If you're looking for novel additions to English symbols, I'd look at text and IM conversations. (basically quoting Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch here)
Under a certain age/cohort, a period at the end of a solitary thought/see isn't just a coda; it very clearly marks a falling tone of voice, to be read as serious or even angry. Likewise the ellipses intended by older-cohort adults as a dangling thought is often misinterpreted as the one used to show "something was omitted here" in a quote, which is usually read as sarcasm or implication.
I've seen even younger people interacting on Discord (which allows rich text formatting via Markdown) by using text with strikethrough formatting to stand for "muttering under your breath/behind your hand".
The use of emojis is also evolving. I rarely see people my own age use the normal 😀🙂 smiles because the way that a lot of services render them looks over-eager and glassy-eyed. Older friends and my parents use them, though.
I recently had a similar discussion with my wife about books. Historically, authors were seen as thought leaders, mainly because of access to education. Widespread illiteracy acted as gatekeepers, ensuring that only the educated few could share and preserve their ideas. As a result, those who could write were the ones remembered.
Fast-forward to today and we see a shift: People are reading less because social media has democratized communication, allowing ideas from all walks of life to spread instantly. While this increased accessibility is valuable, it comes with a major caveat. There are no barriers to entry for misinformation, harmful rhetoric, or deliberately divisive content. Worse still, algorithms prioritize inflammatory material because it drives high engagement, making sensationalism more visible than thoughtful discourse.
I’d be curious as to your thoughts about handwriting on screens. As a college student in biology, the majority of the writing I do is by hand, but with a stylus on a tablet. I don’t have a large sample size, but I’ve noticed that students in science and math that regularly have to draw symbols, models and equations tend towards digital handwriting, while students in disciplines that mostly involve just words tend towards typing on laptops. I honestly get a bit of a culture shock when I enroll in the odd non-STEM class and everyone’s taking notes on laptops.
Yeah! At my university I study maths, and at least 95% takes notes either with pencil and paper, or is handwriting on a screen. I have tried taking notes on a laptop once or twice, but it just takes at least twice as long. Over here, pencil and paper won't die out anytime soon.
Neuroscience shows that the brain - which hasn't changed its wiring since we evolved - functions more efficiently when our thought processes are connected to our bodies by our hands!
Just today I had a chat with my 9-year-old about the etymology of 'subscribe.' He's doing words starting with 'sub' at school. He could only think of subscribing on YouTube and while he figured out 'scribe' meant writing, he was confused about the connection!
So correct me if I'm wrong, but whenever I heard Americans talking about cursive and it not being taught, I always imagined the American style of swoopy fancy caligraphy, only to learn later that any joined-up handwriting (as we'd say in the UK) is cursive and non-cursive is print/blocked letters, which is mad to me. How can you write any length of text lifting the pen between every letter?! Without being culturally insensitive it seems completely childish whenever I see handwriting like it, and even the scrattiest handwriting in the UK is joined up. The only people who generally don't join up are engineers/woodworkers/ designers etc (who write in all caps for clarity), children learning to write, and those girls who do all their fancy bubbly round letters and take an hour to write one page!! The idea that you're not teaching kids how to write basically at all is flabbergasting, maybe especially as most UK exam questions are short or long answer and rarely multiple-choice so it's more essential to have consistency taught. We had the art teacher at school do handwriting lessons for pupils who got referred due to poor penmanship and illegible handwriting and also teachers whos handwriting students complained about!
Personally, I (American, 23) write in a mix of cursive and blocked letters. They stopped teaching cursive in my state right at the time that I was supposed to learn it. My fourth grade teacher was livid about that (understandably so!) and taught us anyway-- we were supposed to learn the year prior. I don't practice it often but I definitely think it influenced the way I write all in all, very "joined-up," like you say. I only ever do full cursive for my signature, and even then, it's not great.
I have no idea how the kids are writing nowadays, but overall our literacy level is really low... maybe this is a factor in why! Also, worth noting that (at least in my state and most southern states), education is extremely defunded... we're lucky to have an art teacher AT ALL and they sure never had the time to focus on our penmanship! That's surely another reason that our literacy levels are low (I hate it here). I think, like Adam said, most educators here are focusing less on penmanship in favor of teaching kids to type and write on computers, since that is where the job market has shifted.
However, I also think that outside of education, there are circles in which the handwritten word is resurfacing!! Journaling is super popular, for example. The internet is such a fickle place to let all our thoughts live (especially as we slip further and further into this right-wing surveillance state... did I mention I hate it here?), so I've been writing my friends letters. Physical media will always be important!!
