ROBIN WRITES: Cursive Woes
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By Robin Garrison Leach
We learn things best as children, and they stay with us for a lifetime. Multiplication tables. How to tie shoes. Tell time. These are basic skills, and they’re locked in.
I’m told you never forget how to ride a bike. And I’m sure that’s true. It’s a muscle memory kind of thing; I could still do it if I wanted to risk falling and invalidating my titanium knees.
Even things we learn as teens are easy to recall and put into practice. I could still drive a manual transmission, given a minute or two. I remember the basics of how to diagram a sentence (thanks, Mr. Vaughn), and—amazingly—I can still recall the boring steps of multiplying fractions.
But the brain cells that housed my ability to write in cursive have absolutely been overwritten by big, blocky, printed letters.
We all learned cursive, back when our classrooms were wall-papered with those black, frilly-alphabet borders dissected by dotted lines. We practiced each letter over and over, making sure we stayed between the top and bottom lines; our curled edges needed to touch the middle dots.
Then came the art of connecting them all to make words. It was supposed to be faster to write instead of print, but in our attempt to make each word pretty, we labored slowly and deliberately.
We wrote book reports. Essays. Solutions to word problems. Love notes. Cursive was our only mode of written communication in school once we learned it. And when we left school, we took handwriting with us—from correspondence to grocery lists.
I don’t remember when I began to print everything. It probably began on a harried school morning, when I needed to send a note to my daughter’s teacher. Or maybe, it was a scribbled recipe copied from a magazine. No need to be fancy. Just get it down. My handwriting was never stellar so it just seemed easier to print for most things.
Over time, letter writing has become something I seldom do. Check writing (where at least we wrote a few words in cursive) is no longer the mode of payment for most of us.
And, over the years, cursive writing has declined for most of us.
Oh, I still remember what it looks like. I see it on my Coca-Cola can and when I get a note from my friend, Karen, who still maintains great penmanship (she was a teacher). But unless I’m looking at old documents or re-reading my childhood autograph book, I don’t see cursive much.
When I decided to teach my granddaughter to write her name in cursive the other day, I was surprised that I had forgotten how to connect cursive letters. She’s only seven-years-old; too young to know that most people consider cursive to be a kind of secret code for old people.
I didn’t want to believe that I couldn’t handwrite anymore. I had to get this skill back, because losing basic skills is something all websites warn against as proof of the slippery slope of decrepitude. Regardless of my advancing age, I’m not ready to be labeled yet.
I got a workbook for cursive writing practice. It has a happy boy and girl on the front, gazing at the lines of a handwriting grid, with no depiction of the telltale calluses we all developed on our middle knuckle from gripping our pencils in a locking chokehold as we agonized over each arc and line.
I’m looking forward to learning how to write cursive all over again. I don’t know if I’ll use it much, but I have to know I can if I want to.
You may think you haven’t forgotten, but just try to make a capital Q. See?
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■ Robin is a freelance columnist who lives and writes in Quincy, Illinois. Contact her at [email protected].
