I will learn to write cursive (again)
My handwriting is a drunken tumble of letters, so illegible to others that it strains the definition of literacy. If I wrote this story longhand, using cursive, you might not be able to read it. There is a fair chance I might not be able to read it. Not quickly. Alas, my mother’s handwriting, like her mother’s, looks effortless. It’s full of welcoming loops, rounded edges and unhurried cheerfulness. Cursive, performed properly, is an art, a style and a signature. Yet colleagues glance at my handwriting with fear, as if some days I am inventing a secret language, other days drafting schematics for a bomb.
Some regard it like the work of an outsider artist — perversely beautiful in its utter lack of discipline. I assure them: My muscle control is fine, my handwriting has always been this bad. The nuns — before their inevitable, ritualistic shaming of my complete failure in front of the whole class — would tell me just ... go ... slow ... I would just ... go ... slow …. Always the same result.
So a few months ago when I heard that the Chicago Board of Education, on the heels of a statewide mandate from Springfield, was requiring all elementary students to receive lessons in cursive — beginning this school year — I developed an eye twitch for hours, then needed a nap. Why is the world so cruel? My thoughts turned to the children, the poor darlings, who must be scared and confused now, wondering what they did to tick off the gods of education.
They can’t have cupcakes in class, but they can have cursive.
In the past decade, these gods — an unlikely cabal of legislators, teachers, researchers and early development professionals, both conservative and liberal — have led cursive-handwriting initiatives in school districts across the country. They offer pleasant, heartwarming reasons for bringing cursive back to children. They say that a fluidity of handwriting will lead to fluidity of mind. They want you to read your greatgrandmother’s love letters. State Sen. Kimberly Lightford, who led the charge in Illinois, likes to emphasize practical benefits of knowing cursive, such as writing a check, signing documents and reading the Constitution (which apparently is not translated into print).
They mean well.
But let’s not pretend handwriting is benign.
If you are a parent of a certain age, you likely recall that cursive handwriting was once used as both a threat and a cudgel. Some teachers referred to this punishment as “copy work,” some called it “writing lines.” The penance for the crime of talking too much, being distractible or not ratting out a kid who launched an eraser in class was the same:
Write a single sentence, in cursive, 500 times.
Or 50 times, or 200 times. I attended a Catholic school where 500 times was standard. The sentence was often cold, curt and authoritarian — “I will not talk in class” or “I will pay attention in class.” Once I had to write, 500 times, “I will not talk back to my teacher.” Which chewed up a weekend. On the Sunday night before it was due, my mother and I stayed up past midnight writing the last 100 lines. She could help because of a myopic loophole in the punishment — the teacher never looked closely at the completed assignment. On Monday, this teacher, a nun, having knowingly ruined days and nights with handwriting, looked you in the eye, tore up your work and dumped it in a wastebasket. It was cruel, and because your hand cramped for weeks, it was corporal.
Then again, said Tamara Thornton, a American culture historian at the Buffalo campus of the State University of New York, “It’s been a long time since teaching handwriting was just about artful expression. For generations, it’s been about conforming to rules.”
No wonder so many associate writing with drudgery. It’s not without reason that “The Simpsons,” our long-running contemporary social satire, always begins with Bart printing out a single sentence on a blackboard, ad nauseam. When Charlie Brown wrote a pen pal, his thoughts flowed: “Dear Pen Pal, I am disturbed. According to what I read your country hates my country and my country hates your country ….” He fixed his hand and printed. When he switched to cursive for class assignments, creator Charles M. Schulz shifted to a stiff flatness: “What I did this summer. I played ball, and I went to camp.”
Myself, I associate handwriting with madness.
I think of impeccable oldcentury script the way you do — as stylistic shorthand for class and refinement — but I can’t help read sweatiness and fear into those overly tidy curls, a creeping lunacy beneath the elegance. I think of graphic novels that use handwriting to establish a queasy intimacy with the pain of the author. I think of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining,” writing the same sentence — “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” — over and over, into oblivion. He was typing, of course. In “The Simpsons” parody of the film, Homer scrawls something similar across walls. But in both versions, it’s an act of auto-writing, which was a serious concern as recently as the late 19th century, the possibility that an endless river of script was caused by channeling the supernatural.
At one cheerful end, there’s Van Morrison, who said “Astral Weeks,” his airy, free-form masterwork, was partly a product of auto-writing — a musical speaking in tongues. Lynda Barry, the former Chicago cartoonist who occasionally teaches classes on creativity, asks her students to keep their pens moving on paper as she talks, to never stem their subconscious. She doesn’t credit the supernatural with success, only a belief that a handwriting motion is somehow linked to fresh ideas. She told me in a recent email that her first prose book, “The Good Times are Killing Me,” was written in 10 days by hand; but when she wrote her second, “Cruddy,” she spent a decade flailing away at a keyboard. “Then I started writing it with a paintbrush, and I finished it in nine months.”
At the other, caustic end are the thorny, opaque flood of words and associations assembled by William S. Burroughs into novels like “Junkie” and “Naked Lunch.” These stand alongside the novels of Jack Kerouac, who wrote “On the Road” on a continuous scroll, rarely self-editing. (“That not writing, that’s typing,” Truman Capote famously quipped, though not meaning presumably that Kerouac was being guided by voices.) Indeed, the Beats liked their typewriters, but I imagine their mindsets weren’t far removed from the 20thcentury schoolkid forced into the dissociative transcendental fog that was required to remain sane while writing “I will not pass notes in class” 500 times. Picture Beatlemania. Earlier this year I wrote a profile of cartoonist Carol Tyler, who grew up in Wrigleyville and Fox Lake, so obsessed with the Beatles she would cover her school notebooks in the word “Beatles,” writing in cursive, from margin to margin, thousands and thousands of times. After a photo of those old notebooks ran in the Tribune, I received an email from Carol Swed, a visual artist who grew up in Elmhurst at the height of Beatlemania.
