Some Thoughts on Cursive

“You know why we need to teach cursive in public schools?” someone belted at me on social media. “So kids can read important historical documents!” This has apparently become something of a clobber argument online recently, in the debate over whether schools should maintain the curriculum of good penmanship. As usual, this fellow hit me with links to the most common “cursive” documents, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Back during my teaching days, students already railed against teaching cursive writing. They regarded elegant handwriting as retrograde in an age of cheap digital printing. Cursive is rarely mandatory outside schools, mostly in rare official government paperwork. Beautiful handwriting has become an unnecessary luxury from another time.

Except, looking at the Declaration of Independence, something struck me: that isn't cursive. The most common version we all know, Timothy Matlock's transcription of Thomas Jefferson's text, was written in Copperplate, a form of calligraphy. Printer John Dunlap reproduced Matlock's handwriting with a typeface called Caslon, popular in the 18th century but mostly forgotten now.

Because of the way public schools teach cursive, I understand why people might lose the distinction between cursive and calligraphy. I studied in the waning days of Parker penmanship; by the time my sister was in grade school, D'Nealian had largely supplanted Parker. But in both cases, teachers heavily emphasized precision, elegance, and cleanliness. Cursive isn't meant to be any of these things.

I don't recall anybody telling me that the purpose of cursive isn't to write beautifully, it's to write quickly. Where the printing we all learned in kindergarten sought to create legible text that others could read, cursive meant to write at the speed of thought, letting students take notes or get thoughts onto the page quickly. Legibility to others should be secondary in cursive writing, at least in its origin.

To serve that, print writing is done mainly in the fingers and wrists. Any college student who's tried to take notes through an interminable lecture course knows how painful that becomes at speed. Cursive should move the effort of writing into the elbow and shoulder, letting the hand stay still while the arm does the effort of writing. This should result in copious quick writing with a minimum of fatigue.

But nobody ever told me that. All the emphasis in my grade-school cursive instruction stressed beautiful, elegant text. That is, calligraphy. As anybody who has ever practiced any art knows, you can have grace and precision, or you can have speed, but not both. By teaching cursive as beautiful writing, my teachers made it burdensome and impractical. No wonder my classmates and I mostly abandoned it when it stopped being mandatory.

I don't want to disparage calligraphy. In an era where text has become utilitarian and bland, I don't want to see beautiful letters disappear. But willfully beautiful handwriting is slow and time-consuming, and like oil painting or guitar playing, not meant for everyone. Those who stand to benefit should definitely practice calligraphy. But again, calligraphy and cursive are not synonyms.

Considering all the time I spent taking notes, and later watching my students take notes, we could've all benefited from real cursive. All the time squandered trying to massage out painful hand cramps or fend off carpal tunnel syndrome, could've gone instead toward art or science or business. If we'd understood how to write quickly, without fatigue, we could've had so many more hours in our days.

Instead, we were misled into thinking we had to accept hand pain as necessary for quick, practical writing. I don't think my teachers misled me deliberately. As with other subjects, their own instruction on how to teach skimmed past the “why” and onto the mechanics. While I believe teachers, at least the ones who last, are good people who love students, the school system sadly inculcates incuriosity and anti-intellectualism, in spite of teachers' best intentions.

Excessively precise handwriting therefore falls onto the same spectrum as “skillz drillz” math exercises and translating Shakespeare into “plain English.” It makes educational administrators feel useful, and gives test writers something to measure, but alienates children from their natural curiosity. Kids need cursive, not because penmanship is elegant and historically significant, but because it's a mode of thinking. Kids need to learn that getting ideas out of their heads, and onto paper, is how we turn abstract thoughts into useful action.

Writing is the bridge between thinking and doing. And cursive is how we cross that bridge without getting tired.