Is good handwriting still an important skill to learn or should schools stop wasting time worrying about it ? Is good handwriting still an important...

Handwriting is obviously an important skill
to learn. It separates civilized people from savages. It is especially important in college for
taking notes and writing bluebook exams. But good handwriting is pretty much a matter of the
individual. He or she might learn good handwriting in elementary school and allow it to
deteriorate over the years. Girls always have much better handwriting than boys because girls
care more about such things and also because they have what is called something like "finer
small muscle control." Leo Tolstoy, the great writer, had terrible handwriting, although he
must have had to practice it for years in school. His wife had to copy his novel War
and Peace seven times! It could not have gone to the printer in Tolstoy's own
handwritten manuscript because no printer would have been able to read it.

Just making clean copies of Tolstoys manuscript was a considerable
job in itself. Apparently no one else in the house could make out his almost illegible
handwriting. And making one clean copy was never enough, for Tolstoy would rewrite it and hand
it back to her for copying again. Sonya once said she had copied the novel seven times. Since it
runs to 1,453 printed pages in my edition, that means that her fair copy came to at least 3,000
manuscript pages. So she must have written down in her own careful handwriting 21,000 pages. And
this does not include countless pages that Tolstoy, as his daughter Tanya noted, threw
away.
                      William L. Shirer, Love and Hatred, p.
69