Posted on 02/14/2006 2:45:26 AM PST by Marius3188
We spend our working days tapping into computers. We communicate with each other via email rather than letter. And today, as chip and pin technology becomes compulsory on the high street, even our signatures have become obsolete. Could it really all be over for handwriting? Stuart Jeffries reports
Patrick McGoohan's words are becoming less and less true as technology extends its cheerless remit. "I am not a number," he declared in The Prisoner, "I am a free man." But increasingly we are numbers - digitised and quantified, rewritten as algorithms and asked for our personal codes to confirm who we are before call centre workers will deign to bandy words with us. As if to prove the point, from this morning anyone with a chip and pin card will be obliged to use their pin number and not their signature when making a purchase. It seems odd that the powers-that-be have used Valentine's Day as the deadline for their unromantic automatisation project. Who, after all, writes poetry about pin cards? Let's have a go. "Roses are red, violets are blue, my pin number is 3, 5, 4, 2" (It isn't, incidentally. I'm not that daft).
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
When I was a teenager, I worked at a movie theater where we did not have cash registers. We had to total the concessions in our head. It amazes me that when I hand the cashier $2.07 for a $1.82 bill that they look at me like I am the stupid one.
Why is this so hard to figure out? Basic math has become an "advanced" job skill?
Mine's gotten better!
Spell-checker is your friend, as long as you remember your synonyms.
Same for me, I'm a draftsman and have been for over 30 years but I haven't been on the board for about 12 years. My lettering still looks good though. I'm amazed at some people's handwriting and how they ever got through school.
Spelling, let us talk of grammar.
I often have to read something five or six time to understand what is being written.
Journalists are the worse offenders.
Was your left hand damaged?
I grew up before computers and my handwriting was god-awful. It still is, but now I can type everything. I am very, very thankful that embarassment is out of my life.
My handwriting was always atrocious. When I became and engineer I learned to letter everything, but at least now I can write legibly.
Fine quote from one of the best episodes - thanks! (Best TV show ever - and more "current" than it was in the 60's.)
I must confess that my spelling has gotten worse since using Word. It's my fault for being lazy.
I never want to go back to the days of pen and ink. Or worse yet, stone and chisel.
I've switched to voice recognition.
It's my cheesier.
My kids can't read my cursive! They always make comments about having to sign anything; they don't like the fact that their signatures look bad. I keep telling them that when they find themselves sitting down for a stretch, get a piece of paper and practice! They haven't had to do much in the way of handwriting, except class notes, lately; they do almost everything on computers.
I fail to see why the "loss" of handwriting skills really matters. The point of handwriting was to communicate without physically present, and electronic communication fills that task admirably.
One may as well lament the lack of people able to accurately press cuneiform into clay tablets.
Just for fun, go back and try to read a handwritten document from the 17th or 18th century. While the penmanship was beautiful from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it's nearly illegible to us today.
I have to question whether computers have improved typing skills, although they have definitely improved typing speed and results. I went to college and law school from 1961 through 1967 and typed a large number of academic papers during that time. The consequences for making a typo then were horrible--at the very least I had to stop, try to erase it or white it out, and then go on. That was if I was only working with a single sheet of paper. With a carbon pack each typo or misspelling required stopping and going through the entire pack to correct the error. That meant I was very careful not to make typos.
With a computer it's all different. A typo can be corrected instantly and almost effortlessly. A spell checker lets any of us get most of the typos without even a serious proof reading. Once the spell checker has done its work proof reading can catch most of the remaining errors. However, if you looked at this post before the spell check and proof reading, you'd see it was replete with errors, far more than a document I'd typed before word processors came along would have been.
In short, since modern word processing programs make fixing documents so easy, I concentrate on typing speed more than accuracy and let the computer fix the errors before I release a document.
That is because we want information...information...information...
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