The year is 2025. Nineteen-year-old Billy Wilson has just completed making checks on his iPad application for a part-time grocery clerk job.

The manager asks him to sign his name next to the X.He jabs his thumb into an ink sponge and presses it onto the spot.Let's get to the point, the point of that pen that will became as extinct as the dinosaur. Handwritten signatures will soon become as unnecessary as all written documents and will be placed alongside books and newspapers for schoolchildren to see on a class trip to a "library museum."By the way, when it comes to signing your name, did you ever wonder how pointless it is to take your time scratching your signature upon that little screen when you pay your bill in the store? You could literally draw a straight line and the register computer will accept it as your personal mark.Handwriting experts claim they can tell if a Babe Ruth autographed baseball is authentic or forged. I wonder. Once I signed a check the bank would not cash because my written name didn't look like my previous signatures. After I blamed my sloppiness on my arthritis, the bank cashed the check.Remember the famous John Hancock signature? Did he always sign his name the same exact way?This newspaper recently reported that handwriting instruction in this country is being restored because it can actually be faster than inputting data on keyboards.I certainly hope so. Those states that are married to the Common Core curriculum are not required to teach cursive writing. Many of their school districts have decided that more time spent on test preparation leaves no time left for penmanship lessons.The good news is that six states from the South and Midwest have restored the teaching of handwriting.As a former English teacher, I have to admit that I had difficulty reading essays written by the sloppy hand. And yet, the personalization of ideas on these papers felt more sincere than the spell-checked, generic looking, word-processed document. Now I love to watch my own children sit at the kitchen table with pencils in hands writing answers to their homework questions.When I retired from teaching, some of my students wanted to send me letters of appreciation. I told them not to type their feelings; I wanted to remember each of them through their unique and distinctive writing styles.Justin Pott, in a recent online article, says that cursive writing is obsolete and unnecessary. Instead, schools should be teaching computer programming. He further claims that all communication that provides human connection will forever be technology-based.Throw away your pens and pencils, folks!On the other hand, Dr. William Klemm in his article from Psychology Today says cursive writing is necessary to "help train the brain to integrate visual and tactile information, and fine motor dexterity."Other research contends that we learn better when we write something down as opposed to typing on a computer. Those college students who take slower longhand notes from a professor's lecture first have to summarize key ideas in their minds before they write them down. Students who word process are much quicker, but they tend to copy the lecture from their ears and not synthesize anything into their brains.To me, it's still mostly about the personalization of the written word against the generically computer driven paragraph. Today, we encourage individuality, but then turn around and try to mandate that everyone fill hard drives from black letters on white screens.Although impractical, I would love to handwrite one of these columns and have it copied onto this newspaper page. I'd even make sure all my letters were nice and neat so you wouldn't have to squint over your morning coffee.We seem to be regressing to that time when cave men used gestures and verbal noises to talk to each other.Someday, that same kid named Billy, who signed his name with his thumb, will buy a new car by just pointing at it to a salesman, who will acknowledge Billy's purchase with a grunt and a head nod in return.Rich Strack can be reached at

katehep11@gmail.com.