On 16 September 2022, Drew Gilpin Faust, a scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. history who specializes in the Antebellum South and who served as the president of Harvard University from 2007 until 2018, published an essay in The Atlantic titled “Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive,” in which she conveys her shock, consternation, and sorrow at having recently discovered that the majority of undergraduate students nowadays cannot read cursive and that, of those few who can read it, even fewer can write it. She expresses worry that, as a result of not being able to read cursive, students will not be able to read historical documents written in it and will be cut off from the historical past. This piece set off many conversations about cursive instruction in the U.S.
I am currently a twenty-three-year-old first-semester master’s student who just received my bachelor’s degree in May of this year, so I am very close in age to present-day undergraduates. Contrary to the sweeping declaration in the title of Faust’s article, I did receive full instruction in how to read and write cursive from third through fifth grades. Nonetheless, I think that the ongoing decline of cursive instruction in the U.S. is both less of a tragedy and less historically significant than many people (including Faust) are making it out to be. In this post, I intend to clear up a few popular misconceptions about the history of cursive writing.
Yes, many or most Gen Zers can read cursive
The first misconception I would like to debunk is the one present in the title of Faust’s article: that Gen Z, as a collective, “never learned to read cursive.” The reality is that sweeping generalizations such as this one about what “Gen Z” supposedly learned or did not learn in elementary school are never fully accurate. The situation on the ground is actually far more complicated.
Pew Research Center defines Generation Z to include “anyone born from 1997 onward.” I was born in 1999, which makes me one of the older members of the Gen Z generational cohort. Business Insider has adopted the rather ironic term “geriatric Gen Z” (a riff on the older term “geriatric Millennial,” which is used to describe older members the Millennial cohort) to describe older members of Gen Z who were born in the late 1990s.
ABOVE: Photograph I took of myself in front of my bookshelf in my apartment on 27 September 2022
I—as well as most other people I’ve talked to who are my age—began learning cursive during my third-grade year of elementary school (i.e., the 2008–2009 school year). Starting at the beginning of my fourth-grade year, we were required to write all our assignments in cursive. If a student turned in an assignment in print letters, the assignment would be marked down. This remained the rule throughout my fourth- and fifth-grade years.
I personally hated writing in cursive when I was in elementary school because we were forced to write in it and it seemed unnecessarily complicated. I therefore used cursive only for schoolwork that I was required to turn in; I continued to use exclusively print letters for everything else.
In sixth grade, we were no longer marked down for writing in print, but the teacher still strongly encouraged us to write in cursive. If I remember correctly, that was the year my school announced that they would no longer be requiring fourth- and fifth-grade students to write all their assignments in cursive. I stopped writing in cursive after sixth grade and never went back. Nowadays, I never use cursive for anything. Instead, I write everything in print.
That being said, I have received many compliments on my print handwriting, which many people consider very beautiful. Throughout middle school and high school, I routinely had teachers and other students comment that I had the best handwriting of anyone in my class. When I was in eighth grade, one boy told me that I had “the handwriting of the gods.”
Since graduating high school, I have done significantly less writing by hand, so fewer people have had the opportunity to see my handwriting, but, on the occasions when people do see my handwriting, I still receive regular compliments. Below are photographs of pages on which I have copied out some famous or memorable poems in different languages by hand to show my handwriting for Ancient Greek, Classical Latin, and Modern English:
As far as my current ability to read cursive is concerned, I can generally read it fine if it is neat and written using a modern form of cursive, like d’Nealian, Palmerian, Spencerian, or Round Hand. If the handwriting is messy and/or it is written in a pre-modern form of cursive, though, I may not be able to read it.
I can also apparently still write cursive fairly decently. As I was writing this post, I realized that it had been many years since I had written anything in cursive (other than my signature, which is more of a bunch of squigglies at his point than real cursive), so I decided to test my cursive-writing ability. I decided to start out with the sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
I found that, surprisingly, despite having basically never used any cursive for about a decade, most of the letters still came very easily. There were a few letters I had forgotten that I needed to look up how to write—the capital T, the lower-cased x, and the lower-cased z—but my cursive is apparently otherwise still quite solid.
I personally strongly suspect that, even among current undergraduates, the ability to read cursive is probably significantly more common than Faust’s article in The Atlantic makes it sound.
My roommate (who is the same age as me and who also received full instruction in how to read and write cursive while they were in elementary school) has keenly pointed out to me that people in our generation will frequently explain why they can’t read handwriting that is messy and difficult to read by saying that they “can’t read cursive” when, in reality, they can read cursive, just not the particular example of cursive they are looking at.
I have had multiple personal experiences that lead me to think this assessment is accurate. For instance, last month, one of my professors returned graded papers to the grad students in my program cohort with handwritten notes. Another student in my program who is the same age as me said that she couldn’t read the notes he had left on her paper because she couldn’t “read cursive.” I looked at the notes he had left on her paper, though, and there were several words that I found totally illegible—not because they were written in cursive, but rather simply because the professor’s handwriting was so messy.
Origins of the Latin alphabet and print letters
This brings us to the second misconception I would like to debunk in this post, which is the notion that cursive is more ancient and old-fashioned than print and that it has always been regarded as fancier, more formal, and more respectable. This is actually the exact opposite of the truth. Print writing actually predates the earliest form of cursive by many centuries and, for nearly the entire history of cursive’s existence, it has been regarded as an inferior, less formal, less respectable, and less legible form of writing than print.
As most people already know, the Phoenician abjad alphabet first developed in around the mid-eleventh century BCE. In around the eighth century BCE or thereabouts, the Greeks adopted a form of the Phoenician alphabet and began using it to write their language. The Greeks adapted some of the letters, which originally represented consonants in Phoenician, and used them to represent vowels in their own language.
As I discuss in this blog post I wrote back in September 2021, the oldest surviving inscription written in the Greek language using the Greek alphabet may be the Dipylon inscription, a short inscription scrawled on a Geometric-style oinochoë, or wine vessel, that was discovered in the Dipylon Cemetery in Athens and that is believed to date to sometime around 740 BCE or thereabouts.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Dipylon inscription, dating to c. 740 BCE
The inhabitants of the Greek city-states of Chalkis and Eretria on the island of Euboia used a specific form of the Greek alphabet that scholars of early Greek epigraphy classify as belonging to the “western” or “red” type.
In the eighth century BCE, Greek settlers from these city-states founded the colony of Kyme on the coast of what is now the region of Campania in southern Italy. They also founded a colony on the island that was known in antiquity as Pithekoussai and that is known today as Ischia, located in the Tyrrhenian Sea on the northwestern end of the Bay of Naples. These settlers brought the form of the Greek alphabet that was already in use on the island of Euboia with them, introducing it to Italy.