Maybe this is a European experience, but I don't think handwriting is dying. From nearly handwriting exclusive systems like Bullet Journaling to a lot of tech savvy people taking comfort in analog notes and journals, I think there's still plenty of handwriting around. It has certainly become a smaller part of life, but "dying" feels excessive.
I write with a pencil every single day. So do all of my students. . . I’m in my mid-fifties, live in the US, and my students range from 5 to 80. I’m fully computer literate but paper and pencil aren’t going anywhere in my livelihood
Autocorrect reinforces norms. But it also reinforces singularity! And puts artificial divisons between languages.
Most if not all software I use to write forces me to choose a single language if I want spelling and grammar support. So I either have to turn it off or accept that everything in one language will be very loudly labelled wrong, incorrect, or otherwise bad.
Even in just American vs British English, where I use both. I am instead forced to pick.
It also happens with technical jargon and non-standard shortenings I use for my own notes.
There might be some software which allows multiple.
I’m a researcher in the field of writing, specifically children’s writing. And there are a plethora of studies showing that handwriting is linked to stronger long-term memory of spelling than keyboarding/typing. It is believed that the link is in the movements that our hand has to make to shape the letters, which is obviously lacking in typing, where every movement is basically the same.
It has been fascinating (and scary!) to watch the development - or lack thereof - of children’s writing over the past few decades.
i really like writing on paper because i can use my own fonts and change it just to see how i'm able to try on different style and shape of letters. thank you for writing this!
Re-read this after having a memory related to it. As an amateur writer, one of my early projects of course had characters, the main one of which was named “rayna” early on but by mistake was re-written as “rayla” and I didn’t realize I had made that change for a very long time. It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t misread my bad handwriting. Pencil & paper writing also makes it so much easier to come up with ideas, in my experience. Maybe it’s the connection to the work you don’t get with a laptop.
If you're looking for novel additions to English symbols, I'd look at text and IM conversations. (basically quoting Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch here)
Under a certain age/cohort, a period at the end of a solitary thought/see isn't just a coda; it very clearly marks a falling tone of voice, to be read as serious or even angry. Likewise the ellipses intended by older-cohort adults as a dangling thought is often misinterpreted as the one used to show "something was omitted here" in a quote, which is usually read as sarcasm or implication.
I've seen even younger people interacting on Discord (which allows rich text formatting via Markdown) by using text with strikethrough formatting to stand for "muttering under your breath/behind your hand".
The use of emojis is also evolving. I rarely see people my own age use the normal 😀🙂 smiles because the way that a lot of services render them looks over-eager and glassy-eyed. Older friends and my parents use them, though.
I recently had a similar discussion with my wife about books. Historically, authors were seen as thought leaders, mainly because of access to education. Widespread illiteracy acted as gatekeepers, ensuring that only the educated few could share and preserve their ideas. As a result, those who could write were the ones remembered.
Fast-forward to today and we see a shift: People are reading less because social media has democratized communication, allowing ideas from all walks of life to spread instantly. While this increased accessibility is valuable, it comes with a major caveat. There are no barriers to entry for misinformation, harmful rhetoric, or deliberately divisive content. Worse still, algorithms prioritize inflammatory material because it drives high engagement, making sensationalism more visible than thoughtful discourse.
All that said, keep up the great work
I’d be curious as to your thoughts about handwriting on screens. As a college student in biology, the majority of the writing I do is by hand, but with a stylus on a tablet. I don’t have a large sample size, but I’ve noticed that students in science and math that regularly have to draw symbols, models and equations tend towards digital handwriting, while students in disciplines that mostly involve just words tend towards typing on laptops. I honestly get a bit of a culture shock when I enroll in the odd non-STEM class and everyone’s taking notes on laptops.
Yeah! At my university I study maths, and at least 95% takes notes either with pencil and paper, or is handwriting on a screen. I have tried taking notes on a laptop once or twice, but it just takes at least twice as long. Over here, pencil and paper won't die out anytime soon.
Neuroscience shows that the brain - which hasn't changed its wiring since we evolved - functions more efficiently when our thought processes are connected to our bodies by our hands!
https://neurosciencenews.com/handwriting-learning-brain-connectivity-25522/
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/
I came here to say this!
Great minds!
Just today I had a chat with my 9-year-old about the etymology of 'subscribe.' He's doing words starting with 'sub' at school. He could only think of subscribing on YouTube and while he figured out 'scribe' meant writing, he was confused about the connection!
