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The Conversation
The Conversation
Misha Teramura, Assistant Professor of English, University of Toronto

Think tech killed penmanship? Messy handwriting was a problem centuries before smartphones

A March 1593 letter from England's Queen Elizabeth I to King James VI of Scotland, where she acknowledges his “cumber [i.e., trouble] to read such scribbed lines.” (Folger Shakespeare Library), CC BY

Handwriting is dead. At least that’s what a New York Times article announced in 2023 in its postmortem investigation “What Killed Penmanship?” But there was no doubt about the culprit: technology.

You’ve probably heard something like this before: the more time we spend using our phone screens and keyboards to type out everything from emails and texts to grocery lists to wedding speeches, the less we put pen to paper and the worse our handwriting gets.

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