One of the oldest surviving Greek inscriptions from southern Italy occurs on “Nestor’s Cup,” a Geometric-style skyphos or drinking cup discovered in the cremation grave of a child on Pithekoussai that is thought to date to sometime between around 720 and around 700 BCE. The skyphos bears a three-line inscription in dactylic hexameter verse scrawled on its side using the Euboian form of the Greek alphabet.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the inscription on Nestor’s Cup, dating to sometime between c. 720 and c. 700 BCE, discovered on the island of Pithekoussai off the coast of Campania
Soon after the Euboians introduced their version of the Greek alphabet to southern Italy, the Etruscans, an ancient people who mainly inhabited what are now the regions of Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio in northern and central Italy, adopted the Euboian version of the Greek alphabet and adapted it to suit their own language, which was non-Indo-European.
The Etruscan alphabet, in turn, became the source for the alphabet for another language that was spoken in Italy in ancient times: Latin, an Italic Indo-European language that was originally spoken primarily in the region of Latium (modern-day Lazio) in west-central Italy, which includes the city of Rome. By the late seventh century BCE, speakers of this language had adopted a form of the Etruscan alphabet and adapted it to suit their language.
One of the oldest surviving direct attestations of the Latin language is a very brief inscription on the Praeneste fibula, a golden fibula or brooch said to have been discovered at the site of Praeneste in Latium near Rome, which most likely dates to the seventh century BCE. The inscription reads as follows, in extremely archaic Latin:
“MANIOS MED FHEFHAKED NVMASIOI.”
This means, in English:
“Manios made me for Numerios.”
Other extremely early surviving inscriptions in the Latin language include the Duenos inscription, which occurs on a kernos or offering tray discovered in Rome in 1880 that is thought to date to around the seventh or sixth century BCE, and the inscription on the cippus or square pillar found underneath the Lapis Niger or “Black Stone” in the Roman Forum, which is thought to most likely date to around the second half of the sixth century BCE or thereabouts.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the Praeneste fibula, which bears one of the oldest surviving inscriptions in the Latin language, thought to date to the seventh century BCE
As I discuss in this blog post I wrote in January 2022, over the course of the third, second, and first centuries BCE, Rome—once merely a small town in Latium—gradually conquered first all of Italy and then eventually the entire Mediterranean world. The Roman Empire continued to expand its territories into the first and second centuries CE, eventually reaching its greatest territorial extent in 117 CE. At the height of its imperial power, Rome ruled all the lands from Portugal in the west to Syria in the east, from southern Scotland in the north to the southernmost reaches of Egypt in the south.
ABOVE: Map from this Reddit page showing the sprawling territorial extent of the Roman Empire in 125 CE during the rule of the emperor Hadrian
As the Romans conquered neighboring peoples and expanded their territorial control, Latin spread beyond Latium to the rest of Italy and eventually became the common language throughout the western Mediterranean. By the late first century BCE, Latin was both the spoken and written language of imperial administration, high literature, and the upper-class elites in general all throughout the western Mediterranean, including in Italy, Gaul, Iberia, and western North Africa.
With the Latin language came the Latin alphabet, which, even to this very day, remains the alphabet that is used (with some adaptations) to write most European languages, including Italian, Catalan, Spanish, Portuguese, Basque, French, Breton, Dutch, German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Croatian, Albanian, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, English, Welsh, Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and others.
ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the Roman Empire in around 330 CE, with the areas where Latin was the dominant language in red and areas where Greek was the dominant language in blue
Ancient Roman print scripts
The Romans made all formal inscriptions in a highly legible print script known as capitalis monumentalis or monumental capital. The letters of this script are all carved carefully and individually, disconnected from one another, and are highly consistent in both their size and shape.
ABOVE: Close-up photo from Wikimedia Commons of the Lyon Tablet, a bronze tablet bearing the transcription of a speech that the emperor Claudius gave to the Roman Senate in the year 42 CE that was most likely inscribed sometime between 48 and 54 CE, discovered by a draper on Croix-Rousse Hill in Lyon, France, in 1528, inscribed in Roman square capitals
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing CIM F66 1 10 1, a Latin inscription from the Cimiez neighborhood of Nice, France, dating to around 200 CE or thereabouts, inscribed in Roman square capitals
Roman scribes carefully and meticulously wrote all scrolls and codices in a range of print scripts based closely on the monumental capital script, which are collectively known as Roman book hand. The most prestigious book hand script is known as capitalis quadrata or the square capital, which is basically identical to the monumental capital. The letters in this script are drawn so carefully and consistently that writing in it would have taken an extra-long time to complete. Probably as a result of its time-consuming nature, very few examples of ancient manuscripts written in this script have survived.
ABOVE: Folio from the Vergilius Augusteus (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin Lat. fol. 416), an ancient Roman codex manuscript dating to around the fourth century CE that originally contained at least the complete texts of the Roman poet Vergil’s Georgics and Aeneid, written in Roman book hand
The less prestigious book hand script is known as capitalis rustica or the rustic capital. The letter forms are very similar to those of the square capital, but are generally thinner, more compressed, and less rigid with the lines that make up the letters being less often perfectly straight. This allowed scribes to draw the letters a little bit faster than they could with the square capital. As a result of this, the rustic capital script is far more commonly and widely attested in surviving manuscripts and fragments than the square capital.
ABOVE: Folio 14 recto of the Vergilius Romanus, an illustrated parchment codex manuscript containing the works of the Roman poet Vergil dating to the fifth century CE, bearing an illustration of what the illustrator imagined Vergil himself might have looked like and a portion of the text of his work in the rustic capital script
In later antiquity, the rustic capital script developed into a new script known as uncial, which consists of instantly recognizable, broad, rounded letters. The script is not cursive, since each letter is drawn distinctly and separately from the others, but each letter is typically drawn with a single stroke of the pen, allowing the scribe to write much faster than they would be able to if they were writing rustic capitals. The uncial script was especially widely used in late antiquity for Greek and Latin copies of Biblical texts, including the famous four great uncial codices.
ABOVE: Image of Codex Bezae, a bilingual codex of the New Testament in both the original Koine Greek and Latin translation, most likely dating to around the early fifth century CE, bearing the text of the Gospel of Luke 23:47–24:1 in Latin translation, written in Latin uncial script
Old and New Roman cursives
For everyday purposes, ordinary literate Romans from at least the first century BCE onward did not use either the square capital, the rustic capital, or uncial, but rather various forms of cursive.
The earliest known form of cursive for the Latin alphabet is Old Roman cursive, which is first attested in around the first century BCE and remained in widespread use until around the third century CE. This style of connected writing developed because it was faster, easier, and more convenient than carefully drawing each letter individually. It was used for common, informal, ephemeral, and everyday purposes, such as graffiti, business accounts, private letters, grocery lists, sales contracts, and school assignments.
