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Last week, I received a package in the mail. It was honestly one of THE most exciting packages I’ve ever received. And this is coming from a woman who has a Mystic Seer, and who unknowingly won an Elvira replica dagger in a contest a few weeks ago. So what was in this new package that topped the delivery of a Mystic Seer and an Elvira dagger?
PENS! No, you’re not missing something here. It’s just the pens and I could not be happier about them.
All through school, I was known for my penmanship. Even won awards for it. And despite the fact that I do a LOT of typing every single day, I’ve never lost my affection for putting pen to paper and really writing.
Despite the convenience and speed that computers allow, I still send handwritten letters and cards whenever I can. Why? Because it’s more personal. It’s more beautiful. It feels more natural. Even with all of its benefits, technology still seems foreign to me. Yes, I can type incredibly fast, and it’s nice to know that any mistakes can be erased with the single push of a button. But where’s the personality in that? A typed letter is completely generic. I know, what’s written is more important than how it’s written, but still, your handwriting says a lot about you. I mean, there are people out there who study handwriting for a living! The flourishes, the slant, the pressure you apply … all of these details help identify who YOU are.
Isn’t it nice when you get a card in the mail and at a single glance of the writing on the envelope you know exactly who it’s from? A Valentine from your sweetheart, a birthday card from your best friend. A girl can spot her boyfriend’s clean and neat penmanship from a mile away. And when she recognizes her left-handed best friend’s uniquely slanted script on a colourful envelope, there’s just something both comforting and exciting about that. A card or letter from someone special SHOULD be instantly recognizable, not lost in an endless sea of plain white business envelopes with typed labels, easily confused as junk mail or bills.
When I send a card to someone special, I want them to know that they’re special, and that they were worth my time and a little extra effort. I could honestly gush non-stop about my love of old-fashioned, handwritten letters. And pretty paper and envelopes and stationery sets and pens… I just adore everything about it.
I’m very particular when it comes to pens. Fine tip only. Black ink, NEVER blue. (Or if you’re very special to me, purple). A nice, smooth ballpoint, not smudgy gel.
The purple pen is reserved for letters to my favourite person, and for use in my daily planner.
Since high school, my everyday pen of choice has been the Pentel R.S.V.P. fine point in black. They’re inexpensive, write incredibly smooth, last a long time, and they were always available… until this spring when I realized I’d used my last one and went to buy more.
And there were none.
In fact, I couldn’t find ANY fine-tipped, ballpoint, black ink pens in this entire town. Not even one. Wow. I mean, the store shelves are FULL of pens, but NONE of them were what I wanted.
Stationery sets: Fancy paper with matching envelopes
When I sent off the last sheet of my mom’s beautiful embossed pansy stationery paper last spring, I quickly discovered just how widespread this trend of moving away from actual writing is. I went from store to store, and no one even knew what a “stationery set” was.
I’m still without much in the way of pretty stationery, but I did give in finally and order my pens online. Sorry, I’m too cheap to pay shipping from Amazon, so I had to wait until there was something else I could add to my order to bump the total over the free shipping minimum. (It was a book, what else? Because the only thing better than pens is real books!)
Being an artist, I take even more pride in my handwriting than most do. But the art field is another area where I haven’t been able to embrace a lot of the technology that’s available. I have one of those fancy drawing tablets, a very nice gift from a friend, but … my brain craves the smooth, tactile feeling of a pencil gliding across paper. My hand rejects the feel of that cold, mechanical stylus and cries out, “Where is my wooden paint brush?? This isn’t right! Ick! Get it away!!”
Oh, my dear friends, I’ve been lost without you…
I know, I could just learn and adapt. But what will happen when all the traditional artists are gone? When digital painting outright replaces oils and acrylics? There’s skill involved in mastering digital art, of course, but it’s not the same skill as working with a raw medium. Today’s art programs control everything for you: Pressure, blendability, colour, tonal values, and layers. If you make a mistake, you can undo it with a single click. With a second click, you can swap out one colour for another — something that could require completely starting over on a traditional painting. When you’re using actual paint, there is no “undo” button. Yes, of course, I WISH there was sometimes! So you’d think I’d embrace a new medium where edits are easy. But as with the handwriting, where is the personality if everything is controlled for you? If everything is always perfect? Where the brush strokes are a series of ones and zeroes instead of a reflection on how you were feeling that day?
You can tell so much about an artist just from the brush strokes on a painting. There is personality in our flaws, not our perfection. A painting isn’t supposed to be perfect. Handwriting isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s supposed to be unique to every person. A reflection of some part of them.
