Penmanship

Mine sucks.  A side-effect of all the typing vs. actual writing that I do.  My handwriting looks like the scratchings of a chicken on LSD.  Unless I'm writing with my fountain pen.  The Ragin' Mrs. got me a beautiful fountain pen for Christmas, and she remarked that the moment I started writing with it, my hand writing improved.  I had a fountain pen years ago, and used to write home when I was stationed in Korea.  My penmanship then was good, and using my fountain pen seems to bring back the muscle memory that led to that good penmanship.  There's something about writing with real ink on paper that forces you to take your time and write correctly.

The Cajun remembers the fountain pens of his youth, and how they used to make you practice penmanship in school.  I can tell you from having to take sworn statements back in my MP days that penmanship has gone straight down the tubes, even when compared to my chickenscratch handwriting.  Folks, if you have kids who use nothing but a computer to type out their correspondence, get them a good pen and force them to write and use decent penmanship.  As easy as it is to use a computer, everybody uses paper and pen on a daily basis in the real world, even if it's to write "while you were out" notes.  You MUST be able to communicate with the written word.  And you might as well do it properly.