There’s a fascinating article in tomorrow’s Post about the decline of cursive handwriting. I’m 37. And I certainly remember fairly intensive instruction in handwriting — first block letters and then the more daunting and advanced cursive handwriting, with the dreaded off-white paper with one solid line, one dotted below it, and another solid beneath the dotted one — all to keep your letter creations bounded and in check. But, I guess not surprisingly given the ubiquity of computers and keyboards these days, instruction in handwriting has dwindled to almost nothing.
According to the article, primary school teachers spend ten minutes a day or less on the subject.
Another interesting factoid. When the SAT introduced written essays in 2006, only 15% of students wrote their essays in cursive. The rest printed them.
Not only do many young people today have difficulty writing cursive, many also have difficulty reading it. And that seems to be one of the main remaining reasons it’s taught — to maintain some basic level of cursive literacy.
On first blush, it seems hard to figure that young people would really have a hard time reading cursive writing. But it actually makes sense to me. In a former life I was studying to be an Early Modern historian — focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries.
Read cursive handwriting from people who lived a hundred years ago, even up to close to two hundred years ago, and as long as their handwriting isn’t especiallys sloppy, it’s not too difficult to read.
Reading 17th century English handwriting, even after quite a lot of practice, was a task I at least found extremely challenging. Some words or passages of words I was never able to decipher. (As a side note to this point, I had historians of earlier periods — who often covered longer spans of time in their area of specialty — tell me that one got to know eras of relatively good penmanship and ones that were atrocious and almost impossible to decipher.)
So does it matter? Do we really need to drill kids to learn cursive when it’s a skill they just won’t use very much except to sign their name?
Possibly so. The article points to some research that suggests that cursive handwriting leads to cognitive advancement. Kids who learn cursive handwriting express themselves in more complex thoughts. Given the tie-ins between cognitive development and hands, I guess this isn’t that surprising.
Here’s a question. When you jot things down in your daily life or take notes, do you write in cursive? I found that as I got older, late adolescence through early adulthood I guess, my cursive writing slowly died away and was replaced by a sort of hybrid of printing with a little cursive thrown in.
I’m looking here in one of the tablets I take notes in during the day. And the way I write isn’t really quite either. But it’s closer to print than cursive. How about you? How do you write when you put pen to paper? And how old are you?
