The next big thing is… handwriting. And it should only set you back a couple of grand to rescue this dying art.

On November 7 next, the computer industry will unveil its next great technological breakthrough. It’s called handwriting. Apparently you take a small, pointed stick-like object, called a stylus (from ‘style’, which Chambers defines as ‘a pointed instrument for writing on wax tablets’) and make squiggle-like movements with it on a screen (called a ‘tablet’ – ‘a slab or stiff sheet for making notes on’). These squiggles are then pondered by a powerful computer which concludes, after much calculation, that they constitute the message ‘Tge big brownn fqx jumpz over tge lasy doge’ and prints same on the aforementioned screen.

We do not yet know how much we will have to pay for this miracle, but the New York Times (from which nothing is hidden) thinks the new Tablet PCs will ‘probably cost slightly more than a good notebook computer’. Which being translated means anything from UKP1,500 to UKP 2,500.

There are some rich ironies here, are there not? This is an industry which, in the last two decades, has more or less wiped out the art of handwriting in the industrialised world. Most intensive keyboard users – and that nowadays includes every white collar worker – have effectively lost the ability to make marks on paper that are legible, never mind attractive. I was reminded of this the other day in a cafè when I watched one of my colleagues take a phone call and scribble down a note as he spoke. The following day I came upon him frowning at the marks he had made, unable to decipher them. If he had taken the call in his office, he would have typed the notes into his word-processor and they would have been preserved, clear as a bell, for posterity. But because he had used pen and paper, they were lost for ever.

Interestingly, the higher up the occupational ladder one goes, the worse it gets. It’s the lawyers and accountants and stock-market analysts – the professionals whose time is most expensive, in other words – who have become most addicted to keyboards as tools for efficient working, and whose handwriting has atrophied as a result. Plumbers and electricians and bricklayers, in contrast – folks who have never touched a keyboard in their working lives – are still able to write a note capable of being read by another human being.

You think I jest? Well ponder this: in the US, where many children are taught touch-typing at school, the National Cursive Handwriting Contest for elementary school students will not be held this year for the first time in its century-old history. Good handwriting ‘has died on the vine for lack of use’, says Robert Hurford, editor of the newsletter for the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting. ‘If you don’t practice it, if you don’t use it, it goes away.’

But all is not lost, because the computer industry – led by the nose, as always, by Microsoft – is riding to the rescue of the dying art of handwriting. It has decreed that the next generation of computer users will interact with their Tablet PCs by writing on them. And because handwriting recognition is difficult at the best of times, the tablets will prove irritatingly obtuse unless their users begin to write legibly. The fact that good handwriting will thus be rewarded by faster and more accurate recognition will set off one of those stimulus-reward conditioning cycles beloved of behavioural psychologists, and lead to a rapid improvement in the nation’s stylusmanship.

It is a heartwarming prospect, is it not? Instead of having to type ‘The big brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ on a boring old steam keyboard, we will be able to scribble them on a Tablet, which will then interpret and – hopefully – convert them to semi-accurate print. And all for only UKP 1,500. The only snag is that you will still have to write the cheque with an old-fashioned pen. If you can.