The Art of Handwriting

I've always believed that handwriting, particularly cursive handwriting, is an art form; each stroke or flourish, whether it's a loopy "L", an elaborate "A" or some elegant "E", being unique to a single artist.

One can learn quite/assume quite a bit about a person just from his penmanship; perhaps I could say it offers a glimpse into one's soul.

Kids enter the realm of writing by scribbling; annoying as you may find those doodles scrawled on every wall of the house 2 feet off the ground and below, those are the formative steps of a young, developing brain, the result of multiple synapses firing in unison. Scribbles are soon replaced by stick figures and finally cartoonish ABC's on a sheet of paper that may sometimes find their way onto a refrigerator door.

Image credit : parade.com

In a year or two, those awkwardly shaped ABC's will soon begin to to merge together to form what we call "cursive".
To a kid, learning to write is basically like learning to draw, and just like every artist has his own unique form, each one's writing has its own uniqueness.

Looking at old works and writings is like admiring a work of art; they hold lot of memories, particularly if it's the writings of a loved one or someone who's no longer there.
I'd found a few letters my friends and I'd exchanged over the years while I was clearing up my drawers and going through them imbued in me a sense of nostalgia for the good old days gone by and also how much we've grown or changed since then.

Perhaps at this point you may be wondering as to why I decided to choose this as a topic for my post; to be honest , one reason is that I just got myself a shiny new fountain pen (yippeeee!) , the second is due to the reduced use of cursive writing in our daily lives.
Heck, the other day I'd come across an article in the papers which stated that apparently in some schools in the US, kids in their teens can't even sign their names in cursive!
It's a known fact that writing in cursive uses a lot more connections in your brain than just plain printing.
It is a character building tool in one's arsenal of life skills.

Writing cursive is unique. Writing cursive is an art. Writing cursive is your personal stamp of individuality that sets you apart from the multitudes.