With emails and texts taking over from letters and even notes, the paper trail we have left behind us for centuries now may be finally coming to an end, writes  FIONA McCANN.

OVER THE PAST 24 hours, I have typed somewhere in the region of three thousand words. I've used my computer for work and for private emails; used my mobile phone for text messages to friends and colleagues. It appears I have little use for something as antiquated as a pen, and while I see them, lidless and languishing everywhere, sliding off desks and inking up pockets, it's been a while since I've even seen anyone use one. It seems that with emails and texts taking over from letters and even notes, the paper trail we have left behind us for centuries may be finally coming to an end.

There are those who would see this as progress - from fingertips to quills to the now ubiquitous (until you actually require one) biro, handwriting has evolved in style and format over thousands of years, and just as we no longer dip feathers in ink to scratch out epistles and lengthy, paragraph-free documents, it seems altogether possible that handwriting will soon be replaced altogether with the keyboard tapping and keypad punching alternatives now available.

"The reason we study cursive writing in school is because it improves spelling," says Sinéad Fahy, an educational psychologist and primary school teacher who has done extensive research into handwriting programmes for primary school children. "It's not just a punishment thing!" According to Fahy, children learn the essential life skills of reading and spelling through the combined implementation of all of their senses, including that which relates to touch and movement, which Fahy calls the kinaesthetic sense.

"With cursive writing you're employing this sense, and multiple intelligence theory suggests that the more senses you employ to learn something, the greater your chance of learning it." In other words, just the act of holding a pen and moving it to shape a word can help in the skills associated with literacy. "If you feel the rhythm of writing the word, that becomes another cue to pull it back," she says.

THE HOURS SPENT looping letters around a ruled grid may seem like a painful process for restless children, but learning cursive writing has added benefits for those with learning difficulties. "It reduces the risk of you misplacing the letter order," says Fahy, who points to the confusion between similar letters like b and d that is often exhibited in children with learning difficulties. "B and d are very different letters in joint writing," she says. "They start in different places and end in different places, so they become more discernible as different letters than they do in separated [print] form, they become more easily identifiable."

In fact, learning how to handwrite has an important role to play in children's cognitive development, which is why so much time is devoted to teaching it at a primary school level. "It's not an automatic skill," says Fahy. "It has to be taught and you have to practice it."

In order to get to a point where pushing a pen across paper to form coherent sentences becomes second nature, children are taught with very specifically developed methods, that start by honing pre-writing skills using crayons and coloured pencils, and move towards shapes and symbols before eventually introducing letters and words. Even the letters themselves, when they are finally taught, are introduced in a very specific order.

"The letters are taught in a particular order to do with when they'll be used in spelling. Your spelling and your writing are completely linked," says Fahy. "It helps your reading as well, because you learn to write from left to right. It really is an interconnected skill."

Yet, despite such uniform programming and the fact that teachers spend hours telling us where to start and end each letter and how to join them all together, we somehow still manage to leave school with distinct variations of the standard handwriting techniques handed down.

The often illegible scrawls that result may be an argument against the retention of handwriting, but the fact that we all produce such individual variations on the school-taught standard is what has given rise to a branch of study, known as graphology.

"Everyone is taught at school a standard way to write, but over the years everybody's handwriting becomes a little different from the way they're taught," explains graphologist Caroline Taylor, author of the ebook The Art and Science of Handwriting Analysis. "It's these differences the graphologist looks at, because in those differences there are symbolic expressions of the person's character."

Taylor says the concept of graphology - studying handwriting - dates back centuries, with the first essay on the subject appearing in the 17th century, although it wasn't until 1872 that a French monk developed the links between handwriting and the human characteristics it can reveal.

FOR TAYLOR, EACH individual interpretation of the standard alphabet we were taught at school reveals something about the person holding the pen. "One obvious example would be the size of handwriting," she says. "If somebody writes very large, they're quite likely to be an expansive extrovert, whereas if they write small and precisely they tend to be a controlled figure who likes facts and figures."

Aware that her profession is given short shrift in some scientific quarters, Taylor says experience has taught her to trust in it completely. "I can see it works and the principles behind it are very logical," she says. Others are trusting her too, with companies availing of her services to obtain character profiles based on the handwriting of potential employees to supplement the interview procedure.

"It is a very tried and tested way of getting a character profile," she says. "I look at about 14 different handwriting features, look at them all separately and weigh them all up together." In doing this, Taylor says she can extrapolate the kind of information that may swing an employer's decision in someone's favour, from the psychological and physiological clues in their handwriting.

"You can tell a lot about people's state of health from hand pressure and rhythm," she says as an example of the kind of information she gleans from her tests. "By how connected the handwriting is and the way it's spaced, you can tell how likely somebody is to relate to other people." Such assessments will set a potential employer back £95 (€118), although for Taylor, working out what your handwriting says about who you are is only the beginning.

She also works in the area of graphotherapy, where small changes encouraged in the subject's handwriting are introduced to alter unconscious thinking and behavioural patterns. "It works in a somewhat similar way to NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) by helping to create new neural pathways or, in handwriting terms, more positive habits in the way we represent ourselves symbolically on paper," she explains on her website.

WHATEVER ITS potential as a therapy trigger, handwriting analysis has become so respected that experts have appeared in court rooms as witnesses in criminal cases, with forensic graphologists particularly in demand when it comes to poison pen letters. Taylor has assisted in cases involving suspected forgeries, her skill in comparing scripts enabling her to spot fraudulent signatures.

Yet with the advent of chip and pin, even signatures seem to be becoming a thing of the past, and if they do end up being replaced by thumbprints or numbers, and if handwriting gives way ultimately to touch typing, will the human race be that much worse off? "There's an argument that if you learn touch typing, you develop a kinaesthetic sense around typing a word," admits Fahy, when queried about whether typing could replace handwriting in schools without affecting children's cognitive development.

But she is adamant that letting handwriting fall off the curriculum altogether would be a mistake. "It's not a bad idea to encourage more use of a keyboard, but the skill of handwriting is still worth learning, and it's worth being able to do it."

Taylor, perhaps unsurprisingly for a graphologist, agrees. "I think people will always have to write," she says. "There will always be a place for handwriting."

WHAT YOUR HANDWRITING REALLY SAYS ABOUT YOU

Size:According to graphologists, the bigger the writing, the more outgoing the writer, while those with a small, neat hand tend to be ordered, introverted types.

Slant:Handwriting that slants to the right is done by people who easily express their feelings, while that which slants to the left comes from those who prefer to keep their cards close to their chest and control their emotions.

Position:Writers who stick to the lines on a page are more likely to conform to rules, graphologists suggest, while those who ignore lines altogether are the free radicals among us.

Pressure:Those who lean heavily on the pen or pencil are more likely to be energetic, physical and passionate people, while those who make very little indentation on the page tend to possess a more cerebral than physical nature.