I have a long love-hate relationship with cursive. It was certainly hatred early on, with old-style elementary school teachers insisting that my handwriting would be better if I "just tried," or if I "really cared" about it. They probably said it more nicely than that, and for all I know it might have been some beloved female relative who was my great antagonist on this. I doubt much it would have been my mother, whose handwriting was idiosyncratic. Yet thus was I kept in for recess quite often for extra practice, and even sometimes after school. Not the way to instill the concept of "really caring" about. I have terrible fine-motor coordination (which I just learned can be an Aspie trait) which meant I was also faulted for "just not being careful" on that. Also, my line about being a guitarist, which I deeply wanted to excel at, was that I had "to work twice as hard to be half as good."
Furthermore, dammit, my OCD/Aspie nature was annoyed that the forms of capital letters changed every year but each teacher insisted just as hard, including that ridiculous "2" for "Q." Fast forward to my son in elementary school, whose penmanship was better than mine but still substandard, especially when he, young for the grade, sat next to the art teacher's daughter, old for the grade. Every teacher insisted they didn't particularly care about penmanship themselves, but next year he was going to have Ms. Dragon, who cared a lot. Ms. Dragon said the same about Ms Godzilla. I just wish one of them would own that they themselves cared about this, so that I could at least once tell someone that it didn't matter.
There was always a whiff that this was ultimately about character, which girls clearly had more of than boys. There was a belief for a while that children learning to crawl properly as infants assisted their learning cursive later. I believe there is no evidence for this. Then there was the thought that better penmanship was a sign that someone would do better in Latin in future years. This strikes me as a statement that conscientious children are better at dead languages, but that this is co-occurring, not causative.
Years later I observed that town clerks and other record-keepers often had "a lovely hand," as they used to say, but that the letters, especially the capitals with their lovely identical slants and identical humps, were indecipherable. The worst we ran across was a Wyman listed in official published genealogies born in 19th C Ware, MA (a little strange, but not terribly far from wife and children's birthplace, that turned out, upon inspection of the actual document, to be Keene, NH. Though it looked really pretty. There are websites, conferences, and entire books devoted to deciphering old handwriting. This one is fun:
In 9th and 10th grades I remade my handwriting based on an idea that as a creative type, I should have creative handwriting. I would see something that another person used, such as an epsilon "e" or using the t-cross to start the next letter and work it in. People complained, yes. When I was handwriting in a hospital chart years later I got lots of whining about it, and eventually switching to a very ugly and tiring block capitals for my notes. One supervisor speculated that I must have some neurological problem to have such interrupted and uneven script. Which was insulting, yes, but gulp, might be true, right? But I had long noted with grim satisfaction that the dictation ladies loved my handwriting. "I groaned when I first saw it, but yours is the easiest writing in the building to read. Whenever you come down to write something I scoop it up as soon as you go out the door before anyone else can get it." Though as dictation and then electronic charts came in, I wrote less and less, and most of that block capitals.
A couple of years ago I bought nice stationery and a good fine-tipped pen - I did not dare go the fountain pen route, as cool as that would be - in order to write to old friends who were my age. One wrote back in cursive herself she was so inspired, and several commented on how much fun it was to get a real letter again. I've still got a little stationery left, I'll use it this year somewhere. Maybe for a 70th birthday of someone a year younger. Actually, there is one with whom I share a birthday...
When I closed down the NDT I had this last letter I thought I was going to send and then decided against it, just to show what the slow recapture of my old cursive is like.
When I take care I can write decent cursive, though not as good as my mother's perfect copperplate. But most of the time I write quickly, and find that I switch back and forth between cursive and print--probably through impatience.
ReplyDeleteI always had the 'lovely hand' in printing and cursive. I liked cursive best because it was faster. In elementary school, I got a separate grade for penmanship, and it was always an A. I don't remember ever being graded on it in later school years.
ReplyDeleteMy problem with penmanship grades started with my son who had an intention tremor due to a head injury (age 7). He had his other subject grades reduced due to poor penmanship -- though his writing was easily decipherable, if not exactly neat. It got bad enough that I hired an attorney to go to the IEP meetings with me.
Though my son was no longer getting graded on penmanship, I found out that reducing grades on various subjects due to penmanship was apparently the norm. His younger sister, who had no physical impairments was also having her math grades reduced for penmanship. As she had no IEP, I had little clout and moved all my children to private schools.
I find your letter very easy to read. My penmanship today is also a mixture of printing/cursive... a little heavier on the cursive than yours. I do think that teaching cursive is important and am thrilled my grandchildren are learning it. However, whether printing or cursive, penmanship is not related to mastery of other subjects. A possible exception to that is art/graphic design.
I used to have a good hand, but it has deteriorated with disuse and the stiffening of age. Thirty and more years ago, handwritten notes were common at work, and I knew the handwriting of all my colleagues. Handwritten notes have disappeared and I've never seen the handwriting of any of my current colleagues. I expect most of them print. My children cannot read cursive, much less write it. They can type with their thumbs, though, which is beyond my power. Almost all of my students print, most of them in what I call the Ransom Note Style,
ReplyDeleteI'm a fountain pen guy. And I went through a phase where I tried to write in cursive more, but gave it up when I looked into some historical penmanship training materials to try and learn to do it better.
ReplyDeleteCursive - as a system (systems, really) for better penmanship - was invented because it is less tiring to not lift the pen after every letter. This was important, in the pre-typewriter era, when all documents were handwritten and it was an actual career to be a copyist and spend literally hours on end writing out documents by hand.
If the end-of-day product was to be legible, you needed a system to keep your scribes from getting worn out.
So, the schools taught penmanship - because it was a good and valuable skill. If you had a good hand, you could get a job anywhere.
By the mid-1880s, typewriters were becoming commonplace (and cursive, I would argue, was becoming obsolete), yet the teaching profession continued in the same vein for at least another hundred years without ever noticing that the need for the skills they were teaching had faded.
No different than if they still required you to learn how to make buggy-whips in shop class, really.
Cursive is an effective cipher for me, although sometimes even I can't read my own writing after a while. I learned in college that if I wanted employers or professors to be able to read my writing well enough to use or score it, I needed to WRITE IN ALL BLOCK HAND PRINT.
ReplyDeleteCursive is so much nicer to use when writing letters to people rather than just plain printing.
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