Cursive: a dying art

The earliest computer I remember my parents owning, the one that was in the guest room, I only have a vague sort of recollection of. I do remember that the actual screen was a significantly smaller part of the computer than anything I’ve seen in a long time. I also remember that when my mom would print something out, the pages would be stuck together, and they would have to be torn apart along the serrated line, and also separated from a dotted strip on each side. I would often help my mom out with her psychology work by tearing apart the pages of the things she printed, which was ok because I was young enough that I couldn’t read the sensitive information, and I thought tearing things apart was jolly good fun. I think this computer may have been the one that had a program for designing and printing greeting cards, which I thought was pretty neat as well. I knew enough of my letters to recognize the words “Happy Birthday” and “Merry Christmas,” and to spell the names of immediate family members. The rest was accomplished by pictures from clip-art.

Around age five, I began to officially learn to read and write, from a book called Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. I hated it. I complained and squirmed every time I had to sit on that old, blue couch and work through a boring lesson. But I loved the stories at the end of each lesson. In fact, as soon as I was sure my mom wasn’t looking, I would pull the horrid, fat, yellow book off the shelf and flip through lesson after lesson, reading all the stories, until I got to the ones that were too hard and I couldn’t make out the words anymore.

I also remember scrawling out my letters as I learned them. I used that paper with the fat lines and the one dotted line going through the middle, and if I ever forgot a letter, I would double check something that was typed, because of course Times New Roman was the basic standard for the written letter. It didn't occur to me until later in life that the hand-written word was invented before the typed word.

My first recollection of using my newly-learned letters for long distance written communication was, of course, an email, probably to my grandmother. By the time I wrote this email, my parents had a newer computer in their bedroom. This computer had Windows 95, which was very cool. I remember struggling over this email, picking out one letter at a time, and asking, “Mom, how do you spell this? How do you spell that?” In the end, when my email was several lines long, I was so proud of what I had written. I had written nearly a paragraph of real typed text, which was so much more valid than anything I had ever written by hand. It just looked so perfect, those lines of Times New Roman all grouped there together on that screen.

Because I was home schooled, most of my tests, at least when I was younger, were oral. My early schooling emphasized stories and ideas rather than facts and skills (except for math, which I hated) and penmanship was never really very important. All of this changed when I attended a private school for one semester in fourth grade. My parents had always said that if I wanted to try out going to school, I could, so when I asked for it, they agreed. Suddenly, there was a strange woman teaching me every day who was very critical of my poor handwriting. One day she took me into a storage room to speak to me privately, and explained that my handwriting was very sloppy, and I was struggling with penmanship, but she wanted to help me by giving me extra homework that would help improve my handwriting. From then on, I went back to those pages with the fat lines and the one dotted line through the middle, and I would trace each letter again and again. I don’t recall for sure, but I think this may have been my first encounter with cursive. I completed the assignments and learned the letters, but I thought some of the cursive letters were rather silly, especially the cursive z. But the worst part was the connections. I could memorize the letters themselves, but the connections changed depending on what letters were next to each other, and I couldn’t figure out any kind of pattern. So I never used cursive, because it didn’t make sense to me.

One week, I had a writing assignment that was several pages long. Because I knew my teacher was still critical of my handwriting (it never improved despite pages of penmanship practice), I decided to type my assignment up and print it. This was of course a logical decision, especially considering that by that age, I could type quickly, using all ten fingers and without looking at the keyboard. When I read my story out loud to the class, everyone loved it, and laughed in the appropriate places. I was also very proud of my pages, neatly typed in Times New Roman, with equal margins, a heading with my name, and a neat little staple in the corner. I thought it was a much better presentation than the other students who had all written their stories by hand, and ended up shuffling through their pages torn out of notebooks, dropping them and getting them mixed up or stapling them facing the wrong way. When one student raised his hand and asked, “Can we type up our homework?” he was met with a firm and resounding “No!” And when I got my paper back, the teacher’s terrifying red ink had marked points off because it was typed. After that semester, I went back to home schooling.

