The almost forgotten art of hand writing

It is unclear exactly when in the evolution of human species articulated language first emerged, but it is likely that it appeared well before two million years ago, because hominids as ancient as the Ardipithecus ramidus already show a modified larynx and the modern human already had the current configuration 40000 years ago. Still, for the big majority of those millions of years the communication among humans has been purely oral and all the joint knowledge was kept in the minds of the members of the tribes. In the end, it would have been troublesome for nomadic hunters and gatherers to carry with them a collection of physical objects storing their knowledge. Besides, the wealth of traditions, laws and expertise was not so wide that it would not fit essentially in the brain of every single member of the community, and the constant repetition in the evening sitting around the fire help consolidating the stories and avoiding their corruption.

However, around 10000 years ago, as the humans started to settle and the agricultural societies flourished, life became suddenly more complex: a bureaucracy of educated people rose the power and became exempt from working on sustenance while providing management services to the community in exchange for a pay by every farmer that worked on producing food. The bigger size of the tribes and the need to keep track of the contributions made by each farmer to the sustenance of the ruling class gave rise by the 4th millennium BCE to the introduction of scripture systems as those present in the cuneiform tablets of Ugarit. This system was mainly used for tax accountancy and its ephemeral nature (they essentially became obsolete with the subsequent harvest) made it impractical for some one to try to memorize. Besides, with well established villages it was not a problem to store the information in physical media, because the tribe did not have to travel.

 

Photo: Bild von Carola68 on Pixabay

From its invention more than 5000 years until roughly 700 years ago writing has been done almost exclusively by hand: either with a stylus in a wax tablet, drawing on wet sand, with a brush or with a quiver, every single letter, ideogram or syllable that has been individually formed. Even the engravings in ancient Roman sculptures, the Rosetta stone or the Code of Hammurabi were meticulously carved by hand. Stamps were present throughout history, but they were impractical in most cases to compose large messages. And even as the different cultures discovered the printing press, making the generation of written material much easier, faster and cheaper, this activity was still limited to a few members of the society with the technical and financial means for it, while the rest of the society (if able to write at all) kept writing by hand.

However, by the end of the 19th century the American inventors Shole and Glidden had seen a lot of success selling their typewriters, which allowed anyone to compose printed text at their will, removing the dependence on the questionable quality of the handwriting and making for much safe transmission of the information.Still, for most of the 20th century typewriters were limited to the professional environment, either in corporate offices filled with very apt secretaries or for writer and journalists who really spent a lot of time "putting words together", where as everybody else was taught at school how to write by hand. 

Only around 1990 with the widespread adoption of the personal computer, and later on with the implantation of the internet, the creation of printable texts was fully democratized. With a very basic computer and an internet access one could easily compose and distribute texts in a variety of formats, adjusting font face and size, color, alignment and every possible feature of the text. That was the end of the demise of hand writing.

I came to think about this today because I got an advertisement about an e-ink tablet with a stylus that allows "natural writing" and even supports text recognition, so that you hand scribbles can be easily converted to printed text. I have to say that the offer was tempting, but the price is steep, so I will have to give it another thought.

Still, the ad caused an impact in me and reminded me of my university years in the late 1990s carrying around some 50 blank pages in my book bag which I carefully numbered and filled with notes taken in class, so that they could be properly archived in preparation for the exam. I had a very basic Schaeffer fountain pen with a screw cap that I carried with me all the time, and I loved the feeling of the tip on the paper, running smooth and almost soundlessly.

For many years I also used to gather the small-format notebooks that my parents got from the pharmaceutical companies, so that I could record my ideas any time. I wrote anywhere and everywhere, and most of the time I did not even pay attention to the physical act of writing, just to the content that I rushed to capture. Other times I simply wrote long letters to one pen pal or another. At some point I had more than one, so as not to overwhelm any one of the them with the frequency and the extension of my letters because, I have mentioned before and these posts are proof, I can be long-winded at times.

Today I have realized that it has been probably many months since I last wrote more than ten words together. When I still went to the office regularly, I used to have a hand-written journal where I kept track of things to be done, discussions I had, the results of some investigation that I intended to remember. However, with the home office I have changed to digital only logging. I commit all my annotations to the project's wiki, so that not only they are easily readable and permanently accessible, but I can also link to them from other parts of my notes.

I had every intention of writing this entry first by hand and the type it, but then I realized it would just take too long, and settled for typing. The funny part is that, for the purpose of note taking, hand writing is still a better learning tool that typing. A study from 2016 showed that student focused on typing class notes verbatim has an acceptable level of accuracy, but the words "flowed" through them without causing any impression. On the other hand, those taking notes by hand, limited as they were to a smaller word count, were forced to perform and on-site synthesis of the ideas that improved significantly on the retention of the content.

It seems that, at least for a little longer, I will have to continue typing my entries. I have to try to find a suitable stylus that allows me to write them by hand on my current tablet or spit up the money to buy the expensive e-ink one. Hopefully, the art of hand writing will not become fully forgotten by me until then. Have a nice evening.