🖊️ What We Lost to Keyboards

Writing Becomes a Lot Less Emotional When It's Rendered in Helvetica — Plus, the 22-Year Old CEO Building the Shopify of DeFi

Author

Katie Perry
May 20, 2025

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The Big Story: The Quiet Extinction of Handwriting

You can’t read this email in my handwriting — and that kind of sucks. I tend to skew very tech in these newsletters, but today I want to go analog.

The big question on my mind:

My handwriting, unchanged since the Backstreet Boys dropped “Millennium.”

I got to catch up with a high school friend over the weekend (Hi, Danielle and go buy her absolutely gorgeous pottery!) and we got to talking about handwriting and how it has so many more dimensions of meaning than digital fonts. We were even able to go through our core teenage friend group and describe everyone’s handwriting style with alarming specificity — this many years later!

What’s interesting about handwriting is that it is such a unique identifier of our personality, and even our present mental state. Nobody’s handwriting is exactly the same, and there are infinite ways handwriting can come to life, with things changing by the day or hour, even. We have a lot of fonts these days, but we’re still “boxed in.”

For centuries, handwriting wasn’t just how we recorded things; it was how we revealed ourselves. A script could be neat and measured or sprawling and emotional. You could guess someone’s confidence, education level, or even how fast their mind was moving just by looking at how they formed their letters. It was an identity marker as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Marketing mastermind Taylor Swift has made her handwriting a core part of her brand identity.

In 19th-century America, cursive was considered not just a practical skill but a moral discipline, taught to develop character through neatness and self-control. Many other cultures have similarly revered handwriting as both communication and art: Japanese calligraphy (shodō), Islamic calligraphy, and Western illuminated manuscripts each carried spiritual and cultural weight.

1950s cursive aesthetic

Today, most of us are more likely to type than to write by hand. The Common Core standards adopted by most U.S. states in 2010 dropped cursive handwriting instruction, shifting focus to typing proficiency instead. Since then, younger generations have grown up barely learning to read or write in cursive. Some can’t even sign their names.

What We Lose When We Stop Writing

It might be easy to shrug this off as progress. But research shows that handwriting is more than a quaint habit. Writing things down shapes how we think, feel, and remember.

A frequently cited study from Princeton and UCLA found that students who took notes by hand performed better on conceptual questions than students who typed. Writing by hand slowed them down, forcing them to process and summarize information rather than transcribe it verbatim. Anecdotally, I simultaneously manage a robust Asana project tracker and go through about 2.5 physical notepads a week.

Another study from Norwegian University of Science and Technology using EEG imaging found that writing by hand produces richer brain activity than typing, activating areas tied to memory, learning, and sensory integration.

Beyond the cognitive science — and this is the aspect that crushes me most — handwriting offers a human dimension that typing erases. A handwritten note carries emotional depth: your choice of ink, pressure, slant, and even spacing says something. Typed text is uniform. It can’t tell someone you were tired, or excited, or rushing. But handwriting can.

Somewhere at the bottom of my “paperwork” box at my apartment, I have decades of handwritten notes saved. Birthday cards from Grandma. A Post-It note my mom sent me in college that simply said she was proud of me. Vestiges of past relationships that have since faded away.

When we lose these physical artifacts, we lose nuance. And we lose a bit of humanity.

A very dramatic breakup letter that was sent to me circa 2009.

Cultural and Historical Disconnects

The loss of handwriting also separates us from the past. Letters from soldiers, handwritten recipes, and even the U.S. Constitution are more than their content. They’re physical, personal artifacts.

Former U.S. Archivist David Ferriero warned that if younger generations can't read handwriting (specifically cursive), they’ll need translations of their own history: “We’re sacrificing generations of students who won’t be able to read our records,” he told NPR. Imagine needing subtitles for a birthday card from your grandmother.

That’s why some states, including California, are reversing course and bringing cursive back into public education. It’s not about nostalgia. It’s about preserving access to our culture, our families, and our past. I’m not even going to attempt to weigh in on the U.S. education system, or what should or shouldn’t be included in it, but I don’t hate this move overall?

The Push to Preserve and Revive

Archivists and educators are actively working to preserve handwriting, both as a skill and as a cultural asset.

The U.S. National Archives runs crowdsourced transcription projects where volunteers help decipher and digitize historical documents. The Library of Congress’s By the People program does the same, offering public access to letters and diaries from figures like Abraham Lincoln and Clara Barton.

There are even cursive "boot camps" for kids, like those held by regional historians, who see handwriting not as a relic but as a bridge to history.

On the creative side, modern calligraphy and bullet journaling have fueled a resurgence of handwriting as a hobby and art form. Communities on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram celebrate handwriting's beauty and imperfection — the very things digital fonts can’t replicate.

Bringing the Human Back

So, what? We toss our laptops and start writing longhand memoirs somewhere in a Scottish cottage? (Actually, that sounds awesome.) Technology, of course, has its place. But in a world where much of our communication is automated, compressed, and ephemeral, the handwritten word offers something precious: presence.

Writing by hand takes longer, but sometimes it’s worth it. And that’s because, as my friend Danielle so accurately put it, writing things out is such a physical experience in a way that voice to text or typing just isn’t.

So next time you’re tempted to send a thank you via text, try a card. Journal your thoughts with pen and paper. Send that postcard to your friend 11 blocks away. You’ll make their week. Because even if it’s messy, it’s you. And that’s worth keeping around.

Daily Rip Live: This CEO is Building the Shopify of Defi — Plus, New Nvidia News, Vibe Coding, and Moody’s Negs the U.S.

Catch us LIVE every weekday M-Th at 9 AM EST!

Every weekday, we cover the biggest market news and events LIVE on Stocktwits’ morning show, The Daily Rip Live.

To kick off the week, we hosted Eric Chen, the 22-year-old CEO of Injective Labs. His company has raised $190 million to essentially build the Shopify of DeFi — that is, they are creating modular systems that allow developers to adopt DeFi functionality into their apps. We also covered what was a pretty eventful weekend in business news: Moody’s downgraded the U.S., Nvidia made some major announcements, and Apple had a China problem and now it has an India problem (according to the White House).

🎤 BONUS! One thing I love about hosting financial news is the exposure I get to different types of companies. I recently interviewed Kaan Terzioglu, CEO of VEON, which is basically if Google, Verizon, and Sofi had a baby (that only went to market in extremely high-conviction, emerging markets, like Ukraine and Pakistan). Watch the 20-minute Q&A here. $VEON ( ▲ 4.56% )  

Now Here’s a Chart

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs draw from several sources when producing answers and navigating workflows on behalf of users. One source — a true OG of the internet — is quietly commanding a lot of the influence, and that’s Wikipedia.

Joshua Blyskal analyzed sources cited across ChatGPT, Google AI, and Perplexity and found that beginning in November 2024, Wikipedia became much more heavily sourced. It peaked in March 2024 before nose-diving to as low as 4% of sources cited.

TL;DR: Wikipedia is an important input, but these LLMs are finicky, and similar to the Google algorithm, seem to be constantly in flux.

Reading List

🎧 Now playing: â€œWords” - Bee Gees

Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.