“I was stopped cold” by that photo, she wrote. She said that in 1965 “I was 12 going on 13, living in Elmhurst, and wrote ‘Beatles’ 20,000 times on lined notebook paper and sent the pages to WLS. I got my name mentioned on the radio! Then some girl wrote ‘Beatles’ 30,000 times and broke my record. So I wrote ‘Beatles’ 25,000 more times and got my name announced again. Finally my record was crushed and I gave up.” She said that when she saw Tyler’s river of “Beatles,” her first thought was: “Is this my preteen rival?”
It was not.
And yet, last month at the annual Fest for Beatles Fans in Rosemont, Joe Yander, a collector from New York, told me: “A lot of the Beatles objects that people try to sell me are worthless. Why? Because someone decided to write ‘I love you John’ 900 times down the side of the piece. One stray ‘John, don’t get married,’ the value is gone. You see it a lot.” Jeff Augsburger of Normal, one of the world’s leading experts on Beatles memorabilia, disagreed: “I have bought many scrapbooks over the years where girls were supposed to be paying attention in class, but instead wrote ‘Beatles’ 1,000 times on loose leaf.” To him this doesn’t kill the value: “The handwriting is a personal touch.”
If only history agreed.
For much of the 20th century, if a student was learning cursive correctly, any personal distinction would be muted. In general, they were taught the Palmer Method of handwriting, which was 18thcentury New England stern, consistent and didn’t really care if you had not yet mastered the art of simply printing letters. According to Thornton, who wrote the 1996 book “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History”: “There was a standard model for cursive script and to deviate from it was not good. In the 1900s even, there were people very upfront about this — juvenile delinquents, they said, could be cleaned up by learning cursive. They believed the wave of new immigrants in the country would not be going to college, they would work in factories — so, if we could teach cursive like military drills, we could at least teach these people to follow our orders. I don’t think the people who want cursive now think that, or that they are fighting against chaos. But in the ’50s and ’60s, just as people were feeling society was getting too permissive, there were handwriting (initiatives). It doesn’t feel impossible to me to connect the handwriting mandate in Chicago to the feeling people have that Chicago is out of control right now.”
Early education reformers linked a messy handwriting with a messy morality, which often brought a bullying quality to the push for preserving a uniform, classical handwriting style in schools — even though, as Thornton added, “you might argue the typewriter had made most forms of handwriting kind of obsolete as early as the 1880s.”
Today’s handwriting advocates are gentler, more practical.
For Phyllis Cavallone, chief of academics at the Archdiocese of Chicago, cursive instruction never went away; she said the goal these days is integrating it but recognizing that “some (students) get thoughts out beautifully with tech and some do better with pencil on paper.” (Likewise, Grace Lee, a policy fellow with the Urbanabased National Council of Teachers of English, said the group’s stance on cursive is essentially “whatever works” to connect students and self-expression.)
In states with successful recent cursive initiatives, such as Texas and California, advocates often pointed at the absence of handwriting lessons in Common Core curricula, as well as studies that linked cursive lessons with increased brain activity, improved literacy and letter development. They also really, really just want you to read your grandma’s letters.
Karin James is a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, where she has studied the correlation between cursive and cognition. She is not convinced of a conclusive connection. “A lot of (school district) policies are not necessarily based on science,” she said. “They often seem based more on someone’s feelings or what parents want. The truth is, as a scientist, there is often a disconnect between what the science knows in this area and the educational policy that follows.”
If there’s agreement among cursive proponents, it’s that handwriting shouldn’t become a punishment.
“Yeah, that’s out,” said Mary Dixon, principal at Dawes Elementary School on the Southwest Side. “Today, we would break down a problem with a student — nobody has the time anymore to bury the problem beneath a mindless exercise of writing sentences over and over.” In fact, the National Council of Teachers of English, back in 1984, made a resolution at its annual meeting that condemned repetitive handwriting punishments.
Whatever trauma remains is generational.
When Chicago Public Schools began planning its cursive lessons this past summer, officials found that a handful of schools were already teaching it. Moreover, according to Jane Fleming, director of literacy for CPS, they found that cursive had been the “creative and fun part of the curriculum for a lot of students.” She said students and teachers saw it as a method to improve writing fluency — and as a kind of history lesson, about writing itself.
Crystal Oswald is a fifth-grade teacher at Skinner North Classical School in Old Town. She helped CPS develop its cursive initiative, and for years she oversaw the Skinner Cursive Club — in other words, her students have stayed after school to write cursive, willingly. She said her students are in touch with their motor skills and show no fear of cursive handwriting. Then again, they think of cursive as an old-timey fetish or an antiquated life skill, maybe even useful someday. Like knowing how to start a camp fire.
They see cursive for what it will become — nostalgia.
The snarky opening credit font of an indie film. The curlicues on a document in a museum. A diary kept in a father’s old Moleskin. A name scribbled on a digital check.
Maybe even a letter from a grandmother, written many years ago by hand.