KILLING CURSIVE

                                                 
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