Now that we keyboard everything from novels to shopping lists and texting on our phones has become the main way to reach out and touch someone, the digital age has stirred a nostalgia for the good old days when everything was writ by hand (apparently no one wants to bring back making actual phone calls). And so we have National Handwriting Day, January 23, the supposed birthday of John Hancock, who penned the signature heard round the world. It may seem ironic, but the only way to find out about National Handwriting Day is to go online.
That’s not the only problem with National Handwriting Day. It’s sponsored by the makers of pens and pencils, and not surprisingly their message is a commercial one: writing with a pen is personal and typing on a machine is anything but. But even though we still buy pens and pencils, no one actually wants to re-learn handwriting, which was nobody’s idea of fun. For some of us it was actually torture.
Enter handwrytten.com, a start-up that will turn keyboarded text into a personalized note so you don’t have to.
Wrytten (cute the way even the spelling looks old fashioned) uses a robot writer, a machine that hooks a real pen up to a computer. The result looks like you wrote it yourself—or it would look that way if your handwriting was uniform and proportionally spaced, and all your lines were parallel. Your only personal contribution—if you want to call it that—is placing the forever stamp on the robot-addressed envelope, into which you have personally placed your note, presumably leaving the tiniest fingerprint or a DNA-containing eyelash to guarantee that personal touch. Oh, and paying for your order, which requires keyboarding your payment information.
The robotic note may not fool your addressee, but at least they’ll know you cared enough to spend the very most.
The writing robot—also called the autopen—is not a new idea. Around 1803, long before the invention of graph paper or photocopying, John Hawkins built a mechanical polygraph that used two pens connected by a series of levers. One pen wrote, the other made an instant copy. Thomas Jefferson was an early adopter. He’d write with the first pen, and the levers translated his hand movements to the second one, which made a copy. Maybe not an exact copy, given that Jefferson had to constantly adjust the levers and re-dip or even replace the reed pens (metal-tipped pens had yet to be invented), but good enough for the president’s files.
Today, autopen machines are popular with executives, celebrities, and politicians who have to sign multiple copies of documents, form letters, greeting cards, or souvenir photographs so they look like they’ve been signed by hand. But autopens are expensive. Now, Wrytten (can’t get over that antique spelling) makes personal robot writing available at prices everyone can afford.
But handwriting isn’t actually more personal than keyboarding, and robot writing is probably even less personal because creating the actual document is being off-loaded not just to a stranger, a secretary or scribe, but to a stranger’s computer.
Pens and pencils are mechanical devices, just like keyboards. So a piece of chalk, a crayon, or a block of graphite-filled cedar, even though they don’t use batteries and have no moving parts, would be enough to block the imaginary psycho-electric circuit between brain, hand, and text.
Then there’s the assumption that handwriting is unique to the individual—like fingerprints or DNA or a social security number—a uniqueness that makes a letter personal. But that’s not strictly true, either.
The goal of handwriting instruction has always been to get everybody’s letters to look the same—as identical and interchangeable as movable type. Before printing presses and typewriters were common, this uniformity of handwriting ensured that anyone could read anything.
Nineteenth century instructors dictated the body posture and hand position (right hands only) necessary to achieve the perfect handwriting. And for lefties or the many other students having trouble getting their letters right, there was an additional torture: harnesses to make sure the right-hand fingers didn’t stray, like this talantograph, invented in 1832 by Benjamin Franklin Foster.
Writing with such uniformity requires painstaking, and sometimes painful, physical discipline, which explains why so many students hated it and why so many now prefer the keyboard—speech to text would be even better: writing untouched by human hands.
As it turned out, new writing technologies made handwriting obsolete. The printing press, developed in the 15th century, meant that producing books and journals no longer required large numbers of scribes copying out pages by hand. And the invention of the typewriter in the 19th meant that clerks no longer had to produce invoices, contracts, reports, and business letters in the big, round hand so deftly satirized by Gilbert and Sullivan as mindless work.
Once that big round hand became superfluous, those who were nostalgic for handwriting began to argue that handwriting was as individual as DNA, which would make handwriting a window into the soul. The pseudo-science of graphology claimed to reveal inner traits based on how you looped and slanted your letters. It was junk science then, a lot like reading palms or bumps on the head, and it’s junk science now, despite the fact that some employers still look to handwriting analysis to determine whether an employee is reliable or a thief.
But making handwriting obsolete also led to the common assumption that your handwriting is personal, and so a handwritten note expresses your true thoughts better than a text message even if both use the exact same words. If you want truly machine-free writing, your options are limited: you can fingerpaint or you can trace your words with your finger in the sand. Neither technology will produce legible, lasting, or profitable messages. The rest of us will celebrate National Handwriting Day not by signing any new declarations of independence, but by clicking away at our various keyboards, just like we would on any other day.
