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This Washington Post story yesterday about the impending demise of cursive handwriting got lots of notice at some of the usual places like Reddit.com and MetaFilter, and even though I try not to be a "me-too" blogger, I thought it was interesting enough to post about here.
The consensus at those forums is that cursive is antiquated at best and generally obsolete, and I really have to agree. Cursive handwriting comes from the need to write with a steady hand using a very unreliable writing instrument (the dip pen) and has been sliding toward obsolesence for the last hundred years or so anyway. It's not the computer that put the handwriting on the wall, so to speak, for cursive script, it was the ball-point pen. To borrow a metaphor from that evil Mr. Darwin, cursive writing represents the Neanderthal, and the ball-point is the Cro-Magnon which co-existed but ultimately co-opted it, while the computer is the resulting homo sapiens -- an evolution, not a revolution.
A lot of the arguments in favor of cursive writing that get mentioned in the article are simply bullshit -- the one that particularly galls me is the one where the "expert" asserts that we won't have meaningful authentic records of modern history if people don't write things in longhand. Here is a guy who clearly needs to get his head out of his ass and take a look around. The Nazis, for example, were big on typewriters (no doubt supplied by IBM), and we have plenty of authentic historical documentation from them. A certain former Republican congressman from Florida can tell you about the permanence and authenticity of certain forms of electronic communication as well.
Some of the arguments pose more intriguing ideas. One critic claims that writing in cursive develops cognitive skills that help children learn to become more verbally expressive. It would be interesting to hear a bit more about that; if it's true, then there might be some justification to including longhand script in creative writing curricula rather than pushing it into general knowledge. Reframed as a creative tool, cursive could gain a whole new cachet just as its predecessor, calligraphy, has.
Implied throughout the piece is the idea that all forms of handwriting are doomed because of technology, but I find that notion a bit presumptive. We've discovered that computer and other electronica simply are not the one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, and indeed often turn into the classic "hammer looking for nails" scenario. Being able to write in any manner with pen-and-paper has significant advantages over electronic writing, and is likely to survive our current romantic obsession with computers.
As someone who does most of his communication by cutting letters out of magazines and pasting them together to form threatening notes a sort of jagged mix of printing and cursive, or, increasingly, electronically, and who really hated penmanship classes in gradeschool, I can't get too worked up about this, if it is really happening.
As you say, calligraphy has not died out, it just has a new function. Here in Austria, there has been an interesting development involving handwriting; an older style of handwriting (sometimes called Fraktur) was widely used and taught in schools until WWII, I think. My wife's parents can still read it, most people under 50 or so find it illegible. No one seems to miss it much. They simply use the more recent, easier form of cursive.
Posted by mig [URL] at 10/12/06
Fraktur had some unfortunate associations with those IBM-typewriter-loving Nazi fellows I mentioned -- at one point Hitler declared that all official correspondence needed to be in Fraktur...until at some point some Nazi realized that it had Jewish origins, and then they had to come up with something else.
I suspect ditching Fraktur might have had something to do with all that unpleasant business.
Posted by Brian [URL] at 10/12/06
I learned "running writing" aka cursive at about age 7. But since upper high school and beyond, I almost exclusively print (unless writing to an aged grandmother). I simply write faster by printing, and even faster typing. But I find that the non-linear aspect* of pen-to-paper is much more useful sometimes when trying to write something difficult and complicated. Technology will not fit all purposes, at least for me, and handwriting is here to stay. There's also something about writing with pen or pencil that seems to make things "stick" better in my mind. If I type, I tend to forget. Perhaps there's some deeper connection between the hand and the brain, or the forced slowness is a factor. Or something.
* that is, being able to write in bits all over the page and link them, crossing out, adding and so on. Then, it's definitely faster, but only up to a certain amount of text and at a certain point in the writing process.
Posted by flerdle [URL] at 10/12/06
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