The Importance of Hand Writing

 At The Federalist a few days ago, Daniel Coupland made The Case for Cursive In a Digital World. He cited things like the fact that without learning cursive writing, one cannot read cursive writing, and thus historical documents such as the Constitution and Bill of Rights would be illegible to our children. But these documents are of immense importance to our history.  But even reading the letters of our grandparents can be enlightening.  They were real people, after all.  

Of more immediate concern, he noted that students that hand wrote notes in class learned better than those who typed. And with practice, one can become quite fast at writing very legible freehand documents. My father, always an average writer in cursive, once marveled at a city clerk back in the day who took notes for the village council meetings in cursive, very quickly. These notes were good enough that they could be kept as official records. But this city clerk was quite old and his career spanned back to the early 20th century.

Gentle readers should read all of Coupland's piece, and if your state does not include it in the curriculum, agitate for it. Personally, I get tired of carrying around a perfectly good pen, only to have to "sign" things with my finger. It seems so childish.

But what I wanted to write urge gentle readers to agitate for is a different kind, and even older style of cursive known as italic. I remember as a child learning cursive writing using a variation of the Palmer method. Once students picked up on it, usually around the 6th or 7th grade, they would begin to stylize their writing, sometimes to the point of illegibility. For instance, the letter "t" requires that you stroke up and then down along the same line. But when writing fast, the straight line becomes a loop. This causes the whole page to be filled with loopty-loops, which are illegible.

Palmer is very strict in that each letter starts from the base line. Thus, the student may not see the "s" or the "r" in the lower case "s" and "r" as written in Palmer. When writing fast, the tendency is to just round off the "s" and "r" into a little mounds. Along with other letters that are rightly round such as "a" and "o" what you often end up with is a series of mounds and loops with little to distinguish one letter from another.

The style I have in mind takes the child's knowledge of printing and begins to simply tie the letters together. The emphasis is always on legibility and as such, letters start where they naturally start. Many people believe that I use calligraphy, but I don't. I use italic style as taught by Getty and Dubay. The style of writing goes back to the Italian merchants of the renaissance, who had to record their trades, contracts, and other business documents very quickly.

All the reasons Coupland gives for teaching cursive, by which he no doubt means Palmer method cursive, apply to italic cursive as well. But the students learn italic faster, because it grows out of printing, yet it maintains legibility, which is why we write things down. Who would know the plays of Shakespeare if he could not write?