Apology to
Bill O’Reilly for borrowing from his best-selling book titles. This letter
attempts to answer two questions: (1) Why cursive matters. And (2), why is
cursive writing one ballpoint pen away from flat lining? (Pun intended)
1. Cursive writing matters because
students taking longhand notes do better on tests. Teachers and parents, take a
deep breath and sit down, and look up studies at Princeton, University of
California, Scientific American, Psychological Science, Research Gate,
Psychology Today, et. al. Beyond the objective rationale for cursive note
taking, there is, in my opinion, cursive writing reveals the distinctive
identity of the writer. Furthermore, a cursive writer is not burdened by the
starts and stops of keyboard activity. Thoughts, the good, the bad, and the
ugly flow unhindered from the moving pencil or pen. A cursive writer never
stops to find an emoji or emoticon to express their feeling. Well known authors
who do their writing in cursive are Quentin Tarantino, Joyce Carol Oates, Amy
Tan, Tom Wolfe, Danielle Steel, George Clooney, and many more. Many musical
composers use a special form of cursive to write their songs. (You might call
it “note” taking!)
2. The usual suspects of the computer
and cell phone as the major culprits in destroying cursive writing. I prefer to
look a bit farther down the digital stream to the ink jet and laser printers.
Every well-formed character is antiseptic and displays a dispassionate
similarity; when you see one machine-printed “E”, you have seen them all.
Venturing even further upon this theme, in my opinion, political correctness
and the homogeneous everyone gets a trophy view of society, disdains cursive as
too distinctive, too individualized, and too much an indicator of hard work and
effort.
Not everyone
agrees with my line of reasoning. (Another pun). Josh Giesbrecht, writing in
The Atlantic, August, 2015, “How the ballpoint pen killed cursive” describes the
history of the ballpoint pen and how it displaced the fountain pen which
started the rapid decline of cursive writing. His clinching argument
is---hang on for it---cursive died because people could not properly hold a
ballpoint pen! (Just think this writer was probably paid by the word.) The best part of his article is a description
of Bic’s “Fight for Your Write” slogan. For the record: I euphemistically refer
to myself as a “Hillbilly with a ballpoint pen.”
Glenn<><
Just West of Yesterday
