As I filled out “Please vote!” postcards before this month’s election, the hardest part wasn’t correctly copying all the names, adhering to the approved message (“Do not alter or expand this script!” warned my instruction sheet), or drawing pictures on the cards, because I was advised that words alone wouldn’t draw attention. (I drew an assortment of little colored flags with “Vote!” on them — pretty pathetic but I’m a writer, not an artist).

No, the hardest part was following the stated rule to print every single word, including addresses, salutations and exhortations. No cursive allowed, because apparently too few people can read it anymore. In my case, that was probably good advice. My handwriting seriously deteriorated during 40-plus years I spent as a newspaper reporter, writing madly in notebooks, often while moving through chaos.

Nevertheless, printing was a real slog for me, because my 75-year-old brain was trained from grammar school on to connect, which is what cursive actually is if you think about it. Cursive also trained me to create something uniquely my own, a signature that both identified and revealed the essential me.

Well, so much for all that, or so I hear from countless sources. And it makes me sad for many reasons — intellectual, artistic, and maybe nostalgic, too. It’s always discomfiting to discover that a skill you’ve long prided yourself on might soon become totally irrelevant (“I can make out what that handwriting says! And I can drive a stick shift too!).

Both my parents had gorgeous handwriting, and I love – and dearly miss – the handwriting of so many friends and relatives that I would recognize instantly if they weren’t almost always texting or emailing – just like me.

“She/he has a beautiful hand,” my late father used to say, a compliment that’s become increasingly rare. I’m appalled that some of my correspondents don’t even bother to touch the letters on their phones, instead talking to the device and – all too frequently – failing to check for errors before clicking “Send.” Talk about trying to decipher someone’s handwriting – How many times have you had to work to decipher someone’s muddled text?

Studies have shown that our brains are more active when our fingers are writing than when they are typing, and I have to believe, simply by listening to myself, that our brains are also more active when writing than when speaking. Maybe that’s another reason handwritten notes are more cherished than emails or texts. They say that the writer has really been thinking.

Remember, if you are of a certain age, practicing your signature when you were young, to make it as attractive and distinctive as you could?

Late night TV host Stephen Colbert recently chastised Maryland’s Washington College for abandoning their logo, which was George Washington’s signature, because it was “too hard for students to read.” Colbert scored points simply by pointing out the obvious, which is that the signature is WORDS. More important is that a signature has always been considered your word, and that word meant something. It still does on legal documents, even if the signature now usually comes below a request to print your name.

On Jan. 1 a Connecticut law went into effect to encourage, but not require, the teaching of cursive in grades K-8. Scholars have warned that if students don’t learn to read and write cursive, they won’t be able to read the nation’s founding documents in their original form, relying instead on translations. What scares me even more is that they may rely on interpretations.

Don’t forget, if students can’t read their nation’s founding documents in original form, they also won’t be able to read many of their own family’s founding documents – including personal letters, etc. – without someone to translate cursive. Which means they may not be able to read them at all.

I wonder how encouraging cursive is going in Connecticut schools?

Not great, I suspect, since teaching cursive remains optional, although I’m much more concerned that too many students throughout the country aren’t learning what our nation’s founding documents mean, or even what they are.

In 2010 a majority of U.S. states adopted Common Core standards for schools; around the same time a majority also stopped requiring cursive instruction. Since then, however, 24 states have put the requirement back. Kentucky will start requiring cursive to be taught in the 2025-26 school year.

Now that’s encouraging. I hope Connecticut will soon do the same.