Michael Gagnon can trace his decline to the fourth grade, when he was introduced to a computer.
"From there it was all downhill for my handwriting," he said. Today, Gagnon sometimes struggles to decipher his own writing.
"If I go back to it a day later, it's like a maze." he said. His co-workers at Teksystems in Framingham agree -- the 25-year-old technical recruiter is forbidden from muddying the office whiteboard with his scribbling. But Gagnon is not concerned about his lack of proficiency with a dry-erase marker.
"Handwriting is kind of obsolete anyway," he said.
That echoes the sentiments of other adults who have traded pencils and pens for keyboards. Computer dependency has turned their cursive writing into jittery strings that mimic seismograph readouts and produces printed letters that look jagged enough to break skin. Educators agree that children are growing into adults who are more comfortable wielding BlackBerrys than Bics. But they are divided on whether illegible handwriting is a serious problem, and if it is, what to do about it.
Elementary schools, squeezed by standardized testing and an increasing number of curriculum requirements, are spending less time on penmanship. By high school, most students stop joining letters, reverting to the print style they learned from kindergarten through second grade. One measure of how eager they are to abandon cursive writing is the SAT . Since the College Board began requiring handwritten essays as part of the exams two years ago, 85 percent of the more than 4.5 million essays have been printed, said Caren Scoropanos , a spokeswoman for the College Board.
As a result, formal handwriting is on the way to becoming more of an "art form" than practical skill, according to Katherine Boles , a lecturer at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education .
"Computers are just taking over," said Boles, who taught third and fourth grade at the Edward Devotion School in Brookline for more than a quarter-century.
Those who earn their living by teaching handwriting say it has not been supplanted by e-mail and text messaging.
"If you go back as far as 1871, typewriter companies promoted the notion that handwriting would become obsolete," said Kate Gladstone , a handwriting "repair" specialist based in Albany, N.Y. "People still need to write things by hand. Even in the most computerized workplaces you see a blizzard of Post-it notes and little strips of paper."
There is no consensus, however, on how to make handwriting more appealing than key strokes.
Some specialists, including Gladstone and Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty , handwriting consultants in Portland, Ore., promote a style of writing that is based on italic, using same-shaped cursive and print letters.
"You build on previously learned concepts," said Dubay, who likens poor handwriting to "mumbling on paper." The intent of Getty-Dubay and similar styles is to make the move from printing to a loop-free cursive easier and faster.
"I describe it as print with a slant," said Karen Conrad , president of Therapro Inc., a Framingham occupational-therapy firm that sells handwriting tools and instructional materials. "Your hand goes across the page instead of going up and down. It's very efficient."
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