It’s a little sad when, instead of learning a new language or an instrument, I’m considering learning something I totally had down in third grade.
But something needs to be done about my penmanship.
People’s handwriting is remarkably distinctive. I can recognize handwriting I haven’t seen in years. I know who’s writing to me from the tiniest scrap. But distinctiveness is not really what we should aim for. That was one of the points of learning cursive.
If you’re doing it right, everyone’s should look just the same. People have always been impressed by Dave’s handwriting. Somehow it seems even more charming and unexpected coming from a man. “Wow, nice penmanship,” I thought when I met him. “Wonder what he’s like naked.” That’s the power of a nice hand. Well, he had nice hair, too. And I had a good idea about the other since he was wearing only a towel when I met him. Anyway. I digress.
I’m digressing a little right now.
Dave has lovely handwriting because he did not diverge from the original cursive we were taught. He may have begun to diverge, but then later he made an effort to replicate his mother’s handwriting so he could sign his own excuse slips. “Once I learned how to spell ‘diarrhea,’” he told me, “I was in ‘em.”
Dave’s mom’s handwriting was just like my mom’s. The Palmer Method. You made every letter just so, the same every time. It was designed to be easy and efficient. I recall that you were also supposed to move the pen with your whole arm, rotating comfortably from the pudding portion of your resting forearm. You were not supposed to move the pen with just your fingers.
When the teacher wasn’t looking, we all moved the pen with just our fingers.
As a result our hands got crampy and tired and our handwriting deteriorated. We got a big bump on the distal interphalangeal joint of our middle fingers from holding our pencils too tight. For those of us on the dimmer side, it was years before we mentioned the odd lumpy tumor we’d had since third grade and someone pointed out it was from gripping a pencil too tight.
Where a lot of us went really wrong was deciding we should be more artistic about our writing. Bless our pre-hippie hearts! No, we should not. In fifth grade there was a teacher who wrote on the blackboard with little backwards threes for the letter “e.” That looked so dang cool. Immediately I began trying to jam in little backwards threes, and that took some jamming. They don’t really fit that well. Not only that, but they won’t hook up to any of the other letters. So every time an E came up in a word, which, you will note, is often, I had to lift the pencil to get it started, and before long I was lifting it for other letters too. The Palmer Method “r” didn’t look like an “r” until I’d written it as a capital letter, only smaller. I believe “g’s” were the next to get complicated. Somehow by the time I was in junior high I was basically printing, only on a slant, and with many of the letters miniaturized upper-case versions.
It was a mess. The Palmer Method sends graceful cursive gazelles loping across the page, and mine looks like I just opened up the monkey cage.
Now, I can’t read my own writing. I have retained scraps and envelopes on which I have scribbled something important, probably. We’ll never know.
There is a movement underfoot now to teach children cursive writing in schools, which is really something, because I didn’t realize it had fallen by the wayside. Apparently, kids are learning keyboard skills only. But many educators advocate for cursive. Among other things, they say you should learn cursive to be able to write and sign checks.
Um. Sure! That’s still a thing! That’s not really the selling point they think it is.
Also, you should learn cursive so you can read other people’s cursive. This won’t come up often. Many modern children are cursive-illiterate in their own language. When Grandma’s hand-written birthday letter shows up with a check floating out of it, they are completely stupefied, but bless their modern hearts, they do know which recycling bin it all goes into.
Well, the more compelling arguments include that cursive improves people’s fine motor skills and aids in the retention of information due to the fancy neural pathways that are developed. I suspect this might be true. My thoughts are organized as hell. I just can’t find the key to the filing cabinet. My neural pathways have been scuffed away by the sands of time into one broad unbranched and featureless highway, and I can’t remember a thing I ever learned. Abandoning proper cursive at age ten is probably to blame.
But I did drink a lot.
Okay, Murr… I think we need to know a little more about your “digression”. When you met Dave, why was he wearing only a towel? And why did he have to write something wearing only a towel? I imagine him taking a bath and having some brilliant idea that he was in danger of forgetting. “Gadzooks!” says he, “I must write this down forthwith!” He grabs a towel and charges into the other room to find a pen and paper. And meets Murr. Ah, Destiny!