The letter forms of Old Roman cursive bear almost no resemblance whatsoever either to the letter forms of Roman monumental capitals or to the letter forms of any modern print or cursive script. Moreover, they are also wildly inconsistent; the appearance of each letter varies drastically from one hand to another even within the same time and place and varies even more so across different geographic regions and time periods.
As a result, this script is basically completely impossible to read for any person who has not had extensive paleographic training in how to read it. Unfortunately, training and experience in reading other, more modern styles of cursive will help the hapless would-be reader very little.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing an example of writing in Old Roman cursive dating to the reign of the emperor Claudius (ruled 41 – 54 CE)
ABOVE: Ancient Roman contract in Old Roman cursive for the sale of a horse, dating to 77 CE, currently held in the Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, Italy
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Vindolanda Tablet 291, a birthday invitation dating to around the year 100 CE, addressed from Claudia Severa, the wife of Aelius Brocchus, the commander of a fort near Vindolanda just south of Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, to Sulpicia Lepidina, the wife of Flavius Cerialis, the commander of the Vindolanda fort, in Old Roman cursive
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing Vindolanda Tablet 343, a letter written in around the late first or early second century CE by a man named Octavius to another man named Candidus in Old Roman cursive
Starting in around the third century CE, Old Roman cursive gradually developed into a new, very different form of cursive known as New Roman cursive, which has letter forms that are more consistent and more rounded. As the old style fell out of use and the new style gradually diverged from it, the old style gradually became illegible to people who were accustomed to the newer style who had not had specific training in it.
Modern readers without special training in paleography tend to find it easier to make out at least a few of the letters of New Roman cursive than they do for Old Roman cursive, but it is still generally illegible to anyone who has not received special paleographic training in how to read it.
New Roman cursive remained in use for the Latin language until around the seventh century CE. As the Early Middle Ages progressed, however, it gradually diverged into increasingly disparate regional styles.
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing the top of an ancient letter written on papyrus in the Latin language using New Roman cursive sometime in the fourth century CE before c. 362 CE, addressed from an enslaved man named Vitalis to his master Achillius
English-language cursive scripts since the Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, various styles of writing developed from both Roman book hand scripts and New Roman cursive. Medieval cursive styles were typically derived from New Roman cursive and print styles were typically derived from Roman book hand scripts. Medieval people still frequently copied and wrote literary texts in print, but they did use cursive for literary manuscripts more often than the ancient Romans did.
Cursive’s ongoing fall out of fashion is not at all unprecedented in the history of the Latin alphabet or the English language. In fact, on the contrary, scripts are constantly, inevitably falling in and out of fashion with the times. We have already seen this with how New Roman cursive eventually came to replace Old Roman cursive, but, to get some further idea, it is worth looking at some of the more common scripts that have been specifically used to write English just over the course of the past eight hundred years or so.
Let’s start out with “Anglicana,” a cursive script that first appeared in England sometime around 1260 CE or thereabouts and became the most commonly used style of writing for copies of literary texts in the English language throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Like most or all other pre-modern cursives, the script is nearly impossible to read for anyone who has not had special training in how to read it.
ABOVE: Detail from the University of Nottingham website showing a manuscript of a South English legendary dating to the early fourteenth century, written in Anglicana
In the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, the royal chancery of England, which was responsible for engrossing all patents, writs, royal letters, and enrollments, used another form of cursive known as “chancery hand,” which is, again, basically impossible to read for anyone who has not had special training in how to read it.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing a letter written in English in chancery hand by an unknown scribe on behalf of King Henry V of England in 1418
From the late fifteenth century onward, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people writing in the English language commonly used a form of cursive known as “secretary hand,” which, again, like all the other cursive scripts we have examined so far, is basically impossible to read for anyone who does not have special training in how to read it.
The most famous surviving document written in secretary hand is probably William Shakespeare’s last will and testament, which is one of the few surviving primary documents that contain information about his personal life.
ABOVE: Third and final page of William Shakespeare’s last will and testament, dated to 25 March 1616, written in “secretary hand”
ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons showing a covenant bond from April 1623 in a mix of Latin and English, written in “secretary hand”
Cursive scripts generally dominated handwriting during the Early Modern Period, but, even so, many people still wrote in print. For instance, in 1553, King Edward VI of England wrote his notorious “devise for succession,” in which he bypasses his older sisters Mary and Elizabeth in succession to the throne and names his first cousin once removed Lady Jane Grey as his heir, by hand in print letters.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing King Edward VI of England’s 1553 “devise for succession” written in his own print handwriting
Similarly, William Bradford (lived 1590 – 1657), the governor of Plymouth Colony, whose handwritten journal Of Plymouth Plantation, which he wrote between 1630 and 1651, is one of the main sources of information about the early colonial history of Massachusetts and the so-called “First Thanksgiving” (which I discuss in much greater detail in this post I wrote back in November 2016 and this other post I wrote in November 2020), wrote almost exclusively in very legible print.
ABOVE: Page of William Bradford’s journal Of Plymouth Plantation giving the text of the so-called “Mayflower Compact,” written, as you can see, in very legible print
Secretary hand gradually fell out of fashion by the late seventeenth century, but another style of cursive writing, Round Hand, which originated in the 1660s, rose to popularity and became the dominant style of cursive in the English-speaking world throughout the late seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries.
This is really the oldest style of cursive used for the English language that is generally legible to people who can read modern cursive without special paleographic training. This is also the particular script that most of the founding documents of the United States, including the 1776 engrossed copy of the Declaration of Independence, the 1787 engrossed copy of the original U.S. Constitution, and the 1789 engrossed copy of the Bill of Rights, were written in.
Round Hand and the other very similar cursive scripts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that were influenced by it are commonly known as “copperplate” styles because they were often taught through copybooks that were printed using the intaglio printmaking technique, which involves the use of copper plates.
ABOVE: Top of the engrossed copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, written 1776 in the English Round Hand cursive script
ABOVE: Top of the first page of the 1787 engrossed copy of the original Constitution of the United States, written in the English Round Hand cursive script
ABOVE: Top of the 1789 engrossed copy of the Bill of Rights, written in the English Round Hand cursive script
The copperplate styles, however, did not remain dominant forever. Over the course of the 1820s, ’30s, and ’40s, the American teacher and penmanship innovator Platt Rogers Spencer (lived 1800 – 1864) developed a new cursive script known as Spencerian. He published a book in 1848 titled Spencer and Rice’s System of Business and Ladies’ Penmanship, in which he lays out the principles of this script. From around the 1850s onward, Spencerian cursive gradually replaced the old Round Hand and copperplate styles and became the dominant style of handwriting in the U.S. for around seventy years or so.