There’s something wonderful about holding a card or letter that someone else wrote to you. To move your fingers over the words that they wrote, to feel the pressure of the pen, to see the lines that they created with their own hands. To know that they touched it, held it and put in the extra effort to make it as neat and error-free as possible for you. It creates a level of intimacy that you just can’t get from a sterile sheet of printed computer paper.
Do you know that they’ve actually stopped teaching handwriting to children in some schools? I’m serious, that’s actually happening in the world right now. I read an article just a few days ago that talked about how students are now being issued their own personal tablet for the year, and that “handing in” homework is a thing of the past. Even in school, they’re moving towards doing everything electronically. Forget books. Just go online.
This makes me angry. And sad. Very sad. I’m not against technology, but like anything else, you can over-use it. What happens when the power goes out, or the battery goes dead? What happens when no one is left who CAN write and CAN do basic math without a calculator? Who will make the calculator? I don’t know about you, but I can’t engineer a computer. I can’t program it. I don’t even understand how or why it works. All I can do is use it. And the irony is that the more dependent we make ourselves on technology, the fewer people there will be who can actually create the machines we’ll need to do the most basic things for us.
This isn’t right. There will always be a place for “basic” literacy skills — BECAUSE they’re basic! Reading, writing, math. We HAVE to keep teaching these to our children, because today, society is raising kids who are both lazy and stupid. And I do mean stupid. Children who can’t DO anything for themselves, who are totally and completely reliant on their devices — devices that they certainly couldn’t build for themselves. And THAT should scare the hell out of everyone.
Well, I’m not having any of it. I refuse to just go with the flow. Any future children of mine will be taught to read and write — and at an advanced level, not just enough to “get by”. They’ll be encouraged to take pride in how neatly they write, in how extensive their vocabulary is. And I’ll buy them an endless supply of books — real books! — paper, pens, pencils and paints. They’ll write out their math problems so they can SEE their work, and LEARN from their mistakes. And they’ll write stories — stories that can be read in the middle of a power outage. I’ll hang their artwork up on the wall, and it sure as hell won’t be printed off a computer.
The art of traditional painting will not die with me. Handwritten letters will not die with me. When I’m 90 years old, I’ll still be scribbling letters to my best friend, even if it’s illegible to everyone but me.
You see, I don’t want to be a boring carbon copy of everyone else. I don’t want to be that generic white envelope with the printed label and the typed letter inside. I want to be the red envelope with the flourished address — the one with a love letter written on a sheet of pretty embossed stationery inside. I want to be me. And I want other people to notice that I take pride in how I present myself to the world, not just today, but always.
I think it was best said in the Twilight Zone episode “Number 12 Looks Just Like You”: “Being like everybody … isn’t that the same as being nobody?”. And who wants to be a nobody?
Not me.
I couldn’t agree more. There’s no substitute for a hand-written card or letter. I hate to see penmanship dying out. Good post, Wendy!
Thanks! Glad I’m not the only one who feels this way!
Hi, Wendy – I was with you for most of this piece (even though my penmanship is atrocious – even my printing has gotten worse with age – and I am forever grateful to my Dad for forcing me to take typing in eighth grade; I could not communicate without a keyboard). But I do not think valuable advances in educational technology are “anti-literacy.”
Does some over-use of technology happen in schools? No doubt. But my kids are in schools that use technology well. While they still learn printing and cursive (for now), and while they certainly still use printed books (the “death” of which has been highly exaggerated), my kids and their peers have incredible opportunities to learn more than I did at their ages thanks to technology.
And I have seen firsthand the kids in my children’s schools using technology to express themselves in highly personal, creative, and emotional ways. I’ve watched Power Point presentations on environmentalism, and multimedia projects about kids wrestling with their sense of vocation. I’ve seen my son and daughter work very hard, on computers, on projects and presentations. My 8-year-old daughter takes screenshots every time she completes a new level of the math literacy game her teacher assigns, because she’s proud of her progress at mastering those facts. My high school freshman son has written poetry in Google Docs, which he can then share effortlessly with his teacher. To suggest that any of these kids are boring carbon copies of everyone else, or lazy and stupid, because they are using technology in school… That doesn’t ring true to me.