Am I anywhere close?
And I have given up on writing cursive except when I have to sign something. I print, as it is more legible. The nuns would be appalled at my cursive now.
Nothing so fancy. He was wearing a towel because he got out of the shower to answer his doorbell. He didn’t sign anything for me, at that point.
What she said
I was one of those handwriting “experimenters”. I tried the mod hippy letters and very adorable curlicues. But what I am best at is very easy to read printing. And my second writing super power is that I can write very small. I was constantly getting poor grades in handwriting (it was a graded subject in my elementary school) but in today’s world of filling out forms, it is golden. I also take handwritten notes in meetings and on applications for my volunteer job and was chosen for both legibility and how many readable words I can fit in small space.
My first and surname both have a lot of lower loops and I am still big into the curls when using what we will loosely call cursive. I am at a complete loss when using those fake pens on a black screen. What shows on the screen is nothing like any handwriting and totally illegible.
My cursive is as equally bad on paper as it is on a black screen. And I always feel compelled when using a black screen to almost apologize: “Um… my actual handwriting is nothing like this.” (A lie.) “Yeah, we know,” they invariably say. Sometimes I don’t even TRY to make it somewhat legible. I just make a scribble and be done with it.
They seem to be just fine with all that. I really don’t know how it’s a legal thing.
And, well, I’m basically printing too, but as you can see, it’s not legible. Not even to me.
When I use a card to pay and a signature is required on a screen, I have a few names I cycle through: Clark Kent, Elmer Fudd, Albert Einstein, Daffy Duck, Cruella DeVille, etc. It all just looks like scribbles and the money still leaves my account like grease through a goose.
I’ll be 70 this year, and can still see that “tumor” on my right middle finger. All the bookkeeping I did as a teen and young adult certainly kept it alive and callused.
The one burning memory I have about penmanship was when I going to miss some days in High School. I had to fill out a form for all my teachers to sign (assigning homework, maybe?) and pick it up at the end of the day. When I did, everything I had filled in was completely rewritten by the office runner (one of my peers–another student). She explained/excused her decision by saying her handwriting was better than mine!
That was the first time I had the feeling of my identity being deliberately erased, because I knew even then how distinct and personal one’s handwriting was.
As an aside: mayonnaise is far superior to sour cream when paired with artichoke hearts.
Now you’re just being mean!
Not only that, mayo is superior to catsup on fries. Especially if you make a black olive-garlic aioli with it.
Meaner
You were erased. I’m surprised we can even hear you from here. And mayonnaise works with anything. I don’t use ketchup on anything on this Earth except meatloaf, and then it’s baked on the top. French fries get Salt, in abundance.
A couple years ago an old classmate (who I haven’t seen since high school) sent me an email asking how I was, and included an attachment. It was a copy of a note I had passed to her in English class, asking if I could hitch a ride with her after school if I chipped in a buck for gas and promised to keep my hands to myself. (We both had after school jobs uptown, she worked the perfume counter at a dept store and I was a dishwasher at the Pancake House.) Anyway, it was from May 1978 and I was very flattered she held onto that note all these years–but what really surprised me was my teenage handwriting. I just assumed my handwriting stayed the same over the years (my mom had beautiful penmanship until the day she died) but it was so neat (especially for a scribbled note) and now you’d need the Dead Sea Scrolls to decipher what I’d written. Anyway, yes I want to hear more about sexy old Dave too :^)
Did I say sexy? Yes, he had the most fabulous hair imaginable, and yes, all his muscles were well defined, but that was because there was no fat on them and nothing but skin, and I thought: Interesting. That might be the skinniest man I’ve ever seen. He was 6’5″ and about 155 pounds. Soaking wet.
My dad was an engineer, my mom a registered nurse. Dad is capable of printing that looks like it was done by a machine. No one can read his handwriting. Mom’s handwriting is neat, precise and absolutely legible.
I got horrible grades in penmanship because it was to me like that other undiscovered country, tying my shoelaces. I got lost in how the loops were supposed to go. My dad was appalled that I should fail at something so simple and there followed lessons in penmanship as well as how to tie knots.