Spencerian script is known for its flowing, continuous style and its exuberant decorative loops and curls, especially on the capital letters. Another important feature of Spencerian cursive is that, unlike the older Round Hand and copperplate styles, all the letters within a single word are always connected, allowing a person to write without ever taking their pen off the page in the middle of a word. This allowed people to write cursive faster and more continuously than they could before.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons of a handwritten letter dated December 4th, 1884, written in the Spencerian style of cursive
In 1894, the American penmanship innovator Austin Norman Palmer (lived 1860 – 1927) published the first edition of his influential textbook Palmer’s Guide to Business Writing, which introduced a new style of cursive that was loosely based on the Spencerian script, but greatly simplified. The Palmerian script did away with most of the decorative loops and curls of the Spencerian and made the relatively few decorative loops that it retained much smaller and less complicated.
Many people understandably came to prefer the Palmerian style to the Spencerian style because it allowed them to write faster and more simply. These qualities were especially desirable at the time because, by this point, handwriting was starting to come into competition with the typewriter.
The Spencerian style was so ornate that, for many people, typing with a typewriter seemed quicker and easier. The Palmerian style, by contrast, was simple enough that it allowed people writing by hand to keep up with the typewriter. By around the 1920s, this style of cursive had become the dominant style taught to students in U.S. primary schools.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing a sample text written in Palmerian cursive
Between 1965 and 1978, an elementary school teacher named Donald Neal Thurber developed a new method of teaching print and cursive scripts to elementary school students known as the d’Nealian Method. The d’Nealian cursive script is based on the Palmerian, but it is even further simplified to make it ideal for teaching young children.
The d’Nealian Method is now the most widely used method of teaching elementary school students print and cursive scripts throughout the U.S. If someone has grown up in the U.S. within the past roughly forty years or so and they learned to read and write cursive in elementary school, the d’Nealian script is most likely the one they learned.
ABOVE: Image from Wikimedia Commons showing the upper- and lower-cased letters of d’Nealian cursive
Conclusion
My personal stance on the cursive debate is that I think students should be given some basic instruction in how to read cursive, but extensive training in how to write cursive is unnecessary and a waste of valuable class time that can be far more productively spent on other subjects that have more immediate relevance to students’ futures in the twenty-first century.
Indeed, if we’re concerned about students having access to history, it is worth noting that students are almost never given any meaningful instruction whatsoever in elementary school about how to read and interpret historical primary sources. The time that previously would have been spent teaching students to write cursive could be more productively spent teaching them how to read and interpret primary sources in print, which has a far more fundamental relevance to the study of history than teaching them how to draw a d’Nealian cursive Z.
New kinds of writing have come and gone throughout history. It is both entirely natural and, indeed, inevitable that the ways people write change with the times. The fact that cursive is presently dying out is nothing new, exceptional, or unique. Students today who do not learn to read and write cursive may require special training in the future to learn to read historic documents written in cursive, but the fact of the matter is that people already require special training in paleography to read most historic documents written before around the eighteenth century.
With cursive instruction slowly falling out of schools, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century cursive scripts will simply join the countless other historic scripts that students need special training in order to read.
The author’s experience parallels mine, and I was in third grade back in 1966-67! And similarly, for years we were expected to write in cursive in the classroom, which I rebelled against, preferring print, Eventually we were left to follow our own preferences, probably some time around middle school, but I recall being questioned by teachers about why I was one of the few students using print and not cursive? What was once odd has now become the norm, it appears. I read this all the time about cursive dying or not being taught — and I always wonder, then how are people today signing their checks and important documents? They must at least be learning enough cursive to sign forms, and give autographs!
Here in New Zealand I was never taught how to write in cursive, and we were never expected to use it or read it. It meant that by the time I started having to write signatures I had a bit of trouble, and eventually settled on writing my initials in self-taught cursive. I was born in 2000, by the way, so I don’t know if the same holds true for older generations.
Cursive is ableist if you have dyspraxia or any similar condition that makes any writing difficult. I need to spend about 3 times the duration to make what might be called legible print. Cursive is simply out of the question for anything more than my signature, which I confine to initials. At least it can’t be casually forged by someone who doesn’t do that as a profession. The fact that I can read cursive about as easily as I read print came in handy for about 5 minutes once since I graduated highschool. Good riddance if it goes.
d’Nealian looks like what I was taught in the Ontario system in the mid-60s. Surviving samples of my parents’ handwriting look more Palmerian (the ‘r’ is a noticeable difference between the two), though I don’t know what was being taught in England in the 1920s-1930s.
My current handwriting is best described as an idiosyncratic scrawl legible only to me, unless I make a special effort to be neat. It developed during my university years when writing standard cursive was too slow to keep up with the prof, and often departs from what I was taught.
I know many students now take class notes on a laptop, but that really doesn’t suit me.
I’ve had very similar experiences, being taught cursive in elementary school and then never using it again except for signatures.
I’ve found that print is easier to write with a pencil, especially a mechanical pencil, while cursive is better suited to pens. Pencils are more pressure-sensitive than pens, so one can glide a pencil along the page without making a mark. This isn’t possible with a pen. This means that a continuous stroke is more important with a pen than with a pencil.
Finally, I’m sure the decline of cursive is related to the fact that most reading, and an increasing amount of writing, is done on a computer or phone, so people want to write like they read.
I wonder if historical changes in writing technologies have influenced writing styles.
This was all very interesting! Now that I look back I find it interesting that I was taught something close to d’Nealian in school, I guess it has spread to Europe as well. Luckily I was never required to write any assignments in cursive (I must confess I never finished the cursive workbook we used) but we were supposed to learn it in 3rd grade.
Have you read much Shakespeare recently, if one may ask? Since you both wrote out some of his lines and referred to his will
No, as odd as it may seem, I actually haven’t been reading any Shakespeare recently. I chose to copy the passages from Shakespeare because I was wanting to use some famous literary passages that were originally written in English. Shakespeare immediately happened to spring to mind, since he is arguably the famous author ever to write in English. I chose the particular passages that I did simply because they are ones that are reasonably famous and they happened to have the right number of lines to fit on the page. (I initially thought about copying out the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, Act III, Scene 1, but I found that that passage was too many lines and it wouldn’t have fit on the single sheet of lined paper that I had in front of me.)
Later on, I mentioned Shakespeare’s will simply because it’s the most famous surviving document in secretary hand and the one that people usually reference when they talk about it. (Notably, the current revision of the Wikipedia article “paleography” has an image of Shakespeare’s will at the top of the page as the main image.)