We subscribers are underwriters!
So correct me if I'm wrong, but whenever I heard Americans talking about cursive and it not being taught, I always imagined the American style of swoopy fancy caligraphy, only to learn later that any joined-up handwriting (as we'd say in the UK) is cursive and non-cursive is print/blocked letters, which is mad to me. How can you write any length of text lifting the pen between every letter?! Without being culturally insensitive it seems completely childish whenever I see handwriting like it, and even the scrattiest handwriting in the UK is joined up. The only people who generally don't join up are engineers/woodworkers/ designers etc (who write in all caps for clarity), children learning to write, and those girls who do all their fancy bubbly round letters and take an hour to write one page!! The idea that you're not teaching kids how to write basically at all is flabbergasting, maybe especially as most UK exam questions are short or long answer and rarely multiple-choice so it's more essential to have consistency taught. We had the art teacher at school do handwriting lessons for pupils who got referred due to poor penmanship and illegible handwriting and also teachers whos handwriting students complained about!
Personally, I (American, 23) write in a mix of cursive and blocked letters. They stopped teaching cursive in my state right at the time that I was supposed to learn it. My fourth grade teacher was livid about that (understandably so!) and taught us anyway-- we were supposed to learn the year prior. I don't practice it often but I definitely think it influenced the way I write all in all, very "joined-up," like you say. I only ever do full cursive for my signature, and even then, it's not great.
I have no idea how the kids are writing nowadays, but overall our literacy level is really low... maybe this is a factor in why! Also, worth noting that (at least in my state and most southern states), education is extremely defunded... we're lucky to have an art teacher AT ALL and they sure never had the time to focus on our penmanship! That's surely another reason that our literacy levels are low (I hate it here). I think, like Adam said, most educators here are focusing less on penmanship in favor of teaching kids to type and write on computers, since that is where the job market has shifted.
However, I also think that outside of education, there are circles in which the handwritten word is resurfacing!! Journaling is super popular, for example. The internet is such a fickle place to let all our thoughts live (especially as we slip further and further into this right-wing surveillance state... did I mention I hate it here?), so I've been writing my friends letters. Physical media will always be important!!
Maybe this is a European experience, but I don't think handwriting is dying. From nearly handwriting exclusive systems like Bullet Journaling to a lot of tech savvy people taking comfort in analog notes and journals, I think there's still plenty of handwriting around. It has certainly become a smaller part of life, but "dying" feels excessive.
I write with a pencil every single day. So do all of my students. . . I’m in my mid-fifties, live in the US, and my students range from 5 to 80. I’m fully computer literate but paper and pencil aren’t going anywhere in my livelihood
Writing on computers is fine but our devices are powered by batteries or electricity.
A pencil will always work - you just need a sharpener!
Autocorrect reinforces norms. But it also reinforces singularity! And puts artificial divisons between languages.
Most if not all software I use to write forces me to choose a single language if I want spelling and grammar support. So I either have to turn it off or accept that everything in one language will be very loudly labelled wrong, incorrect, or otherwise bad.
Even in just American vs British English, where I use both. I am instead forced to pick.
It also happens with technical jargon and non-standard shortenings I use for my own notes.
There might be some software which allows multiple.
You are right. Spellcheck and the like do not support bilingual typing, which makes me mad sometimes. :)
I’m a researcher in the field of writing, specifically children’s writing. And there are a plethora of studies showing that handwriting is linked to stronger long-term memory of spelling than keyboarding/typing. It is believed that the link is in the movements that our hand has to make to shape the letters, which is obviously lacking in typing, where every movement is basically the same.
It has been fascinating (and scary!) to watch the development - or lack thereof - of children’s writing over the past few decades.
Just bought a book about notebooks
i really like writing on paper because i can use my own fonts and change it just to see how i'm able to try on different style and shape of letters. thank you for writing this!
tbh I personally prefer pen and paper, it's faster for me, allows for drawing little diagrams when I need it...
So since 'scribe' means 'write' in Latin, does 'sub' mean 'underneath?'
Re-read this after having a memory related to it. As an amateur writer, one of my early projects of course had characters, the main one of which was named “rayna” early on but by mistake was re-written as “rayla” and I didn’t realize I had made that change for a very long time. It wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t misread my bad handwriting. Pencil & paper writing also makes it so much easier to come up with ideas, in my experience. Maybe it’s the connection to the work you don’t get with a laptop.