“I’m gonna sit right down and text myself a letter” 

By Jim Surber

A revision of the title of this 1935 song came to mind last week as I read an account of the entertainment industry abandoning hand-drawn animation in favor of computer-generated images. As one who hasn’t paid much attention to this medium for many years, it got me to thinking about the most obvious form of personal “art,” – handwriting. 

I remembered the time spent in the first six grades of school, when ballpoint pens were taboo, like sharply-pointed scissors. With fountain pens, we learned to first draw each letter of the alphabet, then to combine them into words and sentences. Being as artistic as an anvil, my handwriting was little more than acceptable. I don’t ever remember even hearing the term “cursive” until my kids were in school many years later. It is certain that none of us would ever have guessed that one of the 3-R’s, then known simply as “writing” would be now considered for elimination. Sad news, if an off-shoot of the internet revolution will be the slow death of cursive writing 

Handwriting has never really been a static art. The Puritans simplified what they considered hedonistically elaborate letters. Nineteenth century America fell in love with loopy, rhythmic Spencerian script, but the early 20th century favored the stripped-down, practical style. 

Researching further, I found that cursive started to lose clout back in the 1920s, when educators theorized that because children learned to read with books printed in manuscript, they should learn to write the same way. By World War II, manuscript, or print writing, was in standard use across the nation. Today, schoolchildren typically learn to print in kindergarten, and cursive in third grade, but they don't master either one. 

Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes to 15. Zaner-Bloser, the nation's largest supplier of handwriting manuals, offers coursework through the eighth grade but admits that now schools rarely purchase materials beyond the third grade. The company, named for two men who ran a penmanship school back when most business documents were handwritten, occasionally modifies its alphabet according to cultural tastes and needs           

Like my kids, many people born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but a professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that they haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says. Today, there is a group of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have no need for good penmanship. Cursive writing is on a death march, as Indiana has now made teaching cursive optional in its schools and asked that more emphasis be put on typing, or what is known today as keyboarding.           

The sinuous letters of the cursive alphabet swirled on countless love letters, credit card slips and banners above elementary school chalk boards are now going the way of the quill and inkwell. With computer keyboards and smart-phones increasingly occupying young fingers, the gradual death of the fancier ABC’s is revealing some unforeseen challenges. For centuries, cursive handwriting has been an art, but to a growing number of young people, it is a mystery. The computer keyboard helped to kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.

Some may say there are a lot of people who just can't stand to see handwriting die, and not just old people; but they may be out-of-touch people. The folks who want to convert us have formulated all sorts of rationalizations. Schools today say they are preparing our kids for the 21st century and ask, “Is cursive really a 21st-century skill?” Horse-riding skills among the general populace have declined too, and yet we survived. I just hope they don’t extend the same reasoning to stopping the memorization of multiplication tables.

It gives me pause to recall how the writing of personal letters to family and friends in cursive was such a very big part of my mother’s life. I’m sure that she wrote tens of thousands. But then, the cost of a stamp and envelope was far less than a long-distance phone call.

If writing in cursive becomes a lost art, so will the reading of it. Will the day come when educated people will look at documents like the Declaration of Independence with the same mystery as the hieroglyphics on ancient Egyptian artifacts? Will genealogists accept all previous information, rather than trying to decipher documents written in a mysterious form? What about the practices of law and surveying, both of which sometimes require the research of old hand-written documentation? How do you sign your name without handwriting?  Not all that many generations before us, many did with an “X.”