I see, that makes sense. As you say Shakespeare is so famed. I did not actually know about those passages, my first choices would probably have been that famous soliloquy (like you) and then “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”
You’ve got a beautiful print handwriting, Spencer, but I’m afraid that “the handwriting of the gods” is that of J. R. R. Tolkien. I suggest you to look at the first page of his alliterative poem “Doworst” (still unpublished in its entire form) in the author’s own hand. The careful calligraphy mimicks that of a medieval scribe (even with ornate initials). The poem itself is a parody of William Langland’s Piers Plowman. On the other hand, his cursive handwriting, when hasty, is extremely difficult, sometimes even impossible, to read (as attested by his son Christopher in each and every one of the 12 volumes of his massive History of Middle-earth).
My own print handwriting has received a little appraisal from some acquaintances, but I’m afraid this was due only to the contrast with my horrific cursive. Some of my teachers claimed they had trouble with reading it, but I always found it easy to read it myself. When correcting exams, I usually alternate both styles, but trying to keep them as legible as possible.
It would have been interesting to include in your article some references to cursive writing systems in other languages. For example, Russian cursive is famously difficult to read, sometimes even for Russians. The guy who taught me Russian, who came from Pyatigorsk, told me once that he went to a pharmacy with a prescription for something written in cursive and had to exit from the shop empty-handed, because none of the workers could understand it. But I guess doctors’ handwriting is a special case everywhere.
Another difficult script is German Kurrent. Looking at Beethoven’s original letters, for example, almost makes you wonder if they aren’t really written in Russian. 😂
I found your historical exposition very interesting and informative. Today, if I want to write fast or only for my own benefit, I start streaming in D’Nealian, and if I want to write slowly and so that everyone can read it, I print with “small caps”. However, I created my own form of cursive in the 7th grade. It was a mix of D’nealian, Palmerian, Spencerian and print letters. I was calling it the Wilder script. I would still use it (and when I want to show off, occassionally still do), but my 8th grade English teacher didn’t like the idea that my handwriting was so different than everyone else’s and refused to accept my work if written in my own script. She originally tried to claim she couldn’t read it, but soon felt very foolish since none of my other teachers had any issue with it at all. For a few months, I tried to switch using D’nealian for my English assignments and Wilder for everything else, but that eventually proved too difficult to continue, and D’nealian naturally won out.
Like you I learned to read and write cursive but continued to use printing. Unlike you I am a “geriatric Boomer.” I only made the transition to writing mostly in cursive in college when writing speed became important. Today I write notes to myself, in cursive, but the bulk of my writing is done at a keyboard. (When I began to write for publication, I wrote everything out longhand, copyedited it, then typed it. I considered typing a chore and that typing for direct expression seemed foreign.)
I’m about ten years older than you. My teachers told me to stop writing in cursive in the 7th grade because my handwriting was bad. They told me to start writing in all caps in 9th grade for the same reason. They told me to start just typing on the computer as much as possibly shortly after that.
Thank god they didn’t force me to write in cursive. I’d’ve never made it as a scribe in the ancient world.
Well. . . I’m an old guy (Class of ’71) so I was definitely taught cursive–I just wasn’t very good at it! I do recall that when I started working for a state agency, in which I was required to conduct interviews and write down the content of them for typing, I was approached by the typists. And, similar to Vas, above, the typists instructed me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d henceforth be expected to print my notes, rather than write them in cursive! ‘Yes, ma’am,’ I said. And, their demand was not unreasonable!
I was also interested in seeing some of the books on your shelf; I note that we have many books in common, although as I never had the opportunity to study ancient Greek, you’ll find no Loeb Classics on my shelf! It appears, though, that we both appreciate Catullus.
Although I was at one time able to transliterate–but not translate–ancient Greek, I couldn’t identify the cursive Ancient Greek script you’ve reproduced; although I did study one quarter Introductory Latin, in addition to one quarter of, oddly enough for a school which didn’t offer ancient Greek, Introductory Sanskrit! Sorry, don’t remember a word!
An entertaining and refreshing essay, Spencer! Thanks, as always, for you very fine work!
Wow, another very interesting article, thank you!
As someone from Italy, there are a few cultural differences which I find rather amusing. First of all, our cursive is a little bit different than the one you showed in your example. For instance, the upper-case letters are completely different, here is an example:
https://i0.wp.com/www.genitorialmente.it/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Alfabeto_corsivo_maiuscolo_minuscolo_1_Genitorialmente.jpg?resize=595%2C842
The second difference is that, while upper-case letters are almost always written in print style nowadays (and awkwardly attached to the other letters), otherwise cursive is alive and thriving in Italy, so much that it’s the default style to employ when writing personal stuff. On the other hand, if you write for others, you will write in ALL CAPS, and possibly on official documents as well, so as to get understood by others (kinda like the Romans!). At uni, I would write notes in cursive, but ALL CAPS when wanting to be understood. For instance, when people asked me to lend them my notes if they were sick. I like my cursive, but it’s illegible. Here is a sample of my writing:
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/459453394785009684/823849000599420948/Volpone_2.PNG
It was taken at a conferency my dorm forced us to attend, to warn people against ‘the gay agenda’ (seriously), and there are some scribbles as well. You can see the cursive, the ALL CAPS (used in comics) and the upper case letters being simply ALL CAPS. Not knowing the language, it’s probably impossible for you to make out anything.
Amusingly, ‘lower case’ print script does not exist in Italy. No one writes with that, except for stylish reasons. Otherwise, it’s either cursive or ALL CAPS.
Also… not (entirely) related, but since we were talking about the history of handwriting, and you are one of the very few people who might be able to appreciate it… When I commissioned some art of my fursona (= furry alter ego), I had my artist draw a ‘?’ sign in its Medieval handwriting version, here:
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/847115807250186250/1032532770989289542/Skuggabaldrinspect.png
and he also wrote ‘Guð hjalpi oss’ (God save us) in a ‘speech scroll’ using 14th century Icelandic handwriting (the era and time my ‘historical’ alter ego allegedly lived):
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fd1uPUFX0AMXhd2?format=png&name=small
I didn’t know a conference could be at once hilarious and alarming until I read your notes about the ‘gay agenda’ event. Who were the freaks in charge of it? And why on Earth were you forced to attend it? That would be something unthinkable in my university.
At least you managed to get the best from the moment with your cartoons. That’s a genuinely funny way to take notes.
I’m not especially well informed about how the education system is set up in Italy, but I’m wondering if it’s possible that Wichiteglega might attend or have attended a private religious university, or at the very least an unusually conservative university. That might explain why he would be required to attend a conference warning him about the “gay agenda.”
Yeah, as I said in the previous comment the place I was referring to was a simple dorm. No university, not even a Catholic one, would ever promote such a thing. In general, Catholic universities are pretty much like any other university in Italy; you just have a few classes dealing with the history of the Church or theology, but this doesn’t intrude the rest of the experience.
