In the age of technology, handwriting has become almost obsolete. Children know how to use computers before they can write their own name and reading the handwriting of college students and office workers is like translating Sumerian Cuneiform. We have evolved into a society entirely dependent on spell-check and the thesaurus function.

To the frustration of English teachers everywhere, we do not know our own language. The red and green squiggles on a word document are too easy to fix and remove the need for the careful planning, pre-writing, and drafting of the last few millenia.  With computers doing all of the work for us, writing has become a chore instead of a great pasttime, and we let the words we produce lose their meaning by never dedicating them to anything specific. This impersonal text that we churn out like machines fills the pages of networking sites and leaves billions of status messages on Twitter pages, but with all of our lives on the ever-changing internet — in the same interchanging fonts and languages–are we actually leaving anything uniquely ours behind?

I understand a lot of computer use is to limit the amount of paper being printed as a part of this era’s green revolution, but why not put more pen to paper and print less mindless emails and reports? Recycling is always an option for the drafts and slightly mussed papers that live on desks, and if worse comes to worse you can still hand write successfully — without paper — using an electronic pentab and write with your own flair inklessly. But either way, something truly unique is produced, without the taint of Times New Roman.