We live in a world where daily interactions are increasingly digital and where most of our writing is done using keyboards or touch screens. Recent decades have seen a decrease in our use of handwriting, with related implications for educational systems, archival research and even our wellbeing. Today we reflect on whether time is up for handwriting, or whether, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of its death have been exaggerated!
Revival or survival?
Much of the debate about the future of handwriting has crystallised around the ability to write or read cursive script (joined-up handwriting with connected characters). Since there is no need to lift the pen off the paper, learning cursive speeds up the process of handwriting. But it takes time to teach, leading some national education boards to prefer to invest this in keyboard skills, either removing cursive from national curricula or reducing its instruction. Others have taken a different approach and held on to the tradition, after assessing the neuroscientific evidence about the benefits of handwriting for cognitive skills; research suggests that handwriting (either cursive or printing) is a better support for early literacy development than typing on a computer.
And with a new generation taking up analogue hobbies, including calligraphy, to counter digital fatigue, there has also been discussion of its benefits for concentration and mindfulness. In an extract from the book The Extinction of Experience: Reclaiming Our Humanity in a Digital World, published in 2025 in The Guardian, the author Christina Rosen quotes a calligraphist saying that when he teaches children to write, “he is really teaching them to slow down”.
Reading and research
Closer to home and from an archival perspective, the ability to read cursive writing is essential for research purposes, even in a world where the need to produce handwritten material is increasingly rare. All manner of evidence, from manuscripts to letters and registers to reports will be inaccessible to those in future generations who cannot. (And as a result, we are now seeing discussions online about a ‘new era’ of paleography – the study of ancient writing.)
You might think that in the ESA Archives, where documentary material generally comes from the last 60 years and is often typewritten, this would be less of a necessity than when consulting texts from hundreds of years ago entirely written using historical calligraphy. However, while there may be fewer challenges of this nature, there are always handwritten letters, memos or notes in the records. The latter can often be the most revealing – for example of unofficial opinions or viewpoints! By that very nature, they are not always written to be clearly deciphered by anyone other than the person for whom the message, or subtext, was intended, let alone for future readers. Perhaps surprisingly, there are also many handwritten parts in technical documents such as the RIDs (Review Items of Discrepancy) which form part of baseline design reviews, project meeting minutes and memoranda of understanding with industry, which can be equally hard to read, even in capital letters.
The files from ESA’s Legal Department are another of the richest sources of handwritten notes, although in this case, they usually consist of important additions or clarifications to the legal texts. The example below comes from a 1964 exchange of letters between NASA and ESA’s predecessor ESRO, which formed an agreement on the exchange of scientific information.
The two notes appear on a letter from ESRO Director General Pierre Auger of 28 May 1964. They are signed Mussard (Jean Mussard, physicist and close collaborator of Auger from his UNESCO days) and confirm the need for, and the subsequent approval of its text by ESRO’s Head of Administration ‘Crowley’.
If you have struggled to decipher the cursive, this is what they say:
- Lettre conforme à la décision du GTST [Groupe du Travail Scientifique et Technique]. L’approbation de Crowley me semble cependant nécessaire.
Mussard 28.V - Crowley étant absent Kaltenecker [ESRO’s Legal Advisor, Hans Kaltenecker] déclare qu’il lui a donné son accord sur ce texte verbalement. Mussard 1-VI-64
Colleagues from other parts of Agency were also well known for their annotations or, in the case of one former Director General, for their preference to make handwritten notes on printed documents, rather than using their laptop in meetings. And then there are the more light-hearted doodles that have found their way into the Archives, from management papers used as sketch pads during meetings!
This aspect of ‘handwriting’ is a reminder of the document as the product of a human mind. Rosen talks about this window to the people behind the pen like this: “You come to know your... subjects through the quirks of their handwriting; one man’s script becomes spidery and small when he writes something emotionally charged”.
And of course, once you recognise a particular person’s handwriting, you can attribute other text to them, much like recognising their face in photographs. The uniqueness of handwriting therefore helps researchers navigate material and reflects how it is individuals who make up organisations and the corporate memory preserved in their archives.
In the context of the digitisation work being undertaken in many institutions, archives are often asked why it is still necessary to preserve handwritten documents. Thanks to our colleagues, we have some answers – the annotations of ESRO’s Legal Advisor show us their importance in terms of content and attribution, while less formal scribbled notes or cartoons reveal something of our personalities and humanity.
Of course, it is one thing to preserve such physical documentation (dare we say easy?) Today organisations face new challenges presented by the digital era, among them how to safeguard, for example, comments made digitally to a document. We’ll be talking more about the risks of information loss for digital material and the so-called digital dark age another time.
A future without writing?
The implications of losing the ability to read or reproduce handwriting are enormous. As Rosen warns, what is at stake is “a process that for thousands of years has allowed humans to make our thoughts visible to one another”. Or even more starkly, when handwriting disappears, “we lose the ability to read the words of the dead”.
Hope, however, might be found in the growing numbers of people embracing a more balanced use of technology and the reported comeback of physical experiences. It is certainly not too late to valorise and protect our written heritage. And also to enjoy the benefits of giving the keyboard a day off and taking up our pen again!
Further Reading
Signature moves: are we losing the ability to write by hand?