BTW the way Italians call ‘the gay agenda’ is ‘ideologia gender’, that is ‘gender ideology’, something that doesn’t make any sense and uses the English word ‘gender’ in order to sound exotic and scary. This conference was in 2016, when people were hoping for a legalization of same-sex marriages (we got an insulting ‘compromise’ with ‘civil unions’, alas), and there was a conservative reaction. But I do remember that, absurdly, there were a lot of rumors that circulated and that were believed by people. For instance, I remember the ridiculous rumor that children were being taught masturbation at kindergarten. This is of course ridiculous, any kindergarten would be razed to the ground by angry parents if this were the case. People researched the sources of this hoax, and they turned out to be: 1) A note by our Minister of Health saying that kindergarten teachers should be *aware* of the existence of pre-puberty sexual gestures, so as to be able to answer kids’ questions in an age-appropriate manner if possible, 2) An exercise created by a pediatrician (who was also a Catholic, ironically), that involved using a stethoscope to allow children to hear their heartbeat and the ones of their peer, so as to understand that everyone is a full-rounded individual. This activity dates back to the 80s, and no one batted an eye since 2016, especially since it’s not even about sexuality, or being LGBT+. 2016 was a weird time for gay rights.
Do you happen to be from Italy?
And yeah, no university would allow this. It was due to my university *dorm*, which was unaffiliated with the university proper. And yes, it was rather conservative, and managed by priests. They usually didn’t interfere much with our lives, but they demanded that we attended some events, mostly of religious nature, and then there was… this.
I remember laughing a lot at the conference and writing down all the logical fallacies spouted by the people talking. And yes, the comics were also fun to make. As a gay person, it was a ‘laugh so as not to cry’ (as we say in Italian) situation.
No, I’m from Argentina and my first language is Spanish, but my grandparents were Italian and I can speak and understand the language. I even could pass as a native Italian for some people when I visited your country, despite having been there only for two weeks. Dialectal variations were a difficult thing, though — I remember being confused for a couple of seconds after getting invited “una bira” by a Venetian guy.
I had a suspicion it had something to do with religion. Our countries are similar in some cultural aspects, including the heavy presence of the Catholic Church (and of Pope Francis!). I remember Roberto Benigni said when he visited Buenos Aires that he loved Argentina, because “it’s like Italy but without Berlusconi”. Sadly we are so similar that we have our own Berlusconis, and even our own Melonis. There is now a very popular right-wing candidate among young people, even some gay and bi guys, who is openly anti-feminist and wants to completely dismantle the current sex education national program, which has been around for the last fifteen years and has been a great leap forward.
We also had some noisy complaints from the most conservative sectors when our Congress discussed same-sex marriage and parental rights, but the law was finally approved in 2010, and their ridiculous fear that it would make everyone gay and “destroy the family” didn’t come to pass. We’re also familiar with the hoaxes about sex education and teaching kindergarten kids to masturbate, and with the absurd concept of “gender ideology”, which we know by “ideología de género”. It’s interesting that you keep the English word for “gender”. I can imagine two reasons for this difference, besides the suggestion that it’s an evil foreign agenda: (1) Italian has more raw anglicisms than Spanish (for example, we never say “el weekend”); (2) Spanish phonology doesn’t include the ⟨d͡ʒ⟩ sound.
Ironically, this concept of “gender ideology” and the notion that there’s an evil international “gay agenda” seeking to make children gay in order to feed them to pedophiles are indeed pushed by international right-wing corporations, which spend millions each year financing lobbyists, writers, and politicians all around the so-called Western world.
Oh, your comment was very interesting (and sad)!
I do believe that the word ‘gender’ was kept in English so they could pass this ‘ideology’ as something weird, foreign and exotic. To the people who don’t know English well, ‘gender’ might be an unrecognizable word, so they probably wouldn’t understand the meaning, again, to incite fears. The word ‘gender’ is regularly translated as ‘genere’ in Italian, just like in Spanish. It is true, however, that Italian is much more open to English loanwords than Spanish.
I didn’t know that the same, terrible narratives are being pushed in Latin America as well… That’s pretty sad, and I feel like proper information analysis should be an obligatory subject in schools, seeing how much these regressive politicians want to exploit this lack of knowledge to their goals. This is reason #621 why I love debunking bad history so much: it is a way to safely (that is, not connected to modern politics and social issues) explore how information can be manipulated for ideological reasons (so, an American Protestant hating on Catholics might support myths about the Middle Ages being stagnant and backwards, and an Italian racist might argue that Africa had no past before Europeans came there). It allows people to understand how much moral motives bias information.
I fully agree with you. Have you read Bertrand Russell’s speech “Free Thought and Official Propaganda”? It was published in 1922, but some bits of it are still very relevant one century later. Take this fragment, related to the last part of your comment, as an example:
“The protection of minorities is vitally important; and even the most orthodox of us may find himself in a minority some day, so that we all have an interest in restraining the tyranny of majorities. Nothing except public opinion can solve this problem. (…) The battle must be fought exactly as the battle of religious toleration was fought. And as in that case, so in this, a decay in the intensity of belief is likely to prove the decisive factor. While men were convinced of the absolute truth of Catholicism or Protestantism, as the case might be, they were willing to persecute on account of them. While men are quite certain of their modern creeds, they will persecute on their behalf. Some element of doubt is essential to the practice, though not to the theory, of toleration. And this brings me to my other point, which concerns the aims of education.
“If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the scheme of scoundrels.
“History should be taught in the same way. Napoleon’s campaigns of 1813 and 1814, for instance, might be studied in the Moniteur, leading up to the surprise which Parisians felt when they saw the Allies arriving under the walls of Paris after they had (according to the official bulletins) been beaten by Napoleon in every battle. In the more advanced classes, students should be encouraged to count the number of times that Lenin has been assassinated by Trotsky, in order to learn contempt for death. Finally, they should be given a school-history approved by the Government, and asked to infer what a French school history would say about our wars with France. All this would be a far better training in citizenship than the trite moral maxims by which some people believe that civic duty can be inculcated.”
Definitely very modern statements, those made by Russell
This is truly fascinating. What you say about there being no lower-cased block letters in Italian is very new and surprising to me. I’m assuming that this is the case only for handwriting and that there are lower-cased block letters in printed texts, such as books, signs, websites, and so forth, right?
The artworks you have shared here are excellent! I especially love how the first one is clearly based on Conrad von Soest’s famous “Glasses Apostle” from his 1403 altarpiece for the church in Bad Wildungen! (Of course, your character having glasses is technically probably anachronistic if they are supposed to have lived in fourteenth-century Iceland, since, unless I am mistaken, I don’t believe glasses had reached quite so far north by that point, but I love the glasses anyway.)
Yeah, exactly. Lower-case letters are used throughout printed and digital media, just like in English. But we generally don’t use it when writing by hand, and we are not taught it at school, we just learn it by copying texts by ourselves. And again, it’s just a ‘stylish’ thing, if you want to write something that looks nice.
