Count me in for the Death of Cursive

by Sidney Carton

A recent article at Newsweek.com discussed the falling of cursive handwriting into disuse among the schoolchildren today.  Many of the parents interviewed in the article seemed to applaud the end of cursive writing, arguing that it held their children back as a skill no longer needed nor necessary in the contemporary, computer-oriented world.  In the comments section were the rebuttals of a number of individuals whose reaction to the article must have been something like unto that of the Inquisition when faced with rank heresy.  There was outrage, contempt and a considerable amount of lamentation about the passing of the “art of handwriting” into historical obsolescence.

On any other topic I might have been among their number.  Ironic as it is, being that I am writing this in a digital media to be published on an online format, but I am not an unabashed fan of the digital.  Call me anachronistic if you like, but I prefer the physical presence of a musty old book to a PDF any day of the week.  As nice as it might be to be able to carry the equivalent to the Bodleian Library on a thumb drive (ok, maybe not yet, but at the rate we’re going…) a room with a computer, or a Nook, Kindle or iPad just doesn’t provide the same ambience of learning and wisdom as the dusty old library stacks (maybe it’s a psychotropic effect of a type of paper-based mold.)

However, in this case, I am also left-handed, and learning to write in cursive is one of the least-pleasant memories of my elementary school days.  Some of you may remember the wonders of that lovely, loopy writing that is all connected to each other, and which, upon starting a word, you are not allowed to lift your pen, pencil or other writing implement until you have finished the word, no matter how long (can you imagine writing a lovely word in German like Arbeitslosunterstutzung that way?)  Anyhow, I had and still have the worst penmanship of anyone in my 2nd and 3rd grade classes.  I say “still have” because occasionally I still write in that benighted script, not because I necessarily enjoy it, but because I still remember it, having had it drilled mercilessly into my skull by a series of dedicated elementary school teachers who were absolutely convinced that I would still  be using it daily, some 20 years later.

I owe my liberation from loopy lunacy to the intervention of a Ninth-Grade English Teacher who, looking at the odd conglomeration of Sanskrit and backwards-Arabic that made up the cursive-written first draft of an essay for her class, gave me an incredulous look and bluntly asked me, “You are going to type that, right?”  To my sheepish response that I most certainly would be, she responded with something along the lines of, “good, I don’t ever want to see a final copy of anything from you that looks like that.”  Harsh I know, but liberation often is, and that was a liberating experience for me, I was finally freed from the vain hope that someday, if I just kept at it, my cursive would finally be acceptable.  After that point, it was printing and typing for me.

Now some may look at that and note that in giving me such an ultimatum, this teacher effectively crushed any dream I may have had of ever becoming a legible cursive writer, but I don’t quite see it that way.  I have always been a faster printer than a writer, and by switching like I did, I have been able to always take notes at sufficient speed in class, while my in-class essays, hated creatures that they still are, are at least legible to those who are tasked with reading them.

As to those who mourn the loss of yet another fine manual art to mechanization and digitization, I sympathize, but not that much.  One of my current hobbies (which is ironic in light of my bad penmanship) is Calligraphy, which has long been considered a “dying” art, kept alive mostly through hobbyists and artists (at least I’ve never seen one of my fellow students taking notes in class in uncial, secretary or black letter)  Cursive will survive, it will have an afterlife much like Calligraphy and become an oddity, a left over from a previous time, cherished by those who appreciate its beauty, and dreaded by those who were one time forced to learn it.