Handwriting, Typing, and LaTeX [President's Message]

In my “President´s Message” in the June issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine, I focused on the topic of reading. The present article deals with its counterpart writing. For starters, I would like to pose the following question: Is handwriting history, or is the future of handwriting still bright? An answer to this question is given in a recent essay published on the Web by Anne Trubek, where she argues that “Writing words by hand is a technology that´s just too slow for our times, and our minds.” In the community of English rhetoric and composition, the essay drew a wide variety of reactions that expressed diverse opinions. It is certainly true that writing has changed dramatically from the schools created by the Sumerians some 6000 years ago to the present way of thumbing short and cryptic text messages with cell phones or broadcasting tweets on social networks.