I have nothing against discontinuing the cursive in America, but here in Italy it’s very important to keep it, since so many people use it in day-to-day contexts.
I’m happy you were able to appreciate the character I commissioned, there are *very* few people that would be able to appreciate it on an acceptable (to me :P) degree!
The glasses are not specifically based on that image you linked (which I didn’t know the name of, cool!), but I did provide it to my artist to give him an idea of how the glasses should be held. Here is another image with the glasses once again:
https://d.furaffinity.net/art/wichiteglega/1649014780/1649014780.wichiteglega_skuggabaldr_commission_glasses.jpg
I did base myself on specimens, though. Also, since I’m Italian, these glasses are somehow more famous because they are featured in the Umberto Eco novel ‘The Name of the Rose’, and its various adaptations. You probably know of this book.
> Of course, your character having glasses is technically probably anachronistic if they are supposed to have lived in fourteenth-century Iceland, since, unless I am mistaken, I don’t believe glasses had reached quite so far north by that point
Eeeeh… As someone who strives for historical accuracy first and foremost (seriously, I spend days researching every detail, down to the color of his clothes)… I kinda have to agree with you here. That said, glasses were invented in the 1290s in Italy, and Iceland had been more connected to mainland Europe ever since it became part of Norway in the 1260s. Additionally, Askr (my 14th century persona) is supposed to be a rather well-off bóndi (landowner), and also ‘conveniently’ has a close relative who is a farmaðr (‘traveller’, but usually merchant and sailor) with a penchant for unique and exotic trinkets, so, while unlikely that glasses had reached Iceland by that point, it is not impossible for a rich person to have had access to objects from faraway lands some forty years after their invention!
Sorry if I’m getting too personal with this question, but just for curiosity, is Norse history and culture your area of expertise?
Technically yes, even though I don’t know enough to be considered an expert per se. I do know enough to be able to debunk many misconceptions when asked, if they come up in conversation and media (though I could say the same for many other premodern fields).
Ultimately, I am interested in Norse culture because 1) it’s medieval, my favorite ‘period’ and 2) there is a lot of literature written in it, relatively standardized. I am a linguist, and I love using languages, even old ones, for creative purposes (in another comment of mine I mentioned translating the game ‘Undertale’ as if it was an Icelandic saga), so Old Norse/Old Icelandic is ideal. I am also very intrigued by Middle Irish, but alas I haven’t found many usable materials, let alone original texts available online.
Also, I’m interested in medieval Icelandic culture in general, not just Norse culture.
Do you have any history fields you are knowledgeable/interested in?
My interest in history and languages is purely personal, not academic. My first contact with Old Norse literature was through J. R. R. Tolkien’s writings, and after that I bought some Spanish translations of sagas and other ON texts I could find. I also found a volume of the Harvard Classics in a second-hand bookshop, containing some Eddic poems translated by Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris. Now I’m thinking about taking a short introductory course to the language with an ON scholar from my country (the only one I know about; he has translated some sagas into Spanish for the first time). I have already taken a couple of online short courses with him about Norse mythology and writing in medieval Scandinavia. Maybe I’ll take a longer, deeper course some day, but I feel I don’t have enough time now to dedicate myself to it.
Oh, that seems interesting! I don’t know much about Tolkien’s writing, but his understanding of medieval Germanic cultures was very brilliant, and I have read some of his poems written in classical allitterative style, and they are very good as well.
I am not very interested in The Lord of the Rings and his other writings with the same setting (never been much into fantasy), but I am very interested in Tolkien as a person!
It’s easy to imagine Ancient Greek and Roman writing as being similar to today, before finding out (or remembering) that it had no spaces (but maybe dots between words) , lowercase letters, or punctuation, as shown by several ancient writing examples in the above article. And yes, people back then (who could read) were accustomed to this. Of course, many writing systems today don’t have letter cases, which I don’t think someone inventing a script would instinctually add, and some don’t use spaces between words either, at least not as often as English.
This is a very anglophone thing.
In Serbia, we all always wrote everything in cursive.
Honestly, writing in anything but cursive is an agony for me, since there is no flow to the hand movements, meaning it’s much more attention-intensive to write anything down.
But to each his own I guess.
My thoughts exactly. It should be an anglophone thing. In Greece we always write in cursive as well and there is no other way. We don’t even understand the meaning of the word “cursive”. It is just print letters (i.e. newspapers, books, etc) and handwritten text. Children, when they are around 5-6 years old, learn to write the letters carefully, that is separately, so they can learn their shape, and after that students are free to develop their personal handwriting style which is a form of self-expression. Some people write more “clearly”, that is they tend not to connect the letters, and others write in a more connected way but it is considered only a matter of style.
What is interesting as well is that in Greece the “cursive” handwriting is considered to be the beautiful handwriting whereas the “print” handwriting is considered more utilitarian. That is why people tent to perceive people who write with separate letters more “logical” and “positive minded” and people who write with connected letters more “artistic” and “literature types”. Specialists also tend to interpret the personality of someone by their handwriting so the fact they naturally have developed a cursive handwriting or not is something they consider as well. But all kinds of handwriting are considered just… handwriting. It is characteristic that most famous Greek poets or writes (i.e. Nobel prize winners) wrote in a cursive form that is very hard to read even for native Greeks. But no one thought even for a moment that they write in a different kind of script. Just a flowing handwriting. And because the handwriting is considered a form of artistic or personality expression in formal occasions, i.e. when needing to fill a formal form, it is considered proper to write in capitals.
And just to illustrate that cursive or print handwriting is maybe a matter of script used when I write in my native language (Greek) I tend to connect the letters far less that when I write in english and I have realised that the form of the latin script is more conducive to connecting the letters. Maybe it is worth noting that even though my “natural” handwriting in Greek is almost incomprehensible to anyone else by me, my “cursive” english handwriting from my experience was always very easy to read by others.
And it never occurred to me that one need special training to read someone else’s handwriting or even more that the school system would make a whole module out of teaching people to write with connected letters.
Cyrillic writing also lends itself to a more flowing style of handwriting, though it is conventionalized, and intended to be understandable to all who read it, unlike what you seem to do in Greek with personal styles.
It would just be an agony for my to write each Latin or Cyrillic letter separately, in the print style.
I actually managed to pick up a little of the Cyrillic “script” style (insofar as it sometimes appears on signs) when I was in Russia three years ago. I already knew standard print Cyrillic, and once you get your head around thinks like ‘T’ looking something like ‘m’, it becomes readable. (I don’t know more than a few dozen words of the actual language, but I understand signs like “Krasnoi Ploschad” once I’ve decoded the phonetics).
You may well be right, Spenser. My 21yo workmate recently called me about a note I left at a job site. He said he could read cursive just fine, but not ‘whatever it is you’re using.’
