The perils of bad handwriting

[Joe Carillo]

Forum member Hill Roberts in Spain sent me this link to a story in MailOnline UK about the mother of a dead soldier having a late night altercation with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown over a “misspelled” letter of condolence.

Click to read the MailOnline UK story now!

[madgirl09]

yes, i think this is just a case of bad handwriting. blame the computers! since the coming of IBM PCs, children, teenagers as well as adult professionals can't scribble legible words anymore. see, even the prime minister's signature is unreadable. the misspellings always fall on the last few letters, which means that he writes on a "steno style"....getting impatient to finish the rest . i could feel the minister's dilemma struggling to make his writing legible. i admit i write this bad as well these days, and worse, my brain can't seem to dictate to my hand what strokes to make, or think what the right way to write in cursive is . a few months ago, during an essay exam, my fingers just couldn't write as fast as i could type in my laptop. so i pleaded the professor to allow me additional time to "pressure my fingers" write what i wanted. my fingers are getting dumber and dumber.....but faster and faster in striking at keys in my Iphone to construct a message. we are training our fingers a new skill, different from handwriting.

[hill roberts]

Hi, Madgirl,
Been a while...hope this finds you well. Yes, you have a point, but he is STILL the Prime Minister of the UK. However, the mere fact that he bothered to write his personal letters by hand is something to be admired. But do you also know that he is blind in one eye, and the other eye is just plodding on, so to speak? The school kids though aren't taught standard handwriting in Britain which is unfortunate. In my day, we were taught proper/standard handwriting too. My mother, her sisters, my cousins and my sisters have identical handwriting, believe it or not. The newspaper, The Sun, is bent on getting rid of Gordon Brown, hence, they released the letter. Poor Brown then had a chat with her, then the Sun recorded the conversation! Is that democracy or is that abused democracy? Only in the UK.

[Tryton Warwick]

Before I was enrolled into an International School, I wrote in beautiful calligraphies, thanks to the strict teachings of Filipino Kindergarten and Elementary Teachers. It's the modern teaching methods, going easy on the students that made our generation and the future generation lose our sense of grace in writing.

That is what I believe.

[Joe Carillo]

In addition to modern teaching methods, Tryton, another obvious culprit is modern word processing that no longer requires us to use pen or paper. It's the price of progress I suppose!

[tonybau]

Doctors are notorious for bad handwriting. It's good to know that even Prime Ministers are not spared this "illness", so to speak, for to some extent this has become an illness of sorts. I am perfectly comfortable, however, using modern technology to encode what I want to say. It saves me a lot of time and allows my thoughts to flow much faster than writing an essay by hand. The output is also aesthetically more pleasing and readable.

We should all give our condolences to Mrs. Janes for her loss and recognize the ultimate sacrifice made by Jamie for his country and the world, as did G.B. Seven spelling mistakes should be cited as an insult? The whole idea for the handwritten note was to make it as personal as possible, spelling mistakes notwithstanding. It indicates that the writer had unquestionalbe intentions even as he was addressing a concern that could pale in contrast to others the Prime Minister must surely be handling, such as a terrorist nuclear bomb detonation. Could she have missed the point?

My read on this: she was angry at the loss, she hadn't accepted it as yet, and this denial had surely affected her perceptions. This is clearly shown in her tirade of G.B. I'm sure she will go beyond this when she accepts her loss. The sooner, the better for her.

To Mrs. Janes, my deepest condolences.