Do you remember your handwriting?

I was reading an article in the New York Times about a new technology that allows you to deliver short music videos by mobile in an easy and inexpensive way (“Forgot to send a birthday card? Phone it in”) when I started thinking of how impersonal the communication is becoming and how much we type every day. Handwritten letters are substituted by emails (and sometimes faxes), greeting cards by e-cards, even postcards are now more and more virtual, since we like to share our digital photos via web. In the social media like Facebook, Twitter or blogs, we type again to have a chat conversation. Summing up, nowadays almost all the messages are typed.

In the past it was easy to spot your classmates’ handwriting in a note or in an essay, now you barely know your relatives’ handwriting. Even our own is disappearing day by day: during classes students take notes typing on a laptop, we text messages by mobile and with the new digital books like “Nook” and “Kindle” we probably won’t even handwrite any more notes on the paper. We have also developed some fonts that reproduce the handwriting in order to keep typing.

So far the signature still survives but sooner or later a “personal” logo will be developed in order to make it virtual too.

It is so nice to read a letter or a postcard, looking at the handwriting of the sender and sometimes feeling his emotions while he was writing it. The handwriting is a way to express our personality and, in my opinion, an enchanting world to study as it seems connected to our unconscious mind.

A friend of mine is now a certified handwriting expert in Italy but, while she was still studying for it, she asked me to provide her with a written page from somebody she didn’t know in order to practice what she was learning. It was an amazing surprise: from the space between the letters, the size of the words, the way some letters were written and many other small details, she “perfectly” described the writer’s personality (that was another close friend of mine).

There are many different schools which teach how to read and interpret a personal “handwriting” in order to get the personality of the writer. Four are the main approaches to study graphology: Integrative Graphology, Holistic Graphology, Symbolic Analysis and Underlying Movement.

In my opinion, without keeping handwriting alive, we are going in the direction of a more and more digital and impersonalized world. We should be able to use technology but leaving some “human” activities out of it.

We have inherited a lot of manuscripts from past writers that are wonderful priceless masterpieces. If we eliminate handwriting we will leave to our future generations only “digital codes” without any personality.

In this world where time flies and everything has to be fast, handwriting slows down our pace but it gives us the possibility to be human again.