This is timely as I’m attending class for work the next couple of days and need to insure that my notes are legible for future reference.
The Great Cursive Debate is among the most ridiculous, and tedious, to come down the pike in recent years. But first, the state of the art today: I have two teenagers. They were not taught cursive in any practical sense. They were briefly exposed to it–really just enough so that they could recognize what it was that they couldn’t read. This was confirmed last year when my younger went to sixth grade camp. Various family members were encouraged to send letters. My mother, whose cursive is gorgeous, was among them, but the kid had to have an adult read it to her. My response is that this is obviously the proper use of school time. Where I was learning cursive, my kids were taught typing, which nowadays is called “keyboarding.” I didn’t learn to type until eighth grade, and that was oriented to formatting business letters (which I still obsess about, when called upon). Typing clearly is a vastly more useful skill, and my older one, now in ninth grade, touch types fluently. I am much happier with this than I would were they hunting and pecking, but could write cursive.
So while I think that the sackcloth and ashes are jumping the gun a bit, the point is valid that younger kids can’t read cursive. But so what? I am a history guy. I get it. I often read hand written 19th century documents, so my mad cursive skills serve me well here. But how many people need this? And if they do, they can learn it, in exactly the same way that I would have to learn it, were my research to require reading Elizabethan secretarial hand, which is entirely gibberish to the modern eye. The wailing and moaning is parochial. My response, when presented with the complaint, is to look the complainer in the eye and ask them what subject matter the schools should drop, so they can devote the time needed to teach cursive. I have yet to get a good, or even coherent, response.
Why were you at highschool at age 19? I’m crying jealous.😭
I was not in high school at age nineteen. My birthday is in August, shortly before the beginning of the school year. I turned eighteen in August 2017 and was eighteen for my entire senior year of high school (i.e., the 2017–2018 school year). I turned nineteen in August 2018 and was nineteen for my entire freshman year of undergrad (i.e., the 2018–2019 school year).
Fascinating history, filled in a lot of gaps in things I didn’t know about hand-writing styles. I’m a post-WWII generation person who was in formal schooling in the 1950’s and 60s, and worked in medical facilities in the 1970s, all in the U.S.
It may have faded with time, but the widespread joke back then (this permeated general culture) was that physicians all had lousy handwriting. Most formal medical records (scheduled exams or consults) were dictated and typed by separate typing staff, but contemporaneous notes and orders were handwritten by MDs and nursing staff. Handwriting styles varied, but I think cursive was probably predominant for speed of writing. Yes, learning to interpret poor penmanship was a medical skill for nursing staff back then. It helped that medical language is highly repetitive, so context assisted interpretation.
In my work with literature I’d sometimes appreciate that experience when reading original manuscripts–but besides decades in the “cursive era” that skill has begun to fade for me. I sometimes ask myself, how did we expect to be understood with common, everyday non-skilled pensmanship back then?
Another thing I recall from the mid-20th century that might surprise some younger readers: typing (at least with any reasonable skill) was highly associated with women. I took typing in high school, I was the only male in the class. Business correspondence of all kinds was dependent on typists, whose job would be gendered for women in the want ads and postings. Even in education and literature, the idea that a typist might be called in or hired was common, because the male scholar or author couldn’t work the typewriter well enough or just distained this task.
Given the generational right-wing, patriarchal nostalgia for the 50s, I wonder is some of the reverence for cursive from some classes is a desire to return to “let’s go back to when we wrote notes and bad drafts in a cramped hand, and then women made them all pretty on a typewriter and fixed all my errors?”
Hi Spencer,
I found your blog because I was looking up the Scottish Lord land deals. I have to admire your thoroughness in the articles you write.
On the subject of handwriting, mine has been terrible all my life. Being able to talk into my phone is very convenient and productive.
As I read your article I got thinking about the connection between the mind and the hand when it comes to writing. In your research or experience is someone who uses a computer / typewriter / cell phone to do most of their communication at a disadvantage to someone who writes things out on paper by hand?
The loss of the ability to write quickly and cursively is a great loss to the writer, scholar, and anyone who wants to communicate quickly and effectively without the burden of relying on a much more complex technology. Some tablets and some pencils are all that are needed to write books, articles, or notes to one’s self. These things are important and shouldn’t be reliant on ever intrusive electronic technology.
A tablet of paper isn’t easily damaged by dropping it onto the floor; cracking its screen; or even spilling a cup of coffee on it. It can be packed up in a backpack and be written upon even under some dire circumstances. Hand written text is easily crossed out, erased, and prepared for the first typed or printed draft. Hand written text doesn’t have a feeling of finality about it that printed text does. The cursive draft can be typed, or read into a dragon speak program very easily.
The loss of these arts is due to prsuptive and lazy pedagogy that boldly assumes that the ignorant student would find writing too strenuous and mathematics beyond their ken. There has been talk of removing algebra from the required curriculum. I’ve also noticed a deterioration in graduated young adult ratiocination, an ignorance of basic logical fallacies whilst maintaining the most common opinions expressed broadly by so called pundits in the media.
The reason for this seems forthright to me. Historically, a great deal of money was put into education for the first time following World War II, this action being prompted by percieved gains in Soviet technical superiority at the time. The result was the most broadly educated class of students up until that time in history. And, what was the result? These students started thinking about what they were being told, questioning the existing authority, while understanding how the system was stacked against them. This radicalized a significant fraction of those students who understood how the Military Industrial Complex was making billions of dollars supplying weapons to the conflict. They also found out that the Vietnam War’s flash point was the contrived Gulf of Tonkin Resolutin, which even the then Defense Secretary had to admit, late in his life, was contrived to start a war.
What’s this got to do with dumbing down our education today? “They” the oligarchs in charge, who own your government thanks to the Citizens United Act, don’t want another rebellious generation. They want you to go to school and learn what they need you to learn to support their businesses –to sit in your cubicles all day, to earn enough money to service the interest on your enormous college debts, eventually try and buy an enormously over priced house and service the debt on that until you are near death and are scared into plowing the equity of that house into a smallish geezer condo in a retirement community owned by a multi national private equity firm which will demand most of your monthly pension in condo fees. When your dead, they will have other ways of making money off your sorry dead body.
But, I digress. The seemingly small symptom of the downgrading of your education, and subsequent economic enslavement is represented in removing simple and easy forms of self expression, like cursive writing, down grading the prestige of courses like philosophy and art. And, of course, passing people who are inadequately educated and will willing and vociferously support and vote against their own interests like Social Security, and Medicare.
It’s the tip of the iceberg. Like the death of a species of unnoticed plant or animal, a butterfly or the once formidable passenger pigeon, cursive writing is a symptom of an unnoticed loss leading to greater deterioration of the human intellect.