No, this isn’t an explanation for the long posting intervals, nor is it an excuse for deficiencies in the posts I do make. I can still string sentences together and express myself in type. And I can still make readable marks on paper with a pen or pencil.
But I seem to have at least partly lost the skill of handwriting in cursive.
When I was in early elementary school, I was a year younger than my classmates, and I wasn’t really physically ready when they switched us from printing to cursive. I was terrible at it; I didn’t have the coordination yet, and I never really learned it well. So all through grade school, I got poor grades in penmanship. My dad bought special pens and pencils designed to force the fingers into the correct grip, and made me copy pages out of books. This resulted in hand cramps, but no improvement.
Then, when I entered junior high school (that’s 7th grade, 11 years old) my very first elective class (and I do mean first; it was the first class of the day as well as the first one I was enrolled in) was drafting, AKA mechanical drawing.
Back in those days, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, we had no computers. Drafting was done at slanted wooden tables, on thick paper with hard pencils sharpened to fine points, using compasses and protractors and triangular-profiled rulers. Not only did we have to draw accurately, we had to print accurately, using precise block capitals. The teacher, Mr. Arafat, was a petty tyrant who brooked no slackers. Misbehaving boys (it was all boys in those days; the girls were off learning how to cook and sew and type) were sentenced to hold a piece of paper against the chalkboard with their noses for the remainder of the class, or kneel on one of the triangular rulers, or similar punishment. The punishment for misshapen letters was also severe; each letter drawn wrong on an assignment earned you the task of drawing that letter correctly one hundred times, and if you drew it wrong any of those one hundred times, it didn’t count and you had to start over.
I came out of that class with the ability to print in neat, regular block capitals.
We all did, but most of the boys swiftly forgot it. I didn’t, though, because finally I had a way to write legibly for the first time since they had taken away our telephone-pole-sized beginner pencils in the third grade and handed out the Palmer cursive workbooks. I abandoned the difficult and seemingly pointless cursive writing, and switched to block capitals, using smaller and larger versions of the same letter to indicate capitalization. Occasionally I would encounter a teacher who would insist on cursive, but after trying to decipher a few assignments written in my illegible scrawling, they would quietly drop that requirement and I would revert to block caps again.
Thirty-seven years have gone by, and I still write that way. People comment to me on my distinctive handwriting. “You must be an architect.” “Are you an engineer?” Most guys get to adulthood with a mishmash of cursive and printing; thanks to Mr. Arafat and his classroom Napoleon complex, my handwriting is regular and even and ultra-legible. Over the years I rationalized it to myself. Some of the rationalizations are good questions, actually; for instance, why do we need to teach children four different ways of making every letter? I’ll return to that question shortly.
This morning in the shower I was doodling on the fogged up glass, and I started writing random words in cursive with my finger – and I realized I have forgotten how. Not completely; I still know how to make the letters (though I wouldn’t bet my life on the capital Q or K being right). But I have forgotten enough that I’m not sure how to join the letters any more. How do you join a lowercase b and a to write banana? I tried it a couple of different ways and it never looked quite right, or felt right. How do you make the double m in summer? It looked like a child’s doodle of an inchworm when I got done with it. I felt foolish, but then I realized, I forgot this skill because I don’t need it, just like I no longer remember how to configure upper memory management in 16-bit operating systems. It’s an obsolete skill.
For years I have been telling myself that cursive was unnecessary. I made that argument to defend my own decision. But nowadays I wonder if that’s become the right choice for everyone, not just for me. Why waste time teaching children how to write letters four different ways when most of them will never hand-write a letter in their lives? I can’t remember the last time I wrote a letter in longhand. It used to be that a handwritten letter was a sign of care and personal attention. Now it marks the sender as amateurish and technologically backward or deprived. Everyone types and emails and texts; increasingly you don’t even need to print to paper any more. I don’t miss it, and I’m not used to it; if I have to hand-write more than a few sentences, my hand cramps. Who needs that? Typing’s faster and clearer and easier to send to its destination. Handwriting now is mainly for filling out the occasional form, writing post-it notes, and labeling objects. Why do we need cursive for that?
Is it time to get rid of cursive? Was I ahead of my time? Or is there still a use for it?
I sympathise. At school I was taught penmanship, and mine was pretty good. A rather feminine hand, actually — you’ll have noticed that women handwrite more neatly on the whole. At college and subsequently I kept lots of correspondences going on dead trees. After a few years with a computer, of course, my penmanship was down the drain, and like yours, my hand cramps after a few sentences. Worse still, my mind jumps and I don’t write the letters in sequence any more, but leave gaps and infill, even in cursive. Anyone watching me must conclude that I am illiterate. I think best on a keyboard. About the only things I use a pen for is making shopping lists (which I generally forget at home, duh) and jotting notes for squibs and essays in shirt-pocket notebooks.
By the way, not all alphabetic or syllabic writing systems have capital letters anyway.
You think we have problems? I’ve been looking into Japanese; they have three separate scripts, and it is possible for one sentence to contain all three, plus romaji, plus arabic numerals. Uff da.
I write the same way – large and small versions of block letters. My penmanship atrocious, and a constant barrage of complaints comes of it. Sometimes I can’t read it myself. I have been asked if I’m a doctor by the most polite individuals subjected to my frenetic scratch.
Obviously, I too welcome the obsolescence of the handwritten word. There’s a place in my cell phone for shopping lists. I can leave my wife a typed, animated message on the screen in front of me. I can email anyone on the planet for free – birthday cards, seasons greetings, you name it. Our physician inputs prescriptions and a printer spits them out.
Will handwriting go the way of cave drawings? I doubt it. For decades to come, there will still be places where technology hasn’t eclipsed tradition, and a back-up plan in modern society still needs to be in place during power failures, etc.
But, I whole-heartedly agree that teaching multiple styles of forming characters by hand is now pointless. The keyboard layout is far more crucial to understand, and many 12 year olds can now type faster and more accurately than us ‘Boomers.
This is a contentious issue in early education, and although there is broad agreement with your analysis of the problem there is not consensus about the solution. Many favor cursive only. One factor is that most children are ready for reading and writing before it is developmentally appropriate to emphasize computer skills.
Until about seven years of age tactile, sensory learning, getting the hands dirty, smelling and tasting, has many advantages. A young child learn more about plants by actually germinating seeds and caring for a few, perhaps eating the fruit, than by having the entire world of botany at their fingertips in virtual form. Parents have been guilt-tripped into imagining that unless their children are doing everything on a computer by the age of four they will be left behind in the rat-race of life. Quite aside from the dubious view of the value of life implied by such a stance, the results have so far been most unimpressive. The main consequence of this headlong rush into virtuality has been a generation of overstimulated gadget addicts. There is little evidence that this has been developmentally advantageous.
Go ahead and call me atavistic, but I do think that sometimes the right tool for the job is a pencil. And at least for intimate correspondence, which I don’t do very much of, there’s something to be said for a piece of paper with hand written text.
By the way, my own hand writing is all but illegible.
I understand, Urban, but I’m not saying that kids shouldn’t be taught to handwrite at all, merely that it’s probably a waste of time to teach them two different ways.
Oh, I didn’t think you were militating for the total abandonment of hand writing! The debate about cursive vs. block letters as the one writing system to teach children takes many subtle twists. Cursive is faster but block letters more closely resemble printed language. A signature is probably better in cursive but that hardly seems to justify learning both, and on and on. My own feeling is that either is better than both for most children.