Is technology making good penmanship obsolete?
01/28/09 By Jennifer Broadwater Email this story to a friend Christine Gray has graded her fair share of sloppy essays over the years. After 25 years as a college English professor, she’s deciphered the scribbled, the excessively loopy, the cramped, the slanted and more. Forget content and style. What Gray sees in terms of penmanship alone is cause for concern. “I’ve seen it all, since 1983,” Gray, an English professor at The Community College of Baltimore County, said of analyzing her students’ penmanship. On the first day of class, she routinely asks students to compose a writing sample. Although the exercise is intended to gauge the students’ writing ability and not to test their penmanship, it’s given Gray a sense that the quality of handwriting is on the decline. Computers have all but replaced pen and paper. Blogs have replaced diaries. E-mail — often with loose standards for format, punctuation and capitalization — has replaced the hand-written letter. And text messages have e
