I was in a writers' meeting once when one of the members pulled a letter from her purse.

Her sister had sent it, she said, and the handwriting was so bad she'd defy anyone in the room to read it.

She placed it on the table with real drama.

Joyce and I leaned over. Read it out loud without missing a beat.

“Dear Margaret, thanks for the birthday card...”

The writer stared at us like we'd just deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

Here's the thing — we hadn't developed better eyesight. We'd developed pattern recognition. Years of reading handwritten copy requests from sales reps will do that to you. You learn that a particular squiggle is probably an R. That three humps followed by a slash means Wednesday. That something resembling the ele...

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