those of us for whom writing is more like building something, and not a purely linear process, writing by hand can slow you down too much. My pages used to get so full of crossings out, transposition marks, arrows and what not, that I'd often have to do the whole page over again; or engage in what I used to call page surgery - cutting out the OK part and sticking it to another OK part. That kind of slowness I don't miss at all.