Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Handwriting is not dead. It lives on despite the computer age. Cursive, however, is on the way out, and I for one am happy to see it go. (Start writing comments about how bad a person I am)

Time magazine mourns the death of handwriting. That is a nice headline, but I don’t put much stock in it. “‘Kids’ (those people who are at least ten years younger than you) don’t write by hand anymore. Everything is done on the computer.” Well, more is done on the computer than ever before, but not everything.

I do see the death of cursive writing, and I am not mourning its passing.

First, a disclosure: I always hated handwriting. I especially hated the subject of penmanship. We got grades in penmanship for grades 1 through 6. I went through that in the 1960s. Girls, excuse the feelings of a boy in the 1960s, were good at penmanship, but bad at the important things like baseball and football.

Anyways, fast forward out of childhood into my 40s.

Four years ago I bought a book on handwriting (“Write Now” by Getty and Dubay). I went through the exercises just like I did as a child. I have to admit that I tried harder this time around. I re-learned how to print. I also learned some history about the dreaded cursive style of handwriting.

“As students are just gaining some mastery of these forms, usually at the beginning of third grade they are asked to … learn a different set of 52 letters known as ‘looped cursive.’ This frustrates many learners”

Yes, it frustrated me!

“Paradoxically, the looped cursive…stems from letterforms inscribed by copperplate engravers and not from letters designed for handwriting.”

Aha! I knew there was some fundamental flaw in the whole thing and I was right!

For the past four years, I have printed exclusively and not written in cursive. I made this change at age 46 (so much for old dogs not learning). I write by hand in a journal daily – at least 500 words a day (that is a full printed page for you computer age types).

I feel younger. My 20-year-old son prints exclusively. I am impressed by his college notebooks as they look like they came off a printer. My 24-year-old son also prints exclusively. He learned to do that in engineering graphics. “If they taught us how to make perfect letters, why go back to that other stuff?”

Amen. Long live handwriting. Goodbye to cursive.