Today my handwriting is a blend of printing and handwriting. I mastered my style in college when I became fast enough to record lectures in real time and verbatim. Also pretty much legible only to me. I must have conveyed something right or just scared the bejesus out of instructors faced by pages of neatly written essays.
For about five years after I was struck by lightning my handwriting was rather spiky.
A classmate in seminary forged one of my checks and I had a horrible time convincing the authorities that it wasn’t mine as my signature was too legible. Fortunately he used his ID to cash the check, idiot.
After that I changed my signature into a series of loops with one big loop encircling the signature like a cartouche.
After lightning my signature devolved further. Back in the day when you actually signed credit card slips a child in the grocery cart behind me gravely watched me signing and then proclaimed loudly that it was just scribble.
I don’t have a lot of goals in life, but I would like to be able to some day say “For about five years after I was struck by lightning my handwriting was rather spiky.” And mean it.
Near death experiences are great for small talk, but not so much fun at the time or if they have persistent after effects.
The lightning strike didn’t leave any external marks which made a bunch of people question whether it was just more of my hysterical nonsense. But I had an MRI of my head in 2014 and the neurologist said there were indicators of electrical trauma.
The other point is if marks had been visible externally, the after effects probably would be far more pronounced.
When I was sorting through my mother’s things after she died, years ago, I found that the one thing that could reliably make me choke up was seeing something she’d handwritten. The sight of her cursive reduced me to blubbering, and that can still happen to me now, 25 years later. I guess there’s just something so PERSONAL about one’s own cursive that it carries multiple layers of meaning and memory in a way that printing simply cannot.
However, like you, Murr, my handwriting is worse and worse, and my additions to the grocery list often mystify me several days later.
Handwriting is very personal. It’s like those stencils of people’s hands on cave walls, so immediate.
What a wonderful metaphor!
When I was in the third grade I wrote with a backhand slant. I don’t recall why, or why or when I stopped doing that.
My mother-in-law learned her beautiful cursive while growing up in Canada (Palmer method, perhaps?). She tried to teach it to my wife, who pointed refused to learn it, which my wife now regrets. She hates her own handwriting and asks me to transcribe any written cards she wants to send. I use a random mixture of cursive and lettering.
I tried to learn those graceful loops, but I absolutely could not do it. Really, I tried. Maybe not hard enough?
I think we were really resisting it. It seemed like a lot of practice for not much gain. We were wrong.
My elementary school class was 41 kids. The first grade teacher decided to skip teaching us to print. She was our second grade teacher as well (no other teacher could be convinced to take the job……. so both my cursive and printing is terrible……..
That is a BIG class. I think we generally topped out at around 30 or under, and my first grade class and second grade were in the same room. I don’t remember how that works but it did contribute to me skipping second grade.
Somehow it doesn’t seem right to not teach cursive writing anymore, but I get it. I only hope that they are teaching proper keyboarding. One of the most useful classes that I took in high school was typing. I admit that my motives were a mix of saving money on future term papers and meeting girls. Little did I know that it would turn out to be a life skill that I use every day.
My handwriting ranges from neat and legible when I’m writing a greeting card to sloppy legible for a grocery list, and it is a mix of printing and cursive. I’ve kept a legible signature, although the first letters are print capitals rather than the cursive ones in my high school signature. My wife (a primary teacher) has cursive handwriting that still looks like the example in the writing workbooks! My dad printed everything, but my mom had that beautiful, flowing script others have mentioned. End of an era.
I took typing in ninth grade and it got me plenty of temp jobs and, as you said, is tremendously important now. I wasn’t quite as good as my mom (130wpm on a manual, with no mistakes) but I was the second in the class. Joe Blount was first. Still remember that name.
I have the 1838 hand-written journal of my GGG-grandmother, Martha. Spidery thin writing in brown ink on nearly 300 semi transparent pages. I’m told my cousin has two other journals Martha kept during her lifetime.
I started working on creating a text document from it that anyone could read.
