Cursive? Really?
Kind of creepy. Point taken.
“Should students still be taught cursive writing?” This is the title of a piece I came across recently in, of all places, The Costco Connection magazine. Proponents for both sides of the issue state their opinions, the yes-ers arguing that cursive helps students with hand-eye coordination, improves their ability to “chunk” letter sounds (-ing endings, for instance) which leads to better reading comprehension and spelling, and that cursive is an important part of our cultural heritage. The naysayers counter that time spent teaching cursive should be devoted to other, more important, subjects, that good handwriting is no indicator of intelligence or success (insert predictable joke about doctors’ illegible scrawls here), and that in this electronic age, the need for tidy penmanship is on its way out.
Frankly, I was surprised that anyone is even talking about this, but a quick Google search revealed that a lot of people are. I’ve never given cursive much thought, because I never learned it. I was in elementary school in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and we learned a script-print hybrid called Duvall, which I abandoned a long time ago for a makeshift printing style that deteriorates a little more each year. Of course, this is because I seem to type exponentially more each year; when I write, unless it’s a note or a list or a birthday card, I do it at my keyboard.
But the piece made me curious about how other writers work, and if the way we write actually matters. What kind of penmanship did you learn in school? What’s your weapon of choice when you’re writing? Pen and paper? Computer? Butcher paper and crayon (as visiting writer Sallie Tisdale suggested in a workshop last year)? Does what you write with change what you write?
Tags: cursive, handwriting
Interesting! I don’t have a lap top, so I often write longhand. I guess I prefer typing because I can type super fast and also I make a lot of false starts, which in pen leads to a lot of X’s and scribbles and asterixes and my own brand of foot notes.
I’m not sure cursive needs to be taught. I have a friend who was taught italics instead of cursive, which sounds more like what you learned. I wonder sometimes if typing is still taught. That’s a more relevant and important skill, I think, at least for most people. If you don’t write in cursive, you can still write fast, right? But if you can’t type, you spend a lot of time pecking, or else learning how to type in a different way. And I guess that wouldn’t necessarily be bad, but I definitely think typing is more important to learn than cursive. I hate cursive, personally, but maybe that’s because I can’t make a nice looking T.
I’m still not a writer, unsurprisingly, but I DO want to chip in.
I developed my own handwriting style a few years ago—long and straight ascenders, long and curving/short and straight descenders, well-kerned letters, and relatively huge majuscules—and it’s very pretty. I get a lot of compliments and they make me happy.
So… having a well-curated handwriting makes me happy and proud, especially these days when most people have really ugly/nigh illegible handwriting. (I am at medical school, though, so I may be part of a population tending away from the norm.) And so I think that people should keep on learning cursive because it looks great!
Another reason is cognitive. Learning how to read different scripts stretches our mental faculties in ways that aren’t found elsewhere (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/08/100831102621.htm) and having a better exercised brain is a pretty damn useful thing.
The world needs more legible doctors, so I wish you every success in medical school.
I practiced cursive penmanship for most of my growing-up years, which was considered a subject in its own right. This moves slightly off topic, but when I went to art school, we studied calligraphic forms. The basis for art class was to train the hand to draw what the eye sees, at least as a starting point (there’s that eye/hand coordination issue). But the discipline of art and of calligraphy (i.e. writing as a formal practice) points toward the end result in which one becomes adept at creating a beautiful line on paper, with ink, a brush or pen.
Secondly, through writing, one’s ideas become symbols on a page. This is true if we scribble or if we use a keyboard. However, training one’s hand to process ideas is a whole body experience. There are creative writers, like Hugo, who would insist on the writer putting pen or pencil to paper, and writing out the words as a way of getting at the physicality of what we mean. There’s a muscle memory that comes from such repetition.
My inner creative writer shows up when a pencil and paper show up. It’s the same Pavlovian experience I have when I go into art stores. The smell of paint makes me salivate. The triggers are in the tools we use. We need to keep a small notebook and pen handy for those times when a keyboard can’t be easily accessed. The more tools we use well, the better we will be at crafting art.
Finally, I think we’re changing how we know, from a physical act (writing as a discipline and an artform), to one of a virtual act (keyboarding). More, we aren’t leaving much of a legacy in the way of letters, journals, or anthropological evidence of our existence — literary tourism may become a thing of the past when there are few artifacts left behind. Scrawling, whether by cursive means, or some hardly decipherable method, is becoming a thing of the past.
