We try to finesse the problem without really trying to read it and we figure that's how people read, too. You bring in a lot of knowledge when you're reading someone's personal letter to you, even if the handwriting is illegible. Speaking of illegible handwriting, many people just assume that there is more and more of it these days and that it inevitably will continue, thanks to the proliferation of computers. I'm kind of skeptical because if you look at the '50s, which we remember now as the golden age of penmanship, there was a huge amount of literature saying that penmanship was going downhill because of the typewriter and the Dictaphone and the telephone. One of the companies doing this says, 'We don't just take your individual letters and string them together.
People get tired of things that are all printed with a word processor.
We like to see something a little bit more stylized. Many of these handwriting fonts are quite popular. So, at least according to these two observers, scrawl is anything but dead. It doesn't require any specialized keyboards or technology. That's a critical advantage, agreed Thornton.