Cursive Writing Looks Like A Dying Language

By JORGE REINA SCHEMENT

With a new school year on the horizon, I'm reviewing a pile of student evaluations to prep for the coming semester. The evaluations come from a large lecture class of 350 students; and, because I teach at Penn State, these students come from every state in the union and numerous countries. As always, their handwritten comments range from "great lectures" to "boring," from "easy dude" to "I'm dying in this class." However, this year something is different.

This year, for the first time in my 30 years of teaching, every student printed his or her comments. Not one student wrote in cursive.

A veteran elementary school teacher assures me that cursive handwriting continues to be taught in every third-grade class. So, why has it disappeared?

The answer lies in practice. The many opportunities to practice cursive of earlier generations - letters, personal notes, lists, calendar entries and reminders - now offer practice in the use of keyboards and other digital devices. For those of us who spent hours moving pencils in circles and loops on double-lined paper under the stern eye of a teacher or a nun, it seems inconceivable that such a rite of passage has faded. Yet so it has - though it shone with power for centuries.

The few 18th-century Americans who could write expressed themselves through the distinctiveness of their handwriting. The style of handwriting instantly distinguished the clerk from the lawyer. A gentleman such as John Hancock practiced his strokes and swirls to demonstrate his strength of character; and Hancock did so admirably, for his is the most recognizable signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Nineteenth-century educators taught a simple cursive style to their pupils to go with the spare conditions of the new industrial workplace. By the end of the century, most instructors taught according to the Palmer method with its emphasis on uniform, legible penmanship. Proper penmanship was essential to a proper upbringing.

Journalists and academics have been decrying the decline of cursive for at least a decade, but the line has been crossed: Cursive is dead.

Should we mourn its passing? Indeed we should, for at its best it approached a true cultural art form. That culture, of many drafts, of wads of paper flying at the trashcan, of the messiness of hand and ink, has passed with hardly a final signature. To be sure, the remnants remain here and there, yet the occasional handwritten note is but an echo.

And what of it? In the era of instant messaging, the passing of cursive seems dismissively trivial, hardly worth noticing. Yet consider this: The generation born after 1980, soon to take up the responsibilities of civic leadership, cannot read either the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution in the original any more than they can decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics.

No longer does a person's cursive style speak of character and passion. As the form fades, what will survive of the spirit of John Hancock? Most assuredly, it is his spirit, for the political rantings of the blogosphere would warm the radical hearts of Sam Adams and Thomas Paine.

So let us toast the death of a fine old craft: "Cursive is dead! Long live instant messaging!"