You bring up an interesting point about what is left behind. Recently I have been working on a historical family history and have access to a great number of letters and documents, some mundane, some interesting. It made me wonder what scraps we will leave future generations. Then, the Library of Congress decided to start archiving Twitter feeds and facebook posts. Some people felt this was a gross invasion of property, but others thought this would be boon for future historians. This was posted recently from the PBS Newshour: From the NewsHour: by analyzing a database of 500,000 text messages sent on Sept. 11, 2001, researchers at the University of Mainz in Germany have created an hour-by-hour psychological profile of texting Americans on that day.
So, yes, this is off topic. But I think this shows that even if we don’t plan to, humans always leave a mark and a legacy. After transcribing letters sent from the Mokelumne Hill Mine in 1848, written by a very tired man near a candle, I kind of wish he had a keyboard.
When I do write longhand, I almost always write in cursive. I’m actually kind of shocked to find that people don’t want it taught or never learned it–for me, cursive flows more quickly. If I’m taking notes at a meeting, the paper will start out printed and quickly flow into cursive as I need to link the letters together for time’s sake. When I write a story longhand and it’s coming out quickly, it’s always cursive.
And see, I print much more quickly than I write in cursive, probably because that’s what I prefer to use and I’ve gotten faster at it. Interesting.
Also, printing avoids the major time-wasters of cursive: such as needlessly complex capitals (you mentioned “T”) and the joins involving difficult curves (such as the joins that cursive requires in such common letter-pairs “pa” and “sc” and “gh” and “qu”).
I guess it is just a matter of what you get used to. Also, I’ve been told I hold my pen funny–using my thumb to guide it rather than my fingers–so maybe that has something to do with it.
I think it’s more common to have a scriptified print—a handwriting that does away with the unnecessary ornamentation found in cursive while maintaining the utility found in the joined letters and flowing motion of the script.
Your article interested me because I used to know the inventor of Duvall (a Mrs. Betty Duvall, who must be quite old now) as a pen-pal — also, I have seen handwriting from children in a school using it, and I’m familiar with a few other similar writing-styles. Most people who learned to write in one of those styles hang on to it, so I’m wondering why you didn’t. What affected your decision to change.
Also, I looked up the research summarized in the sciencedaily.com article you linked to, which doesn’t say everything you thought it did.
The author didn’t link to the science daily article, a commentator named John did (see above).
Science is fun!
Also, of course it wasn’t a study designed specifically to support my thoughts on this post. That would have been too convenient. Instead, it’s a study whose incidental conclusions happen to be congruent with the general topics found in this discussion. Because science is fun, and handwriting can be pretty!
Still, you deserve my thanks for mentiioning that sciencedaily.com article, which I’d never have found otherwise (because it did say some interesting and important things, even if your brief summary over-generalized its findings).
I learned to write cursive in Catholic school, with a fountain pen, in 1984. Truth is, I liked it. Writing time was the most relaxing time of the day. They left you alone with your thoughts and there was something soothing about the repetition and the flow of ink. When my thoughts become frenetic I like to write long hand. Calms my mind and helps me check my logic. One thing is true, too, about writing time, I started to see patterns in spelling and language. I never thought it helped me with reading comprehension, but maybe it did. I think tanya is right though, maybe modern students need to learn typing. There is repetition and pattern recognition when learning typing, plus it is a bit more practical.
Yes, I goofed by not recalling that a fellow commenter — not the post’s author — had cited SCIENCE DAILY. For this I apologize, though not for having gotten some new clients because of my posting.
I’d say ditch cursive. As far as literacy’s concerned, one doesn’t need to know two varieties of script (cursive is essentially another font). I’d say teach everyone a nice, legible script and be done with it. They could use the extra time, say, reading or something.
I’ll admit I skimmed the comments here, but… with no cursive, what does that mean for one’s signature? When I’m writing, it’s sort of a weird mix of print and cursive, but signing my name, it’s always cursive.
Signatures don’t need cursive to be legal — as any attorney can tell you, your legal signature is whatever you habitually produce when you decide to sign something. For further details/source material, see the “signatures” question on the FAQ page of my web-site: http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com/KateFAQ.html
(And, yes, your elementary school teacher may have told you differently. On this matter, at least, elementary school teachers have a lot to answer for … )
Right, but aesthetically, I think it’s an interesting question. There are certain expectations we have, cultural norms. I am always shocked when I see a signature that’s not cursive, because it’s so rare for me to see.
