March 24, 2009

I experienced an entirely unexpected revelation while preparing for our 5 o'clock newscast a few days ago.

It was shortly after 4 pm.... time for me to step into our little audio-recording booth and voice, what we call, the "cold open" for the news broadcast. That's the little 20-second presentation you see and hear at the very top of many newscasts.
We say things like, "Now on Channel 4 news.... etc, etc, etc, etc..." while showing video snippets of the stories we're about to present.

After tweaking a few words here and there on my computer screen, I hit "print" to produce a paper copy of the script to take into the audio booth.
At least I thought I was printing it.
Turns out, our printers were temporarily jammed, or broken, or off-line, or whatever happens to printers when they don't work.

While our team of "printer experts" labored to get everything working, I knew -- with deadline approaching -- the voice track needed to be done, so our video editors could assemble it for the newscast.

"No problem" I said, "I'll just write it out in long hand on a piece of paper and read from that."
So I wrote it out.
Then came the revelation.
When I got to the recording booth, I couldn't decipher what I had written.
It looked like the most unintelligible words a doctor ever scribbled on a prescription pad.
The writing was chaotic and unfamiliar.
My handwriting has changed.... and not for the better.
Was this a "sign" that perhaps I'd missed my calling... that I should've gone to medical school?

Until fairly recently I always felt I had neat, legible handwriting. I used to get compliments on it.
In fact, in grammar school (a few short years ago) I was occasionally recognized as having among the best penmanship in our class.

But the truth is... in this age of computers, email and text messaging... most of us don't write lengthy compositions in longhand anymore.
Sure, I'll utilize handwriting for "to do lists"... sticky notes... checks or greeting cards.... but it's rare when I use cursive writing for full paragraphs or pages.
It wouldn't surprise me if handwriting deteriorated into a lost art for our descendants somewhere down the road.... and that would be sad.

Where's my calculator?
I need to figure up how many years it's been since I wrote in longhand almost exclusively.

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