You use technology yourself in personal and creative ways to give us this beautiful blog. I know you take pride in how you present yourself digitally, as well as in your painting. I think lamenting the loss of handwriting is one thing,; to a certain extent, I agree (not because I love to write by hand – I don’t – but because we’ll inevitably lose some history if we can no longer read manuscript). But I don’t agree that it necessarily follows that we are marching toward a nightmarish, conformist existence out of the Twilight Zone as a result.
And I don’t understand why this has to be an either-or, zero-sum game. No one is going to stop you from giving kids real books, paper, pens, paints…
I think you raise an important point in questioning whether the millennials really are “digital natives,” or just know how to use an app while it’s working, and the risk of overdependency on technology; that’s a good discussion to have. Another good discussion to have would be, Are our schools teaching logical reasoning, critical thinking, and evidence-based science (all of which are sorely lacking here in the U.S. these days), whether by traditional methods or by newer, tech-oriented ones?
Thank you for a thought-provoking post!
Hi, Mike! Thanks for taking the time to comment today. Firstly, I never meant to imply that technology is “anti-literacy”. As I said in the post, I’m not against technology, but like anything else, you can over-use it. And when you stop using technology to complement basic learning and you use it to REPLACE it, that’s where I draw the line. A calculator is not an acceptable REPLACEMENT for learning basic adding, subtracting and multiplication. In Canada, there are teachers who are pushing to outright stop the teaching of basic math to children, using the argument “Well, they have calculators, so why do they need to learn to do it in their head?” And that destructive idea bleeds over into other subjects, like English. Even if your handwriting isn’t that great, at least you have the “ability” to communicate without the aid of technology. And taking away ANY of a child’s abilities does a great disservice to them, and ultimately, to society.
I use my computer to aid me with the design of a lot of my paintings. It saves me time and work and helps me produce a better quality product, and frankly, I wouldn’t want to have to give that up. What I was saying is that it’s wrong to allow technology to obliterate a traditional medium, and that I didn’t want to help contribute to the death of painting and handwriting by just giving in and completely abandoning the non-tech skills I’ve learned.
I think that technology and traditional methods should go hand in hand, without one overtaking the other. Technology can greatly supplement a child’s learning. Absolutely! I didn’t say that they shouldn’t have the tablets (for example), just that having that added resource shouldn’t mean doing away with how they would naturally do their work. And that’s the direction things are moving in. In fact, the point of the post was to point out how I’m already seeing the effects – can’t find a decent pen, no one even knows what stationery sets ARE, etc. By the time I have children of my own, or when they have children, will they even be able to FIND books, pens, paints, etc?
There should be a very real concern in the world with how reliant we are on devices that won’t work without a power source. It disturbs me that when I’m in the grocery store in the middle of a storm and the power goes out… I CAN’T buy food. I’m standing there with cash in my hand, and they will not sell me a bag of milk. Or I’m in line at the bank and I want to pay a bill. If the computer system is down, guess what? They’ll turn me away and tell me that I can’t pay that bill today.
I just think that technology, ESPECIALLY information on the internet (which is not very reliable), is being pushed way too much. Even if you’re not super skilled at handwriting, that is still a skill that’s necessary for you — and you know what? So is typing!! Computers were still pretty new when I was in public school in the ’90s, so it was about grade 7 when we started having an actual “computer” class where we learned how to type. But the truth is, my mom had a typewriter at home that I had been using for years — I already knew how to type pretty well by the time they decided to start teaching it in school and it’s been an invaluable skill for me – as you pointed out, I’m typing right now on this blog post!
I absolutely never said that it had to be one or the other. In fact, the point I wanted to make is that you shouldn’t have to choose. You can have BOTH, and you should have both. But that means preserving important aspects of the old while integrating the best parts of the new. I love that I can use my computer to quickly find something, and then go to my books (now that I know where to look!) and read about it in full from there. I like that technology can make my standard methods more efficient and easier. I could get along with nothing but paper books, but really, you can’t have too many resources, can you? Books AND online, etc. That’s a good thing.
So honestly, I just don’t like seeing the old thrown by the wayside. If using technology means ceasing to learn basic principles, then what you’ll end up with is people who can’t do as many things. They won’t be as smart. The more a child can learn, the better off he’ll be. And my point is simply that NOT teaching children the basics because we have machines to do it for them now is NOT the way to go.