I’m one of those block print people, but I’ve always signed my name in cursive, even when I went through an analysis of my handwriting habits a few years ago to look at legibility/efficiency. I stuck with the cursive signature. I’d be curious to see what the average signature would look like without cursive. Would it be as aesthetically pleasing? Many folks use the signature as an opportunity to add flourishes to normal penmanship. Isn’t that why we remember famous autographs visually? I mean, why is “John Hancock” a synonym for signature? Because he wrote his name in huge, beautiful script, that’s why.
It’s an interesting thing to think about.
Another interesting thing: A lot of people just scribble their signatures. My boyfriend does this, but on something super-official, like a social security card, he prints. My own personal penmanship is not aesthetically pleasing in cursive, and I don’t find cursive in general to be beautiful, though some make it look much better than me.
Cursive is so important, because the act of writing by hand helps focus thoughts. There are plenty of neuro-studies you can research on-line that back this up. Even psy-studies do so, which is why keeping hand-written journals – not e-journals – remain such an important part of psychotherapy.
In my work as a writer, I may keep an e-list on my computer of ideas, but when I need to flush out an idea, I hand-write it, as in cursively hand-write. Printing to too disjointed a process and can take me out of my thought process. Cursive writing, for me, is faster. Thoughts flow out. Once I have the kernel of the idea worked out, I take it to the computer where my fingers can then fly.
BTW: Theresa @ Rainbow Writing sent me!
P.S. I’m old enough to remember having cursive writing books in school. Beautiful writing is still very important to me, though college kind of ruined my skill.
P.S. I’m old enough to remember having cursive writing books in school. Beautiful writing is still very important to me, though college kind of ruined my skill.
P.P.S. That’s Tamara, not Theresa, from Rainbow Writing. Sorry!
Hi Sarah and Diane,
I go back and forth on this one.
I have two kids in school and they have a little bit of cursive training but some teachers make it optional, while others focus on keyboarding skills.
It’s a toss up for me.
I get exactly what Diane is saying. There’s that eye-hand connection that helps pull ideas onto the page that just isn’t possible via keyboard.
On the other hand, the kids do so much of their work on the computer, and keyboard skills are so much a part of literacy (it’s not enough to read these days, you have to have keyboard fluency as well) that cursive handwriting seems so impractical.
Tamara
Not all kids were weird (uh, I mean, motivated) like me and taught themselves to type by age 8.
But yes, I’d say they are both important, keyboarding and handwriting.
And think of all the script fonts we’d have to eliminate down the line if no one could recognize cursive anymore. ;)
Re:
“the act of writing by hand helps focus thoughts.”
That excellently justifies writing by hand.
It doesn’t do a thing to justify writing by hand *in* *cursive*.
You might with equal logic (or, rather, illogic) say: “My favorite brand of bottled water is the important one, because water is good for you.”
Re:
“think of all the script fonts we’d have to eliminate down the line if no one could recognize cursive anymore” –
You don’t need to write a style in order to recognize and read it — just look at the fancy “Olde Englishe” fonts in Christmas cards, or the equally elaborate (and equally non-cursive) fancy fonts on the covers of most fantasy novels and computer games.
I’m arriving little late to this conversation (via Flickr) but, as the “Baby Birds Cannot Fly. 3.” penmanship practice sheet belongs to me, I wanted to comment.
My mother’s penmanship was phenomenal. Beautiful, flowing Edwardian hand, she won many Palmer Penmanship Awards during the 1930′s and continued to take great pride in the beauty of her penmanship well into her 70′s. It was only when the strain of holding a pen any length of time became a burden that she made the switch to the keyboard.
And one of the first things she told me was that she wished she’d made the switch years earlier. “I would have written more ~ more letters, more notes, more recipes, more everything!”
I believe her. She was not one to become sidetracked by the junk mail of the internet ~ the games and lol-sites, certainly not the porn (I’d like to think).
I’m writing now, via the keyboard. My handwriting is not awful, some hybrid of cursive and quite-print, but with each passing year it’s clear to me it is more difficult.
I see no difference in the method by which I choose to write. My mind connects with me fingers and the words flow. It matters not if it’s via pen, pencil or printing, cursive … or keyboard. They are my thoughts and they flow.
I write. A *lot*. And I pause a lot. My errors in writing are more easily corrected via keyboard and I find I have to choose my words far more carefully on the keyboard and I’ve found ways via the keyboard to make things seem more … personal. More *me*. More fiiiilled with my emotions.
Penmanship, as all my mother’s awards go to prove, is an art. Some are artists. Some aren’t.
Writing, however, is a separate art from Penmanship. And more often than not, a person is not an artist in both disciplines.
I’m all about writing. But, when I see beautiful flowing penmanship, my mother instantly appears before me again and I smile.
xo karen