Penmanship In A Love Letter

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Penmanship is an art that is slowly dying at the hands of technology. It’s truly unfortunate that generations and to come don’t and won’t realize the immense importance of the art of writing by hand. This phenomenon runs parallel to the proliferation of computers in the home, classroom , and everyday lives of people. It is all too common for a senior in high school to not know how to write in cursive, or be confused by the thought of comprising sentences in a manner that inspires the feelings embedded in the message without having to read the message itself. The art of penmanship is to not just draw shapes and lines that form letters that form words to be interpreted once read, but to let corresponding passion manifest in the style in which …show more content…

There’s also a satisfaction in appreciating the beauty of, not only the message contained in a love letter, but the construction of it as well. Whether it’s intended or subconscious, the style in which a love letter is written speaks to the author’s mood while composing it. Long, whimsical strokes of his pen come together to form words that are meant to invoke the same feelings in the recipient that floods the author’s own body. Perhaps the way he writes his words, leaning slightly to the right, is reminiscent of the way he leans in to kiss the cheek of his lover. His tendency to exaggerate the loops of the L in love reminds his lover of the way he throws his arms around her in a playful, loving embrace. The same letter composed on a computer may get the same message across, but lacks the personal appeal of its handwritten counterpart. I’ll go as far as to say that typography lacks the mere ability to be completely personalized, much less saturated with the kind of sentiment that the handwritten letter can’t help but …show more content…

No longer will lovers look forward to the excitement of receiving a letter in the mail, opening the envelope, likely having been sealed with a kiss, and gazing upon a beautiful masterpiece created solely for them by the hands of someone dear. A love letter will be typed into a program, edited to perfection by computer software, pasted into an email, and sent with a click of a mouse, thus, losing any magic that the original thought may have contained. Eyes will no longer trace loving loops of inked whimsy, but rather jump from letter to letter, from word to word, as if a program is being loaded into a human processing center to be computed then filed away. I love you will be sung in the robotic, monotone voice of Arial Black rather than with the inflected beauty and harmony of words written by hand. The magic of a composed “I love you” should never be reduced to the pecking away at a keyboard or the click of a mouse, but be expressed in a manner befitting of its infinite depth, a heart feeling it, a head thinking it, and a hand bestowing it to a medium worthy of the message and in a style reflective of what that message

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