As for my concluding TZ quote and the envelope comparisons – that was strictly me saying that handwriting is much more individualistic than typing. Handwriting in and of itself is something highly personal and recognizable. If you laid out ten of the same letters, written by ten different people, if they’re all typed, you couldn’t tell them apart for all the money in the world. But if each is handwritten, you’d see the differences immediately. And I like the idea of standing out like the handwritten letters, rather than blending in and being lost with the typed ones. It was just a metaphor for that. :)
Thanks for your reply, Wendy. I think, at bottom, we aren’t in any real disagreement except perhaps the point at which we need to worry about technology in the school. As I read (and re-read) your post, you said what prompted your anger and sadness was a news report that students were issued their own tablet for the year and were being encouraged or required (unclear) to submit homework electronically. That in itself does not seem like any kind of red flag to me.
Or perhaps we are in more disagreement than I think. Either way, I will still be following and enjoying your blog!
Well, I think perhaps the wrong emphasis is coming across in my post. The beginning of the paragraph that mentioned the tablets said how there were already schools who have stopped teaching handwriting. In my mind, the tablet mention was really just an aside, like “Oh, and this happened too”. It wasn’t meant to be taken as the main point (the handwriting was the point I wanted to tee off on), although I was also drawing a conclusion of 1) Here they are already not teaching handwriting, and 2) Here they are giving students a device that can REPLACE the handwriting. Those two things together would indicate a move in a certain direction — the direction I don’t agree with — even more so than if it were just one or the other. The idea of a move to electronic ONLY is what made me upset. Not that there were electronics being introduced.
But basically, I don’t think we’re really disagreeing at all. And I’m glad you’ll still be sticking around, Mike. I have more fun (less serious) posts planned for the near future!
I love handwritten cards. Unfortunately, while you were winning awards for penmanship, I was taking notes home that said “your child might need a brain scan” I can’t write legibly to save my life.
I do like to take notes and doodle with real ink. I’m not too particular about pens. I like Pilot Razor Points, but I can do fine or extra fine. I cn also do blue or black. What I can’t do is push too hard. when the ink stops flowing easily, I toss them.
Ha! Dan, I doubt that anyone would have said that about you!
When I couldn’t find what I wanted, I did buy a 5-pack of black pens that looked like they might at least get me through in the interim… I pitched three of them in the first day. If I can’t even get through a single word without the ink giving out in three places? Yeah, no.
Oh, it’s true Wendy. I wasn’t the best student.
You sure it wasn’t just that you had a Munsters-loving, Coke-drinking teacher…..? xD
Perhaps :)
I’m a fan of the no.2 pencil and medium-point pens. To me, writing with a fine-tipped pen feels like writing with a knife! But then, given what I write…maybe I *should* reconsider! :-]
Great points, all. Shouldn’t be zero-sum. Technologies have their place. So does penpersonship.
And my handwriting sucks. Always has. Wish it didn’t. Good post, Wendy.
Ha, thanks, Frank! That’s a great analogy — writing with a knife — and I would agree it is somewhat appropriate for you (or me!)! To tell the truth, I think for me, the diameter of the actual pen is almost more important than the fineness of the tip. Much like with my paintbrushes, the smaller the barrel, the better I like it. Pens or brushes with HUGE grips on them and fat ol’ barrels just aren’t comfortable at all in my hands (which are large but NOT bulky in the least), and it is the one feature of my beloved Pentel RSVP pens that I’d love to be able to tweak. The barrels are definitely larger than what I’d prefer.
And you’re right. As with so many other things in life, it shouldn’t have to be “one or the other”. Life is all about compromise, and I’d like to see more of that when it comes to this school tech business. Anyway, thanks as always for taking the time to comment!
It’s just not the same scrolling to the next page as it is turning the page on a book.
Tim
Could not agree with you more, Tim. Ironically enough, I feel like paper books are more user-friendly than electronic ones!
100% with you on this topic! I’m horrified that they stopped teaching handwriting in school. I, too, was one of those who won awards for my penmanship (although I could definitely brush up on my skills as an “adult”)! I’ve been thinking about purchasing some new stationary and bringing back the written letter! Next up – telegrams.
What I wouldn’t give to have a stationery store to walk into! That’s about the only thing as appealing as walking into a bookstore!
It makes me sad that the younger generations won’t know cursive. I will teach my future kids though! My hand writing isn’t the best, but I prefer cursive anyway. As a writer, pens are everything! My favorite is Pilot G2, but Ink Joy will do as well.
Oh, I’ve wanted to try the colourful Inkjoy 100RT fine point pens for quite some time now. They look really nice to write with. And I’m with you. Regardless of what schools are teaching in the future, any children of mine will definitely be learning the joys of handwriting!
They are nice–especially for the price.
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