I will write better. I will write better. I will...

I always delight in hearing my boyfriend's story about how his handwriting was so atrocious in elementary school that a teacher made him stay in from recess and write "I will write better" over and over again on a piece of paper. Unfortunately, his printing has not gotten any better. I still find it atrocious today how he scribbles carelessly and squashes his letters and makes lowercase e's by drawing the curve first, then inserting a haphazard line.

I was also thinking about handwriting this weekend while we were up in NH for the wedding of one of my boyfriend's childhood friends. We were browsing through some of his old yearbooks, and as I read the "autographs" of girls in his class, it seemed exactly the same as the handwriting my friends and I used to have. I wondered - 'is handwriting trendy?' Are some types of handwriting "cool" at times, and others not? Was it "cool" to write in swirly, bubbly, big letters that conjured up images of giggly girls with braces? It might have been, because I remember striving to that effervescent handwriting... though I could never quite get it.

And now with all this texting and emailing, will kids not even regard handwriting as a form of communication anymore? What does the "cool" handwriting look like today? (And don't say: Times New Roman.)

This article doesn't really answer that question; it's more about how cursive is a silly way to teach kids to write. But it is what inspired this post, so check it out: here.