by Lynnell Mickelsen

You'd think this story in today's Washngton Post story wouldn't get a lot of play in the blogosphere where, after all, keyboards rule.

But you'd be wrong.

Kos posted about it around 1 p.m. and nine hours later, 565 people had weighed in, far more than usually comment on the weighty events of the nation and world.

"Good riddance," Kos writes. "I am completely incapable of writing in cursive. My print writing uses some elements of cursive -- for example, my "l" and "t" letters always flow into the next letter, cursive-style. But in general, I can't think of a more irrelevant skill in today's world than learning two ways to handwrite the same thing, when most writing will be electronic in the future.

At a time when new ways to communicate are invented seemingly every few months, I won't shed tears over an obsolete, archaic and irrelevant form of communication.

(And yeah, in school, I got terrible marks for my penmanship.)"

I'm with Kos. I got terrible marks for penmanship too. I wrote in cursive only when teachers forced me to. Switched to printing as soon as I could. Started typing all my papers at age 12. Never looked back.

I have three teenage sons. None of them use cursive. My husband, age 51, uses cursive. But then again, he has good handwriting, the freak.

"Now look at Diane's handwriting," I can still hear my fourth grade teacher say. "This is what you should work towards......" Diane was little Miss Perfect, the straight-A smarty-pants who sat behind me. When the teacher left the room, Diane was the one chosen to write the names of miscreants on the board and occasionally my name ended up there, always in Little Miss Perfect's beautiful cursive hand.

I hated her. But as the years passed, I got over it. Because in addition to being a smarty-pants with perfect handwriting, she was also funny, fierce and generous. By high school, we were good friends and we stayed in contact, off and on after that. She moved out West, got married, had kids and became this award-winning high school teacher. Every Christmas, I got a card with her absolutely beautiful cursive handwriting.

Then one day, someone ran a red light and smashed into Diane's car. She instinctively put up her right hand to shield herself and her daughter. Somehow her hand was totally crushed. She had multiple surgeries to try to regain its use.

When I got Diane's Christmas card that year, the cursive was long-gone. She was learning to write with her left hand. Her printing looked as bad as mine, sort of like the chicken-scratches of a demented second-grader.I remembered how I had hated her for her perfect hand-writing. And now I loved her for this barely decipherable scrawl, the tangible proof that she had survived.