Just before my sixth grade year, my family moved closer to a big city, and I was accepted into a relatively prestigious private school. My mom explained that I would probably be expected to write out my assignments in cursive, so I needed to be sure I knew how. Of course, I didn’t. Again, at age eleven, I went back to those horrid pages with the fat lines and the one dotted line through the middle, and re-learned my cursive letters. Then, as I moved on to words and sentences, I struggled through the connections, improvising when I didn’t know what to do. I would often pause in the middle of a word, think about how the letter ended and the next one began, try to figure out how to connect them naturally, give up and just draw the next letter with a line between the two. And occasionally I would throw in a Times New Roman letter if I forgot the cursive one. After I spent hours writing out, in cursive, my first one-page assignment to be turned in on the first day of class, my mom took one look at it, sighed, and said, “Oh well, you might as well just write everything in print from now on because it’s more readable anyway.” I had no complaint. And honestly, it didn’t matter, because none of my teachers in that school (which I only attended for one year due to financial reasons) minded that I preferred to write in print, or, whenever possible, to type things up. In fact, they liked the fact that I knew how to use a computer and was adept at typing.

A couple weeks before the start of my freshman year in college, I sat in a doctor’s office at the OU Health Sciences center, going over the results of my neuro-psych evaluation. I was about three months recovered from a major brain surgery (…well, is there any such thing as minor brain surgery?), was doing well, but being tested to see if everything was recovering properly or if I would need accommodations for a disability at my university. This doctor was fascinated by my case because my exact condition was one that had not been previously documented. The surgery had been to remove a birth defect in my brain that, at age 17, had suddenly begun to cause severe myoclonus (sudden, brief muscle spasms that were constant and only went away when I slept). [Side note: when I say “not previously documented,” what I mean is that other people are diagnosed with that particular birth defect, and other people are diagnosed with myoclonus (which is just a symptom), but no one, at least when I was at the Mayo Clinic, had ever been diagnosed with myoclonus caused by that particular birth defect.] The surgery was about 95% successful (I am satisfied with the results). During the course of that particular doctor’s visit, however, my mom happened to mention that I had never really been able to learn cursive. The doctor found this very interesting. He said that, of course, not everyone who struggles with cursive will go on to develop a rare neurological disorder, but in retrospect, because of the location of the birth defect, it may have had something to do with my difficulty learning cursive.

So I’m not afraid to say it: I’m twenty-one years old, and aside from signing my name, I don’t know how to write in cursive. But I can honestly say that since the last day of that particular semester in fourth grade, I have never once needed to. I didn’t get points counted off (that I know of) on my standardized tests for writing the essays in print. When I was accepted into the honors program at OU, they didn’t even look at my handwriting. Most of my professors require that I type up all my assignments, some of them I submit online, and nobody cares what my notes look like as long as I can read them. It’s easy to see that cursive is no longer a necessary skill, and in my opinion the time I spent learning to use a computer was much better spent than the time I spent poring over those pages with the fat lines and the one dotted line through the middle. I could sit here and be mad at my fourth grade teacher for punishing me for something that I couldn’t fix, but it wouldn’t be worth it. She may have been old fashioned and critical about the wrong things, but in the end her efforts didn’t change anything. She couldn’t stop me from typing, she couldn’t teach me cursive, and she certainly couldn’t change the fact that cursive is slowly but surely dying out.

The one way remaining that cursive still appears to be an integral part of society is the signing of signatures. Because most official documents must be signed in cursive to be official, some people would argue that some amount of knowledge of cursive is still necessary. However, based on my experience living in France for 5 months, it is possible that eventually, even signatures will no longer require knowledge of cursive. The following are examples of what actual, official French signatures might look like:

When I asked an American who had been living in France for some time about this, he pointed out that as long as the signature is distinct, recognizable, and difficult to imitate, it counts. And occasionally, when I’m at the grocery store and I have to sign one of those horrid electronic pads that makes my already-poor handwriting practically illegible, my signature, which the machine accepts, is an x. And of course, you can’t forget that in many cases, a pin number is accepted in the place of a signature. So when the day comes that the world realizes that cursive is dead (which I predict will be in the not-too-distant future), I will rejoice.