I read an interesting article in the Washington Post recently about a fountain pen store in D.C. It reminded me of how much time in my teens and early twenties that I spent working on my handwriting. Of course, cursive handwriting is now out of style but I grew up before word processing was widely available. (My first experience with computers involved a machine that filled an entire room and was fed with punch cards.)
But when I was a child, writing was a skill we were taught in grade school. There was a very standardized style of writing, some of which was simply ridiculous-looking. The capital Q, for example, looked like a 2 with some whorls attached to it. If you couldn’t write in Palmer Method, you actually got a bad grade!
As a teenager finding my own way in the world, I spent quite a bit of time developing my own personal handwriting which would be both legible and very cool. Although I didn’t admit it out loud, I hoped that at some point I would be signing autographs. I experimented with different ways to write, especially the capital letters in my name, getting rid of all those silly loops that I was taught in Palmer.
I also got in the habit of disconnecting some of the letters in the words I wrote, which meant that my handwriting wasn’t authentic cursive (where all letters in a word, other than the capital letter, were supposed to flow out in a single unbroken line). I actually had a teacher lecture the entire class about “an unnamed student” who had written a word without connecting any of the letters of the word. Apparently, that was no better than printing, like a first-grader. However, she failed to shame me since I was already past the point of caring about their standards.
I think about the death of cursive now when I write letters to friends and relatives. Most people don’t write letters anymore. Only a few people that I correspond with actually ever send me anything back in the mail. Some will text or email me on occasion, although even email now is very old fashioned. But those few people who do write to me on paper with a pen actually print the words. They don't write because they don’t know how to do so. They were never taught cursive.
There still are some people around the world who know how to write by hand and enjoy it. They send letters regularly and may have a list of “pen pals”. Some of them do it for the connection, while some are (also) infatuated with things like fountain pens, various colors and types of stationery and notecards, stamps and stickers, and other means of enhancing written communications. There are letter writing clubs where like-minded people can find others to correspond with, and I belong to one that I have enjoyed for many years and have people I have been writing to for over a decade.
In addition, the art of cursive handwriting can be as satisfying in its own way as a perfect ace in tennis or a great golf swing or a precise movement in Tai Chi. It's a physical skill that one can train to do through repetition and concentration. I wouldn't go so far to say that it's an athletic skill, but it definitely is about coordination and control of the arm and hand. It can be fulfilling in its own way.
Like calligraphy, cursive is becoming rare. I have found that some people can no longer read handwriting, and the few places that we need to use handwriting, such as signing a check or completing a legal document have also disappeared. Most people pay bills electronically. Many legal and medical documents ask people to sign their name with their fingertip on a screen. Those of us who have great handwriting using a pen have found out that we are back to square one with a “finger signature”. Mine looks like a child’s scrawl and I resent this. All that time spent was wasted because the muscles I taught to make beautiful words are not located in my index finger.
Within my lifetime. I have gone from composing poems and stories on loose leaf notebook paper to writing novels on legal pads. I have gone from inserting paragraphs with arrows and additional sheets of paper or even gluing a rewritten paragraph over the old one, to typing out my pages on a manual typewriter. My first novel was composed this way - painfully written on paper and painstakingly typed (sometimes using white-out when I made an error). For my second book, I struggled to learn to create on a blank white computer screen using a text-based word processing program. It was hard to make the shift, but I did so and have completed a number of stories and books this way. (The very old stuff is still in my filing cabinet on white and yellow paper, handwritten. Someday I will type it in.)
These days I tend to dictate rough drafts of story ideas on my phone using voice input software, which involves even less physical interaction with a device. The spelling is not great (AI doesn’t understand my accent as well as I would hope) so I have to rewrite quite a bit, but it's as far from cursive handwriting as I can get these days. I miss it, to be honest.
It's not as if I can convince people to take up handwriting again. That would be somewhat like asking people to go back to chipping their thoughts in stone tablets or inscribing them on cave walls or on buffalo skins. The way that human beings have tried to record information for future generations, or to communicate with other people have gone through many variations and many different technologies. But I still feel kind of bad that a skill I developed with many years of practice is probably going to die with me.