Cursed cursive

Have we lost our ability to write by hand?

From Bill Warren:

The news reported today that the Newberry Library in Chicago was looking for volunteers to translate letters and documents written during the Civil War in their collection. Not in a foreign language, but in “cursive.”

Not taught generally today, cursive was the mainstay of communication of most people still alive today and in their 90’s. We learned it at school sitting at a wooden desk with attached seats, lined up in rows. The desk surface was sloped and the top opened to reveal a place for books, paper and pens and chewing gum. The pens were round handled wands, with a replaceable curved metal pen-tip shoved into the end. This was the writing tool.

One began by dipping the pen into a shallow round glass container mounted in the upper right corner of the desk cover. This was partially filled with black ink. The pens nib was pierced with a hole which filled with some ink when dipped in the inkwell. One then began writing with the pen on a sheet of paper laid on the desk top. The form of writing was cursive, which connects all of the letters so that the pen doesn’t leave the paper surface until the end of each word. When the pen begins not leaving ink on the paper it is time to redip the pen in the inkwell.

One was taught to write from left to right in lines across the page. Very easy for right-handed people, a bit more difficult for left handers. Right handers were always able to keep their hands away from the ink, Left handers were following the pen point with the side of their fingers. It was much more difficult to keep from smearing the wet ink which you just left on the paper.

One of the teaching techniques used to learn cursive was to draw consecutive circles across the page. This then ended in nicely drawn tubes flowing across the page. Left handers had the ink smeared as the pen moved across the sheet. So left handers tended to tip the sheet to the left, avoiding the following smear. Right handers learned to satisfy the teacher by creating nice long swirling tubes. If I sound bitter it’s because as a left hander my penmanship was awful. All of this was going on in the first few grades. Superb penmanship was rewarded by being posted on the blackboard for all to see, particularly parents during inspection time. The reward for the proficient cursive student was often being allowed to dust the erasers. This consisted of beating them together (outside) producing a cloud of fine chalk dust which slowly fell to the ground.

I’ve gone away from cursive to complain about being left-handed, let’s go back to the subject. Cursive had some very interesting variations. As one became more proficient the writer could slant all of the letters in one direction. This made your work standout from the crowd, until the crowd decided to adopt slant writing. One thing the student could adopt was larger and rounder capitals for the initial letter of each sentence. The letter I’s had to be dotted, one could make those small circles or subtle dashes flashing off in a new direction. Letter T’s had to be crossed. It was much prettier to use a swirl rather than a straight line in doing so. And capital O’s always had a swirl in the top surface above the line of the lower case letters. Q’s not only had the swirl of the capital O’s but a curl hanging off the bottom to distinguish them from ordinary O’s. Cursive capital S’s and G’s were always things of beauty. They both incorporated a rounded bottom swirling into an upper smaller circle, looking less like a printed S or G, but with plenty of room for decorative scrolls to be added. Doing this with a flourish was particularly admired by handwriting experts.

Running out of ink in the nib was a horror for pen masters. Trying to faultlessly reconnect a dry penline with a new nib was difficult. And then there were always the showoffs who used calligraphic pens to make lines headed in one direction thicker than the others. Showoffs, every one of them.

Well, we’ve pretty much covered the reasons why people now don’t recognize treatises written in cursive. Go look at a copy of the Declaration of Independence. See how clever you are in translating the common forms of writing up to less than 100 years ago. If you feel a little inadequate, good. That’s what those of us who still can write in cursive want you to feel. So you can type 60 words a minute. Great. But can you dip the pigtail of the young lady sitting in front of you in the computer? Thought not. Go practice running your fingers over the keys without using the space bar. Caught you. See, you’re not that smart after all.

Written by Bill Warren without ChatGPT that doesn’t recognize cursive either.