[kixiQu]

If I handwrite a letter, I'm filtering before and while I write to reduce all the nonsense that might pass through my head down to something I hope will be of interest to the recipient.

If I tweet, I can shoot out all of that nonsense to the world, secure in the knowledge that the filtering labor will be done in combination by some subset of potential recipients (whose choices to engage or not will provide the fodder that the Twitter feed-building algorithm can use to determine whether it's passed the filter).

This might then indicate that a skill that might be atrophying is the ability to filter one's own writing for relevance/value, not just to produce it in cursive.

I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine what other signs they would look for to confirm or disconfirm this hypothetical atrophy.

[tootie]

Haha you were never passed notes in high school. My most embarrassingly awful messages were all hand written. I am very careful with my emails because editing is so easy.

[kixiQu]

I passed notes extensively in high school – it's a lot of them I'm thinking of! A friend has saved a box of the ones I wrote her and it's fun to revisit.

Email's interesting because there's traditionally been very little of that social-media-feed-style automatic sorting / filtering outside of spam (not that the "priority inbox" concept isn't trying) so the weight still properly lies on the sender to make the missive easy to handle. I too edit the bejesus out of all my work emails, but it's a different skill than having to compose a coherent first draft without easy edits.