Curses for cursive’s decline
link to the past being lost
The Sunday edition of, ahem, another Toronto newspaper contained a fascinating, disturbing story on high-school students who are quite literally incapable of signing their own name. Alas, that would seem destined to include most children: The art of writing longhand is no longer required teaching in most Ontario schools. For
today’s teenagers it’s at best a distant memory; for tomorrow’s it will be something akin to hieroglyphics.
It’s not just an Ontario thing. Penmanship also has been dropped from the Common Core State Standards, the voluntary national curriculum in the U.S., leaving it up to each state to decide whether it should be taught. Some have: North Carolina, California and Massachusetts are among states that have responded by making it mandatory. But the trend elsewhere is away from it. In the digital age, where kids are surgically connected to their keyboards, where’s the need?
I learned to type when I was nine. I’ve been writing on a computer for more than 30 years. But I can tell you I would feel something vital had been lost if I could not express my thoughts longhand. Often when I am stuck at the keyboard, unable to find my way out of whatever mental cul-desac I have put myself in, I will pick up a pen and start writing — and the words start to come again.
This is not by accident. You’re using different parts of the brain. Typing is file retrieval, remembering where a letter is. With handwriting, you create the letters anew each time, using much more complex motor skills. Whether it’s the flowing motion of the arm, or the feel of the page under your hand, or the aesthetic satisfaction of a well-turned “f”, it seems to engage the more intuitive, right-brain aspects of cognition.
Tapping into your intuition is a critical part of writing, or indeed of thinking. Finding just the right word for a given thought is rarely a matter of rational choice: rather, it seems almost to suggest itself, its own peculiar welter of connotations and associations emerging as a match to those surrounding the thought to be expressed. Often you cannot immediately say why it is the right word. It just is.
That process of letting your mind rummage about in its library, subconsciously comparing words until it finds the right one, may sound vague, or aimless: but it’s really about precision. I know of poets, who value precision in words more than anyone, who refuse to write on a computer for this very reason.
But it isn’t only its fluidity that makes handwriting a useful aid to thinking. It is also the constraints it imposes. As with many older technologies, its virtues consist partly in its defects. (The problem with radio is you can’t watch it; the great thing about radio is you don’t need to.) Text on a computer is
How we write, in other words, affects what we write
infinitely corrigible: We commit to nothing, either in words or sentence structure. This frees us to make an incomprehensible mess of things. We sail out recklessly into a sentence with no idea of where we are headed, and get lost.
Handwriting, to the contrary, forces us to make an investment. The words are there on the page; we can’t change them, except to scratch them out. It inclines us thus to compose the sentence in our heads first — and the sort of sentence you can compose and keep in your head is likely to be shorter and clearer than otherwise. Your readers will
generally thank you.
That’s one of the reasons the Beatles’ songs were so memorable: they had to compose them in their heads. Neither Lennon nor McCartney could read or write music. So if they weren’t finished a song by the end of a day, they had to remember it until the next. If they couldn’t remember it, chances are it wasn’t worth remembering.
But just as handwriting’s free associative qualities make for greater precision, so its constraints are a stimulus to creativity. The imagination needs to tug on a leash. Nothing is so inhibiting as a blank screen, precisely because the possibilities are infinite. Likewise, anyone who has done improv knows the first thing you do is ask for an audience suggestion — “give me an occupation.” Only after you have narrowed your choices can you begin to expand on them. That’s what putting words down on paper does.
(The same is true of typing on a typewriter. I used to write all my university essays that way. I was too lazy to write a rough copy, too lazy even to reach for the correction fluid. So if I typed the wrong letter, I had to come up with a word that started with that letter. Whole sentences would sometimes go off in a different direction as a result.)
How we write, in other words, affects what we write. You compose in a different way using pen and ink than you do on a computer. You think in a different way. It may even be that you are, to that extent, a different person, much as we take on a different personality when we speak a foreign language.
We are becoming different people now: Our brains are almost certainly being restructured by interacting with computers all day long. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it would be a shame if that were all we knew — if one day we found ourselves cut off from our ancestors, unable to fully comprehend the thoughts they composed, having forgotten how they used to compose them.