Coming up on today’s Moncrieff Show, stationery geek Barbara Feeney will once again welcome Seán inside her cupboard, revealing the lost art of letter writing.

From pen pals to Valentine’s Day cards, Barbara will be enveloping Seán in epistolary excitement, so tune in live at 2.45pm: http://www.newstalk.com/player/

Handwriting, an essential part of the letter-exchanging experience, is a dying art. Not just serif-ed scribbling, but even neatly ordered joined-up handwriting. As digital devices replace pen and pencil, their ability to cover up hasty spelling mistakes means we’re writing fewer and fewer letters every year.

But now, at least, there’s a smart pen that makes sees when you’ve put I before E after C, and alerts you to it.

The Lernstift, a German start-up, is a haptic smart-pen that spellchecks as you scribble, vibrating when you muddle things up. Not only that, the Lernstift is a stickler for precise penmanship, so will also angrily buzz whenever your handwriting’s neatness starts to step into illegible scrawl territory.

At least that was the theory when its creators launched a failed Kickstarter campaign in 2013 - but it failed to reach its funding goal. Now, a version of the pen that can be used as an alternative to computer keyboards for writing words in documents and spreadsheets and another to help children learn how to spell is for sale on the company's website. 

Whether or not an invention like this will have us all sending letters once again seems unlikely. But it would be an ideal present for a certain Newstalk personality to offer the station’s resident stationery mistress...