HAMDEN, Conn. - "The moving finger writes," says the famous Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "and, having writ, moves on." Nowadays, the finger more likely is hammering away on a computer keyboard, texting on a cellphone, or Twittering on a BlackBerry.

If you predate the computer age, you might remember a school subject called "penmanship," which trained your cursive handwriting, usually by the Palmer Method. The penmanship teacher would come by once a week to rate your work, and if your handwriting was bad, you'd hear about it. It's still taught, to be sure, but it's no longer emphasized. "There's been a decline in attention to all kinds of basic skills," said Louise Spear-Swerling, coordinator of the graduate program in learning disabilities at Southern Connecticut State University. "With handwriting, people think it's just not that important."

Some people are concerned, though, and one is Kitty Burns Florey, whose book "Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting" comes out Friday - John Hancock's birthday and National Handwriting Day. Florey, author of nine novels and a book about sentence diagramming, became interested in the subject after reading that computer keyboarding has displaced handwriting in schools.

"My first reaction was horror," Florey said in an interview at her home, "then I thought, 'Why would anyone use handwriting in today's world?' I write my books on the computer. I discovered two schools of thought: One is that it wouldn't matter if nobody learned handwriting because we all have computers, and the other is that this is an interesting, historic, valuable, and beautiful skill that has been around for thousands of years, and we are just tossing it out."

Diane Desmond, who has taught fourth grade for 39 years at Fall River's Letourneau Elementary School, says pressure on teachers to improve test scores is partially to blame. "Cursive was always taught in the third grade," she said. "In the last four or five years, I've had more students who have trouble with it. This year, I have five or six. They have trouble reading it, too."

Victoria Munroe of Northampton, who taught for 10 years in the New Salem-Wendell district, said she had no training in college or the school system on the teaching of handwriting. "I walked in and they said, 'Here are some worksheets; see what you can do.' The kids couldn't write, they couldn't hold a pencil, they were tiring, and I was supposed to be moving them into words and sentences and paragraphs." Finally she took a workshop, on her own initiative, in the teaching of handwriting.

To previous generations, clear and speedy handwriting was essential to everything from public documents to personal letters to generals' orders in battle. As literacy became more widespread, various handwriting methods arose. There was italic, starting in the 15th century, and then in the 17th century came roundhand - called copperplate in the United States - seen in the Declaration of Independence and the script of Benjamin Franklin. In the 1820s, Platt Rogers Spencer developed the Spencerian script, which became the American standard in schools (it survives in the Coca-Cola logo).