Have any of you picked up a pen and paper to scrawl some note or jot down a quick to do list only to find your hand muscles have gone slack and your once-clear, familiar handwriting now crooked and forced? I have. Sometimes. It's really rather sad.


The results of a study commissioned by the online stationer Docmail show that I'm not alone—and that we're all getting a little lazy in the writing department: the average time since an adult last wrote by hand, the study showed, was 41 days. 41 days! What's more, 1-in-3 of us, the research showed, has not had cause to write anything the old fashioned way for more than six months. Basically, it's holiday thank-you cards or bust.

This is both appalling and not at all.

Really, why should we fetishize pen-and-ink notation? Electronic correspondence is environmentally greener, quicker to send/receive, and—best of all!—avoids the nasty taste of a licked stamp. Plus, there are plenty of other ways to keep our fingers nimble and our hands occupied.


Writing is dead. Long live writing! [DailyMail - Image via viviamo/Shutterstock]