Cursive on the comeback?

One of the young assistants at my gym/PT place – I float in and out of fitness and physical therapy – is applying to grad school, and he asked me to take a look at his essays. He gave me a printed copy and I read through and made my edits in the margin. He took a quick look at it and told me, “Your handwriting is fine. I’m just not sure that I can read cursive.”

Huh?

I knew that they weren’t spending much time worrying about whether kids learn Palmer penmanship – got to spend that precious classroom time prepping for the all-important standardized state tests to make sure that kids learn the Common Core. But I hadn’t thought through that this would actually translate into young adults who could neither read nor write cursive.

My writing is okay. Mostly legible, occasionally “nice.” But when I’ve been writing a lot, or I’m tired, it does tend to deteriorate. Generally, though, my signature is clear, and I can – if I concentrate – write with a fairly respectable hand.

My sister Kath has handwriting that is my beau ideal. My sister Trish has pretty good handwriting, too. I like my cousin Barbara’s quirky print/cursive writing, too. (Which I chalk up to her being a lefty.)

We all learned the Palmer Method which was, from second grade on (when it was introduced to students), practiced every day in exercise books. With our hands curved as if we were holding a tennis ball, and our forearms flat against the desk, we wrote out lower case alphabets, upper case alphabets, ovals, and push pulls.

Those are push/pulls and ovals on that pic of a yellow PostIt note. And that looks like my writing. Pure Palmer penmanship.

Here’s what the Palmer alphabet looks like:

Signs illustrating the Palmer Method – similar to the one above – were posted in every class room I ever spent childhood time in.

After 7 years of exposure and daily practice, even after all these decades I pretty much stick to Palmer. In high school, I stopped using the capital Q that looks like a 2, and substituted a Q of my own invention, which pretty much looks like a typescript Q, only slanted. At one point, one of the more officious nuns called me out on it. Who did I think I was? In her class, I was to use the Palmer 2-like Q.

I’m not very familiar with methods other than Palmer. My father, I know, didn’t use it. He may have learned the Spencer Method:

In any case, I always thought his writing was ultra-classy, and preferred that he sign my report card rather than my mother. (Her penmanship was some sort of bastardized version of Palmer. I’ll have to ask my Aunt Mary how, exactly, they learned cursive.)

In any case, I do believe there’s a value to learning cursive.

How are you going to sign something?

Sure, I just signed a document via DocuSign that imposed some fake script on my name and that counted as a signature. But in real life, there will still be non-digital forms to sign. What do you do if you don’t know cursive? Print your name in block letters, like a kindergartner? Mark it with an X?

And what if you actually have to take down some information? What if, for whatever unimaginable and far-fetched reason, you don’t have an electronic device on which to do so? Cursive is a lot faster than printing, that’s for sure.

Fortunately, even if it’s no longer quite the “thing” in grammar school that it once was, cursive may not be a completely lost art.

At least if you’re in Connecticut, where there’s a summer cursive camp.

Brigid Guertin, executive director of the Danbury Museum & Historical Society, has struggled to find interns capable of deciphering the sepia-tinted documents of their city’s handwritten past. “The majority of our assets are in cursive and not transcribed,” she said.

So three years ago she launched cursive camp, in hopes of training tomorrow’s interns today. Surprisingly, children and parents flocked to it.

The campers, ages 6 to 14, spent their waning days of vacation under the guidance of third-grade teacher Kathleen Johnson creating their own ink (a mashing of berries, vinegar and salt), scratching their names on paper with Day-Glo quills, or with cotton swabs on paint-filled bags, or with their fingers in generous shmears of shaving cream. (Source: Washington Post)

Well it sure would have been a lot more fun if we’d had Day-Glo Quills and shaving cream, rather than Sheaffer cartridge fountain pens. But whatever the tools deployed learning to write can help kids with more than just taking notes when our iPad is dead:

Now that technology has routed children to communicate via typing or (shudder!) emoji, experts are finding more to recommend about pencil and ink. Handwriting — print or cursive — increases development in three areas of the brain, according to a 2012 study, and “may facilitate reading acquisition in young children.”

Any kind of writing “is going to have massive benefits for the brain,” said Indiana University professor and co-author Karin James. Other studies demonstrate that students retain more information if they write their notes, instead of typing them.

Cursive making a comeback? Love it!