Don’t give up on cursive writing

Re: Curses For Cursive’s Decline, Andrew Coyne, June 25.

I enjoyed reading this column very much, as it made me reflect on my own handwriting. Writing in longhand forces me to concentrate harder on the choice of words to make a point. However, I wonder whether to truly free one’s brain creatively, it might be even better to dictate aloud to someone. I recall stories about Leo Tolstoy and others relying on a spouse or amanuensis for this purpose. In some cases this probably did not lead to a very happy home life. This inconvenience has now been overcome with voice recognition technology. On this count handwriting remains in peril.

C. Valley Ban, Toronto.

I was totally aghast when I discovered that despite putting my daughter through private school, she could not write a full sentence in cursive on a piece of paper upon graduating junior high. But I was even more distraught in addressing this with the head administrator responsible for academic excellence, who put me down for being so outdated by my expectations in her ability to do so. The administrator proudly admitted that as an adult, she personally couldn’t write anything more than her signature on a piece of paper.

Prescription notes from doctors are a classic example of how academically smart kids can be so dumb when it comes to penmanship.

Besides a poor reflection on a professional self-image and the possibility of killing patients, dropping cursive can “cut you off from your ancestors” by cutting you off from the beauty of the language itself, as Andrew Coyne contests.

rather than dropping cursive, I would argue for its reinstatement into a “bilingual” written curriculum. There is no question that knowing computer skills today is critical. But knowing computer typing skills along with cursive gives you the edge over those who are limited to computer typing — even in this modern age of social media.

Karen Fainman, Toronto.