Writing Rightly. . .again

One of my bosses, a co-worker and I were talking about writing and how we make notes for large projects such as college papers or stories. The co-worker does the spider web type of notating where as the boss and I are linear, either to the side or down below or both. The co-worker informed us that Microsoft Office has a new notating program that employs something like the spider web bubble type. I made the comment that I can't do such a thing on the computer and that all my notes have to be hand-written, along with everything else. Knowing that I'm writing a book series, the boss asked if I write out everything. I said yes, and then explained that because I wasn't exposed to computers until I was in highschool, I hadn't become reliant upon them and so the creative process melded to pens and pencils. (Though now I use only pencil.) She also knows that I write very, very, very small. The running joke at work is: "Don't let Mary write anything by hand because we can't read it without a magnifying glass."

Seriously though: The skill of hand-writing is a dying art. And though I see that computers, like the word processors and type-writers of before, are tools and that we can do nifty things, such as blogging, with them, I fear that we may have become too reliant upon them. I run into kids now that have only a two to three-week training on cursive. I remember learning it in forth grade and being required to use it for the rest of my school carreer. And when encountering these young people who text rather than write, I feel very much like the ghost ship above.