MARK MY WORD: AMERICA SUFFERS FROM POOR PENMANSHIP

America is suffering from absolutely appalling penmanship.

"Cost of Awful Handwriting Set At $200 Million a Year," a recent newspaper headline blared.

I've always had bad handwriting, but I never realized until now that my personal scribbles were part of a national problem.

The crisis takes the form of mystery memos, undecipherable prescriptions, unenforceable parking tickets and illegible mail addresses.

When I was growing up, my teachers tried to teach me good penmanship.

I didn't do too badly when I was printing on the big-lined paper. But I had real problems with cursive writing. All those pencil lines just sort of flowed together.

Of course, there are advantages to bad penmanship, particularly when you are short of facts on an essay test.

Abraham Lincoln scribbled down the Gettysburg Address. Had he been concentrating on his penmanship, the speech would have been even shorter, probably something on the order of: "Thanks for coming."

My daughter, Becca, writes in a distinctly confusing style of jumbled lines that are almost as illegible as doctors' prescriptions. But then she's only 2.

Patients can never read prescriptions. That's why they have to go to a pharmacist who has had years of training in reading bad handwriting.

Hospitals have known this for years. You don't get scrawled bills from them. They come to you typed fresh from the computer so you'll know you really do owe a zillion dollars unless you are a third-world country, in which case there is no charge.

The University of Pennsylvania Hospital pharmacy makes about 200 calls a week trying to decipher bad handwriting.

The American Medical Association says that illegible handwriting by doctors has resulted in the wrong medication being given to patients. No doubt, that explains how a perfectly normal purple dinosaur like Barney could become a sugary, singing fiend.

The University of Pennsylvania Hospital is planning to install a new computer system just to avoid bad penmanship.

Doctors will enter prescriptions and medical orders on a keyboard, eliminating the need for the hospital to hand out all those ballpoint pens with their logo on them.

Dade County in Florida will soon issue parking tickets with a hand-held computer as a way of collecting an estimated $2 million a year in fines lost partly due to bad handwriting.

The computer will issue a ticket that doesn't smear in the rain or get lost. Personally, I'd take a rain check.

The Philadelphia Parking Authority is sending some of its officers back to school to learn how to write in nice, neat block letters. Coloring books are optional.

Ticket takers might be advised to avoid reading and writing entirely and stick to line drawings.

All of this raises a troubling question: Is handwriting dead and buried?

I don't think so. There will always be those little Post-it notes all over my desk, and plenty of scrawled words in my reporter's notebooks.

Still, perhaps I should save them. Who knows, even bad handwriting might be worth something some day.

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.