While I notice a lot of people falling back into kana (especially for harder kanji) when writing by hand, it's usually rather embarrassing to have to write comm

While I notice a lot of people falling back into kana (especially for harder kanji) when writing by hand, it's usually rather embarrassing to have to write common words in kana when in front of other people. If you're making a presentation or doing sales, you definitely don't want to be writing in kana. I'm in the same boat as patio, as I write notes by hand MAYBE once a week (now that patio quit the dayjob, I'm sure he writes a lot less often). While my reading is still at a high level (Lv 2 of the Kanji-kentei) my writing is worse than an elementary school student (currently lv 8 in writing). As an aside, in this post I misspelled about 3-4 words and would never have been able to correct them if I didn't have spellcheck... so this definitely isn't a problem limited to character-based languages.