I found a website called Transkribus. Here you can upload images from hand-written materials and Transkribus will convert it to text. I’ve tried one page so far and it did fairly well, but I still have to read Martha’s cursive and try to correct errors or fill in missing words. I’m told that my eyes will get accustomed to reading this, and Transkribus will also improve with repetition.
Re, Dave in a towel:
I once had a blind date using an ad in a local magazine to attract suitors. (Way before internet dating.) He sent me a naked photo of himself standing face forward in an outdoor shower at a campsite. There was a little piece of masking tape covering the genitals, which I peeled off, of course. We had lunch, that’s all, I swear. I just had to meet someone who would do that. He was boring.
Oh. My. Freaking. Gawd.
Being stubbornly left-handed compounded my difficulties developing legible handwriting, especially since I started 1st grade 73 years ago in an Alliance Française school where they started you right off not only with cursive, but using steel-nibbed pens that you had to dip repeatedly in the inkwell in the front-center of your shared desk. Needless to say, I would make a mess of ink smears, for which I was publicly humiliated and physically punished. It was not until seventh grade in an American Catholic Middle School that a patient and kindly Brother Phillip (no, he was not grooming me) taught me how to write legibly and rapidly. By then ball-point pens had been invented. Now, approaching 80, my arthritic hands make writing anyhing longer than a greeting card a literal pain.
Heard that. My dad was left-handed (we children were all instructed that left-handed people are superior beings, although none of us inherited that) and he, having been born in 1908, was not allowed to use his left hand. As a consequence, his writing was even less legible than mine. And when he lost his larynx, and had to write to make his feelings and requests known, we could hardly manage it. Thank you, early twentieth century teachers!
Although I was never in Catholic school, we were required to use those steel nibbed, dip in inkwell pens in the fourth grade, which was held in a WW II style quonset hut after our school burned down during winter break. This was in the mid-60’s in Winthrop Washington, in the northern cascade mountains. This was only for penmanship classes, not regular school work. We had to practice our letters over and over. Fortunately, I wasn’t hampered with left handedness as well!
Because my older siblings didn’t have that experience, I think this requirement was just a peccadillo of that particular teacher, whose husband taught the fifth grade, and was equally weird. He would beat recalcitrant students, and my mother was convinced he was a child molester as well, and wanted to groom this blue eyed blond girl, so was very relieved when they moved away the next year.
Quite remarkable what sort of memories the blog posts and comments resurrect! I hadn’t thought about that in decades. You’re welcome.
Lordy! I am beginning to think of my comment section, as opposed to my posts, as a sacred space. I have the vaguest memory of using one of those pens, but not strong enough to be reliable. I do remember my dad got me a Fountain Pen, I think it was called, which drew ink into a reservoir. Hmm. I should look that up.
My daughter (in her 50s) learned cursive writing through the D’Nealean system. It is rather cool and at the time I adopted many of the letters. My daughter’s handwriting is very legible but mine is not.
I have never heard of it, so I looked it up. Sure looks like Palmer method to me! The capital letters are a little different. Hmm.
I can thank Robert Palladino, calligraphy instructor/ex monk at Reed College, for teaching me Italic handwriting. There’s flow, beauty and legibility and it transfers from pen to brush, small to large. Took me a bit further from elementary school cursive and I’m very glad it did. Roman majuscules I prefer to chisel in stone.
Well who doesn’t?
People who do not deal with cursive will be unable to read old documents. It reminds me of Mao Zedong’s reforming of Chinese. Subsequent generations can read everything Mao wrote — but nothing that he read.
OK, my turn. If only English were written from right to left, we left-handed scribes would have the advantage: Why do we approach the line from above? (Or “write upside down,”as often accused?). The angular strokes of cursive move the hand naturally across the page. To achieve the same pendulum motion, we lefties have to arc our wrist from above. Still, we end up limping our way across the page like an inch worm, and smearing the [cartridge] ink along the way. I remember turning the angle of my paper to get the pendulum advantage as best I could. My teachers would pass by and straighten my paper, after which I would surreptitiously adjust it again.
One day, age seven, I walked up to my mother’s typewriter table and placed eight digits on the center row of keys. Urikah, (or however it’s spelled). This made sense!