It was the bane of many young second and third graders’ existence. It took hundreds of class hours and repetitive exercises to perfect. It was a staple of elementary education, and was advertised as the proper and faster way to write. And, according to one university’s recent report on the matter, it officially died this week.
Cursive, the elegant and sometimes impossible-to-read script that is easily recognizable by its loop-filled letters and the links between individual letters in a word, was in a sense declared deceased this week by officials at Beloit College. Their annual Mindset List describes items of culture familiar to most adults that the incoming freshman class likely will not recognize. Above corded phones and snail mail, one item topped the 75-item list this year: “Few in the Class [of 2014] know how to write in cursive.”
For some professors exhausted by attempts to make out their students’ chicken scratch on mid-term essays, this announcement is long overdue. After all, it was only last year that an article in Time magazine aptly titled “Mourning the Death of Handwriting” described the rise and fall of penmanship in the United States. But as many college students sigh in relief, trying in vain to remember how to make a capital “Q” (which sort of looks like a “2”) or “Z” (which I can’t even describe) in that seemingly ancient calligraphy, the laying of the tombstone on cursive’s grave makes me wonder:
What does this say about our generation?
Ask yourself, as a college student, how much do you write on a daily basis? And by write, I imply its original old English root meaning “to cut, to tear,” as a pen or pencil collides with the paper. Our generation lives in an era of texting, Tweeting, e-mailing and typing. Unless it’s a quick sentence on a sticky note as a reminder to pick up laundry or a paper exam, writing has largely disappeared from our daily lives.
“Cursive” comes from the Latin word cursivus, translated as “flowing.” Early in its history, cursive’s graceful form made it the official script for correspondence and important documentation like the Declaration of Independence. Before the turn of the 20th century, cursive was highly policed and taught in only one form; the ability to write in proper cursive was considered a highly prized art and a sign of literacy and education. But as the century turned, the official “rules” of cursive were bent, and students were encouraged to transform it into their own personal script. Eventually, the typewriter and then the computer slowly put an end to cursive, as more and more “writing” activity was accomplished on keyboards for clarity and ease.
And so the value of cursive was lost upon our generation. Most of us probably learned the technique in elementary school, but all but the most devoted of us abandoned the art as soon as our schools stopped teaching it and requiring its use on papers and tests. But as we traded the elaborate loops and curves for the simplicity of print and the ease of the keyboard, we also gave up something else. We lost a part of our own personality, an element of creativity and human expression.
In our generation, when we receive an e-mailed or typed thank-you note, we have no idea whether the note was conceived by an actual person or a program, or whether it was meant just for us or was copied to hundreds of others. We have thousands of online fonts to choose from and yet none that is subtly and uniquely ours, whether it was because we formed our “M” oddly or put an extra loop in our “F.” Slowly, we have sacrificed the hard but truly personal work of penmanship for the safe conformity of the keyboard.
Rest assured, cursive will not stop being taught in schools, if only because most people develop their signature from the swift-flowing letters. But as we hear the swan song of cursive and begin to see signs of the decline of penmanship, we should not be so quick to rejoice or dismiss it. We lose a little part of ourselves when we fall into the electronic void of the keyboard, and I for one am sorry to see it go.
