By Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:
CURSIVE WRITING
Writing capital letters on the chalkboard, Mrs. Dunavan drew a loop at the beginning of the Q and then followed through, making it look like an uppity 2. And she made a loop as she began the C. Loops apparently were the going thing in 1967.
The F was written backwards and the T wore an odd curvy hat, but those are consonants for you.
In third grade, cursive writing seemed like a foreign language. Bent over our tablet paper, we 8-year-olds stuck out our tongues in concentration, trying to get our pencils to replicate the teacher’s perfectly drawn letters.
We pushed a lot of eraser crumbs onto the floor of that third-grade classroom.
Penmanship carried value in my day, but it was not nearly as important as it had been several generations before in the one-room schoolhouses across Kansas. I look at the writing from the late 1800s, early 1900s, and those folks knew their way around an ink well. The delicate script of the past is always neat and clean and much more elaborate than our ballpoint scrawls of today.
Change of style is just one step in the evolution of writing. And in fact, longhand might soon disappear. I was shocked recently to learn that many elementary schools across the country no longer teach it. How can it be possible to not learn cursive writing?
Emporia schools still teach longhand, but in many communities, it is getting crowded out of curriculums. Cursive writing is not a skill that children need for competency tests, and its decline in popularity is also due to our reliance on computers and cell phones. Typing and texting are the preferred pathways now. Pen and paper are so yesterday.
Alas, I am one of those yesterday girls. I love ink and paper and would be happy to be sprawled on the floor of an office supply store where I could sample notebooks and ink pens. But then, writing is my thing. Now for some who write solely on the computer, the only cursive writing they do is to sign credit card receipts.
Abandoning longhand seems crazy to me because printing just doesn’t seem an efficient way for kids to take notes in class. And if cursive is phased out of schools, in a generation or two, script will disappear from our everyday lives.
But such is the way of the world. Things change. And this made me think of the various forms of writing tools and methods I’ve used during my lifetime. We had the fat Crayolas in kindergarten (eight colors) because we couldn’t yet be trusted with the skinny and delicate set of 24 crayons.
Then we moved on to pencils and our graphite phase lasted until high school. Pencils, of course, offered that saving grace of being erasable.
Although I learned to type on my mother’s old manual Royal, I took typing as a high school junior. And those who learned touch typing back then are glad they did since keyboards are now such a daily part of our lives.
In college I had a Smith-Corona typewriter and it came with two cartridges: a black ribbon and a correction tape. There was also Liquid Paper to cover mistakes and an erasable paper option which I used when I typed 12-page term papers.
It was 1983 when I first typed onto an electronic screen using a CPT, a cassette powered typewriter. Such delight I felt when I discovered that I could backspace to correct errors. And one could rearrange paragraphs without retyping an entire page. This was glorious indeed.
Although I use the computer endlessly, I haven’t given up on pens and paper. I use longhand in my journals. And most of my columns come from ideas scribbled in those spiral notebooks.
As the generations pass, there will be less cursive writing. Everything will be hand-printed or typed on an electronic screen. Things change. That’s the way of the world.
And 40 years from now, today’s young adults will likely feel nostalgic for the writing tools and methods they once used – computer keyboards, cell phones, text messages. Maybe all communication will be done telepathically by then. Let’s just hope there’s still some sort of backspace key.
Copyright 2011 ~ Cheryl Unruh
Good one, Cheryl.
I liked these lines.
“We pushed a lot of eraser crumbs onto the floor of that third-grade classroom.”
“Alas, I am one of those yesterday girls.”
The ESU Business School was founded by a Penmanship professor. Penmanship was essential to 1890s business.
I love this column, Cheryl. Brings back so many memories of learning cursive writing at Walnut School in Emporia! I still do much of my songwriting by hand and probably always will…
Wonderful column. I remember learning cursive in the 3rd grade also, and remember all the little red marks on my papers. My writing has deteriorated so much since then. Mrs. McCormick (my teacher) would be appalled. 🙂 I hope cursive writing doesn’t disappear entirely. It has so much character.
It will put all the psychoanalysts out of business.
I meant Graphoanalysts.
I love your handwriting Cheryl!
Great Column! Definitely brings back memories. My cursive has never been good but it is much faster than printing. I remember thinking I wouldn’t need to know how to typ,e because I wasn’t going to be a secretary. Boy was I short-sighted!!
I like your handwriting too. I can still see remnants of the fancy cursive. My own seemed to develop through a series of “fonts,” if you will, until today it is nearly printing, only a bit more connected. I can do it very quickly without all the lovely flourishes of cursive, which is probably why it came into being.
I learned to type on the IBM Selectric, the one with the spinning ball. It was nearly distracting to my typing speed to watch the ball leaping about. 🙂
This past summer I had reason to be in the Wabaunsee County courthouse looking up some old court documents, doing research for a cousin about our great-grandfather. The case was from the 1880s, and it was very clear that excellent handwriting was critical to civilization in those days.
I wonder if the ability to read cursive will ever vanish? If it happens quickly enough I could have a retirement career as a translator. 🙂
Amy is right–cursive is faster, and that is why we teach children with dyslexia or dyslexia symptons to write in cursive–it helps the flow of the letter sounds. Manuscript is much slower, although my dad always wrote in manuscript, but he wrote really fast (and his manuscript looked somewhat like cursive–but not connected letters.)
We,in Clark County Nevada do not teach cursive at any time, unfortunately. For some apparent reason it is not important, and too, maybe that’s why education is in such dire straights here as well as across this country. The basic fundamentals seem to be only marginally necessary as long as the student stays up with their peers, and feels good about themselves. I have to admit that I did struggle in school at Pawnee Rock, to keep up with my classmates, but I find my educational accomplishments are far greater than those in the public school systems today.