Cursive

I see more and more stories in various places about whether or not schools should keep teaching cursive handwriting. I don't have an answer. Handwriting styles do change over time, and for the immediate future the need to be able to write by hand is going to continue. Personally I only write in cursive consistently on checks. My father only wrote his signature in cursive during my lifetime. His printing was a thing of beauty, precise and quite elegant. When I eventually saw samples of his cursive from his high school days, I was very surprised. It was far worse than mine at the same age, a very untidy mess. He obviously learned to print precisely in engineering school. Printing was part of "Mechanical Drawing" one of the first courses in engineering, which very much explains why my mother was always more concerned with the penmanship of brother and myself than my father was. Mother always wrote in a very nice cursive. My brother's handwriting, both printing and cursive, was pretty bad, and his Mechanical Drawing class didn't change that much. I fooled everyone by not going into engineering, so my printing is what it is.

I had a rough time in early grade school with writing classes. Now I know it was probably due to a form of perception problem, the same one that causes me to make so many mistakes writing these posts. I don't really see fine details the way other people see them. They used to call it lack of hand-eye coordination. Of course it was. But saying that didn't provide a solution. I got enough practice writing that my printing and cursive eventually became legible. I still have problems with spacing letters and writing on unlined paper is pretty much a disaster. I enjoy writing by hand and do quite a bit of it, especially when planning out things that take space on paper more than just line after line of text. I still write often enough that I have gotten compliments on my handwriting (printing), which would probably shock my grade school teachers.

When I was teaching Russian, I used to insist that my students learn to write Russian in cursive. It wasn't so much that I cared, but in those days the odds of an American seeing genuine Russian block printing were pretty small. I'd studied Russian for years and up to that time hadn't seen more than two or three examples, mostly all-caps for makeshift signs. A student absolutely had to have some experience reading Russian cursive even if it was mostly their own handwriting! Some students would moan and groan when I announced my insistence on their writing tests and papers in cursive. Many of them had been through a beginning course or two with somebody else after all. The reaction was always the same the day of the first test. They'd come in smiling with their eyes wide, exclaiming that writing in Russian cursive was fun! I don't claim the results looked like genuine Russian-style handwriting. I was the last person to be able to teach handwriting in that fine of detail! But it least it gave them a chance of reading Russian handwriting.