Handwriting: A fascination bordering on the brink of obsession

This post has been percolating for awhile now....I've just been trying to figure out how to word this...hopefully this all makes sense. It sort of all tied together as I was watching the news one night.

You see, after the Olympics, when they do the brief nightly news report, one of the local issues they covered was whether or not elementary schools should continue to spend time improving kids' handwriting and teaching cursive. The argument is that in this technology-driven world, schools should spend more time teaching math and science and computer/keyboarding skills and drop the handwriting requirement in the curriculum. There's no need for cursive these days- no one uses it anyway, so why learn to read and write it?

This makes me sad.

Now, I could go on about the things they mentioned on the news, about how learning cursive is important because without it, we could not read ancient documents, legal papers from the time before type-writers, ancestors' journals, etc, and all of that IS important. But for me, I just like handwriting. :)

I've mentioned on here my obsession with different kinds of pens. Well, you see, the basis for this lies in a much deeper fascination with handwriting. I LOVE it. In fact, I should add hand-writing analyst to my list of dream-jobs. There's just something magical and transcendent about reading pages of Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte's own, delicate penmanship or realizing that you make your capital Ws the same way Walt Whitman did. In AP Government, I'd zone out and study Thomas Jefferson's signature while the teacher prattled on, trying to follow the swift, fluid strokes of his quill and mimic them on the paper in front of me.

last page of Jane Eyre

I hope you don't misunderstand. While I LOVE cursive, I don't expect everyone to use it. In fact, as much as I love beautiful, calligraphic handwriting, I'm just as enthralled by messy, hurried scrawling. I like that everyone writes so differently. It's almost as distinct as a fingerprint. Personal. Unique. No one writes exactly the way you do. It's kinda cool to think about, no?

I like that I, personally, can change the way I write. I have a messy scrawl just like anybody else. I usually use that for hurried note-taking. But if I have time, my notes are printed nice and neat. In high school, a couple times, I didn't finish typing a paper, so I printed what was typed, found the right pen for the job, and finished the paper, writing it to look just like the typed portion. I saw it as a challenge, and I could get away with it. And then I have my "normal" handwriting, which is neither messy nor perfectly straight. It's just "me." And then, of course, there's the cursive. Now, I have different kinds of cursive, too. I can copy my mother's smooth, looping handwriting pretty well. My dad's narrow, slanting cursive is a little harder. But my very favourite thing to do is write with my genuine, antique fountain pen and incorporate some of the traits of old writers into my own way of writing.

Pen from Norwich, probably early 1900s to 1920s
Brass desk stand from late 1800s, missing the top decoration

Yes, this is really what my weekly letters look like. I could just write with a regular pen on regular paper, but at least this way, I have fun doing it. Fountain pen and parchment paper.

Now, I realize this might border on the slightly-crazy side, but this is how I memorized my songs last semester. Took a piece of chalk, and wrote that hilariously French poem on the board in a way that made me just want to sit and read it over and over.

While words are full of meaning, handwriting adds something to the way we read something. It opens the reader to the mind of the author. I said it before, but it's so different reading something when you realize the pen that wrote something was in the hand of the original author and not just mass-produced on a printing-press for the general public. There's a connection there that you can't get by staring at computer-printed words.

So back to the original quandary of whether schools should even bother teaching it, I think you know where I stand. You can bet my children will know cursive, regardless of whether the schools teach it to them. Do I expect my kids to have perfect handwriting and use cursive all the time? Absolutely not. Some people just have messy handwriting, and I'm just fine with that. But I do think that handwriting is much too important to simply lose for the sake of technology.

I'll step off my soap-box now.