on Cursive

I just read an article in the Times the other day regarding how American schools are no longer teaching cursive handwriting.  The author made two points to bemoan this loss: 1.  how will kids be able to read the original Declaration of Independence, and 2.  how will people sign their names?

First of all, in the interest of full disclosure, I have always despised cursive.  It is an invention that came about in the mid century to replace an older "archaic" form of handwriting that was supposed to be easier to learn and easier to read.  The concept was to make all handwriting look the same.  Each letter was supposed to be constructed identically by each individual in such a way as to remove anything remotely individual.  This means that even signatures were supposed to be non-individualistic, which of course is a legal problem.  More on this a bit later.

In the seventh grade my science teacher required everyone to take copious notes and then turn in a finished notebook at the end of the term.  My hand would ache and I simply could not keep up. Cursive handwriting was slow and difficult for me to master.  After a few dozen pages, I realized I couldn't read what I had written.  I decided to change my own handwriting.  I sat down and developed a new style of written alphabet full of flourishes and interesting shapes.  Then, after a week or so of honing, the curly-cues and difficult line-work smoothed out.  It was a form of printing with stylized letters.  By forcing myself to write in this new alphabet, and only in this new form, I completely changed the way I wrote from that day forward.  Although my handwriting was eventually reshaped by tedious lettering assignments in Architectural Calligraphy, many of the letter shapes have remained in my day-to-day hand writing.

Back to the article:  The Declaration of Independence is not written in cursive.  It is written in a form of calligraphy where many of the lower case letters are connected to one another but many are not.  It is very readable because most of the letters are simply italicized versions of present-day fonts with obvious exceptions being the letters "s", "r" and the capital "Q".  Even someone who has never once seen these versions of these particular letters can figure out what the document says, just as someone in present day can understand the old word: "Congreff" even though the s's look like lower case f's.  As for the signatures on the document, they are as different from each other as they are from the text itself.

This leads me to the second point of the article, that kids won't learn how to sign their names. A signature is an individual, stylized piece of writing.  If the students learned cursive the way it was meant to be taught, their signatures would, in no way, be individualistic.  I can recognize my own signature in a split second. Yet, my signature is really made up of those stylized printed letters and not cursive. Hand printing is still an individualistic style of writing, regardless of whether or not the letters connect to each other.  The human hand will always make little movements with repetitive use that are markedly individual.

So I say, let this old form of handwriting simply die out and fade away.  It has served it's usefulness and has become passe.  Just as the older forms of writing have passed on, this one should be allowed to disappear.  Sure, we can feel its loss, just as some are complaining about old incandescent light bulbs going away, but we shouldn't cling to it just because it may have had a purpose one time, long ago.  Let it go people.  Let it go.