Handwriting can’t be written off in digital age

Is the art of handwriting losing relevance in this digital era?

France has been captivated by the release of handwritten letters from former French president François Mitterrand to his secret lover, Anne Pingeot, featured in the recently published book Lettres à Anne.

Florid, passionate and romantic, the letters span from 1962, when they met, until a few months before his death of prostate cancer in 1996.

There are of course moral complexities underpinning their affair. Mitterrand, the Socialist president from 1981 to 1995, lived a double life. He was married to Danielle Gouze in 1944, and they raised two sons together. He met Pingeot when he was 46 and she was 19. Their daughter, Mazarine, was born in 1974. Danielle, to whom he remained married, died in 2011.

Today, Pingeot is 73 years old. She kept more than 1,200 letters from Mitterrand in shoeboxes, agreeing to publish them on condition that she would not speak about them publicly, nor do any publicity for the book. She did however insist on transcribing the letters herself — a task that must have been both emotional and laborious.

They are the literature of love, secrecy and political history in 20th-century France.

This story from France is one example of why I’m not convinced we should dismiss longhand and letter writing — what author John O’Connell has called slow communication — as relics of a bygone age.

Many of us are aware of scientific studies demonstrating that cursive writing is beneficial to cognitive and biological development, of children in particular. It promotes hand-eye co-ordination and visual, fine motor and memory skills. It creates new pathways in the brain, as children use their hands and senses to interact with the world.

Last week, I sat down to help my six-year-old with his cursive writing homework. I watched him, tongue sticking out in concentration, as he gripped the pencil. I decided to join him and copy out a text in proper cursive, something I don’t think I’ve done in at least a decade. It was unexpectedly difficult, requiring much more focus than typing at a computer.

It was a reminder that longhand writing is a creative, purposeful act. I would argue it operates at the intersection of art, science and technology that is driving our digital revolution.

There is perhaps no better example of this than the late Steve Jobs. The co-founder of Apple famously dropped out of Reed College in Portland, Ore. after only six months, but hung around campus attending classes he found interesting. In 2005, Jobs gave a commencement speech to graduates at Stanford University. In it, he credited the time he spent studying calligraphy for laying the foundation for what would become the famous Mac aesthetic:

“Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture . . . . None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac.”

Some see longhand and letter writing as questionable skills in a landscape dominated by new communications technologies.

I disagree. I happen to think that the art and science of handwriting and computer literacy coexist beautifully in this digital age.