In grade school at St. Paul College of Quezon City, Penmanship with a tall "P" was a required but minor subject. An older cousin and my godmother Jane Pearl Server Banzhaf, since deceased, remarkably retained the light and dark strokes that were the hallmark of Paulinian penmanship right through her 60s.
In the course of conducting interviews as a journalist, I lost those strokes while doing my own shorthand. I keep a diary, but most times I'm also in a great rush to finish the day's entry. The results are all the words, phrases and sentences are rendered in one even heavy stroke.
But I have a high regard for people who still do cursive and have not totally succumbed to the conveniences of the digital age.
Julie Miller, a historian in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, and Victoria Van Hyning, a senior innovation specialist in the division, wrote that "the digital age has transformed us from people who read and write by hand to people who type and read on a screen, from letter-writers to emailers, texters and tweeters."
See link here: https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2019/01/crowdsourcing-helps-to-unlock-the-mystery-of-cursive/?loclr=twloc
I still consider myself fortunate than those much younger than I am because I went through the phases of learning the proper Paulinian way of shaping the alphabet from capital "A" to small "a" all the way to "Z" from Grades One to Four. The lessons are not lost on me, Sisters Gemma, Scholastica, Richard and Eugenie!
If one loves to hand-write stuff, the next obvious things one loves, and can get attached to, are random pieces of paper, cards, postcards, notebooks and yes, I hear you, Joseph Uy, fountain pens.
Just a short hour spent with these objects to compose a life through diary-keeping and letter writing is a splash of sanity and serenity in a madding world.
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