Please use the sharing tools found via the share button at the top or side of articles. Copying articles to share with others is a breach of FT.com T&Cs and Copyright Policy. Email licensing@ft.com to buy additional rights. Subscribers may share up to 10 or 20 articles per month using the gift article service. More information can be found at https://www.ft.com/tour.
https://www.ft.com/content/087082a8-91c1-447b-a08f-4428992b0819Last month, I went on holiday to a small town at the bottom of Spain that I have been visiting for more than 20 years, where a friend asked: “Why is your Spanish still so bad?”
“Er,” I said, struggling to remember how to say in Spanish that, after decades of fitful studies, there had in fact been times when I could speak as well as any local four-year-old.
This was not one of those times, unfortunately. So I went home, sat down and started writing out lists of verb conjugations by hand, which was when I discovered something worse. My handwriting, never good, had turned into barely legible scrawl. My words jerked across the page like the trails of a snail dunked in crystal meth. The very act of writing was a strain. Years of typing and texting had taken an unattractive toll.
I cannot be alone. Nearly 60 per cent of Britons say they write less by hand than they did five years ago, a survey found last year, and 12 per cent have never written even a shopping list. Children email Santa and some struggle to hold a pen.
The question is, does this really matter? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everything we wrote was as clear and unambiguous as the printed word? The medical world certainly would: a 42-year-old American once died after a pharmacist reading a cardiologist’s sloppily written prescription dispensed the wrong pills.