You may think handwriting is a dying art but Taylor Swift is keeping it alive

There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure...but it is never safe to make an assumption about how the different generations feel about anything, from vegans to scented candles. 

This week Christopher Howse and Guy Kelly get to grips with the future of penmanship.

Not so long ago people used to boast about how bad their handwriting was, in much the same way that they boasted of how bad their French was. Having learnt French from the age of seven, they might secure an O level but still be unable to exchange remarks with a French person.

The ruling classes were likewise expensively educated as though the aim were to gain a first-class degree by writing exam papers that only the sharpest epigrapher could decipher. Charles Kingsley once received a letter of condolence from the Bishop of Durham. In its 14 pages, he could make out only one phrase: ‘ungrateful devil’.

But now a method of making handwriting bad in a different way has attracted universal favour: stopping anyone writing by hand at all. I won’t drear on about no one writing letters or even postcards. They don’t write anything.

I suppose if anyone still has a milkman and wants two pints today, please, they email the request instead of scrawling it on a piece of lined paper and rolling it up in the neck of the bottle, for the ink to run a little in the early morning drizzle.

Because they don’t write, they can’t. More than a decade ago the novelist Philip Hensher reported, in a book on handwriting, a student of his saying that she couldn’t, as directed, make notes in a little notebook because it made her hand hurt. And, by the way, could he please type his comments on her assignments, because she couldn’t read his writing?

What does this physical and mental incapacity to write by hand resemble? It is closer to the heart of civilisation than not being able to live in a house without central heating, not being able to drive a car that isn’t an automatic, not being able to dance.

The traces left by those we have loved are nowhere more strongly expressed than in their handwriting, on an envelope, or just a shopping list. The notion of handwriting was once a metaphor for a voice, a manner of being, a bodily presence – or absence. An old pair of trainers won’t be the same to remember anyone by.

Well, colour me surprised, but it seems there isn’t a great deal of overlap between people who declare that handwriting is becoming an endangered skill and people who follow the online behaviour of Taylor Swift’s most ardent fans. If there was, they’d be aware that ‘Swifties’ have spent much of the past fortnight debating whether it is Harry Styles’ handwriting in her Instagram story featuring lyrics from the re-recorded album 1989.

‘i found harry’s handwriting chart on pinterest and that def his handwriting,’ read one comment, attaching a full alphabet apparently of Styles’s script. ‘THE “what if” IS LITERALLY HARRY’S HANDWRITING, SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP PUNCH ME IN THE FACE,’ another fan mused. The mystery persists.

The zodiac killer of pop, Swift enjoys teasing her fans with riddles, many involving handwriting. This is despite whole articles written about how freakishly she holds a pen (google it, it’s like she’s a sloth doing archery). Single-handedly, she’s ensuring Generation Z do not lose interest in penmanship.

This is more than the doom-mongers are doing. Some older readers – and columnists – appear certain the world is ending, one typed page at a time. Yet if papers really cared about preserving handwriting, they would have all their journalists hand-write articles and scan them in. I think you’d be surprised at some of the styles here at The Telegraph. Christopher uses a quill and ink pot on vellum, of course. Allison Pearson uses capital letters. And there’s a particularly hawkish columnist who writes exclusively in blood, with a sword as a pen. (It is mightier, they say.) I do not know whose it is. The blood, I mean; the sword is clearly labelled as theirs.

As for me, I would simply resign. If King Charles has a ‘black spider’ style, mine’s like somebody stomped on the spider with a bovver boot. And it hurts: I hand-wrote 30 thank-you cards over the summer and found it more physically taxing than a half-marathon. I know – what a snowflake. A symptom of the issue. I should get more into it. I should get more into Taylor Swift.

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