Steven B. Zwickel
April, 2024
My handwriting was an awful scrawl all the way through my school years. I was taught cursive in grade school (probably Palmer) but executed it poorly.
In the 1950s children started by writing with pencils and switched to using pens in 3rd or 4th grade. Most people were still using fountain pens, so each pupil in my school had to buy a sheet of blotter paper large enough to cover our desk tops.
I took a typing class in junior high school, but I missed most of a semester due to illness and never really caught up. I could hunt-and-peck with two fingers, but it was slow going and I made a lot of mistakes.
I was OK in high school because I rarely had to write anything longer than a short answer on an exam. For longer papers, I wrote them out in longhand and then read them aloud to my dad while he typed.
I caught a lucky break—a month of free time between finishing high school and starting college—and, since I hoped to do better in my college courses, I decided it was time for me to really learn to type.
I got a book for beginning typists from the library and sat down at the keyboard of our manual Remington.
J-U-G-space. J-U-G-space. J-U-G-space. Over and over. At the end of the month I knew how to type and handwriting was no longer a problem.
My college papers rolled out of the typewriter paten with ease and, thanks to “white-out”, I was good enough and fast enough to become a reporter, and later an editor, of the college newspaper. (I was actually fast enough so that years later when I was “between gigs” I was able to earn money working as an office temp.)
By the time I graduated I had great typing skills but the same lousy handwriting I’d always had. (And my spelling was much, much better!)
Then I spent six months abroad without access to a typewriter. My postcards home were illegible. Family members, and my girlfriend, complained that they had no idea what I had written. They couldn’t figure out what I was trying to say.
Now, in spite of the fact that my penmanship stank, I was a long-time fan of the fountain pen. Perhaps it was some kind of teenage rebellion; my dad worked for a large stationery company and helped introduce the ball point pen to the American business world. And, going against tradition and stereotypes, I got a Cross ballpoint pen for my Bar Mitzvah.
Some time in high school I bought a fountain pen and ink and took them with me to school. Before you ask—yes, they leaked and yes, they stained my pants, and yes, my folks were upset. I should note that those early ball-point pens were not a lot better; they often leaked and also made a mess.
But I was not going to give up. I wanted to write the old-fashioned way with a pen and ink. One time, I recall filling a film canister with cotton and a small amount of ink. I took it to school and, in class, opened the canister and dipped my pen into the ink. Dumb idea! What a mess!
Anyway, while I was overseas I got a ride into town and found a bookstore that sold books in English. On the shelf I found a little paperback by an Englishman who argued, very persuasively I thought, that anyone willing to take the time to learn and to practice, practice, practice, could develop an elegant, calligraphic writing style. No special pen or paper was required, just a desire to write legibly.
I began working on the exercises in the book. After a while, I became fairly good at it. I dropped many of the characters I’d been taught in grade school in favor of more legible ones that looked more like printed text. No more f, s, G, r, Q or Z. I even changed my signature so it looked more legible and a lot more professional.
Eventually my penmanship was so nice that people invited me to write out their formal invitations and to do the lettering on posters. I even got paid for some of this work! When I spent some time in China, I got a lot of compliments from the Chinese—who know great calligraphy when they see it—on my beautiful handwriting.
The debate over whether children still need to be taught cursive writing reminds me of what I heard parents saying in the 1980s. Many saw the computer as the tool of the future and they were vocal proponents of teaching “keyboarding” in the schools. I don’t know where this movement went, but in the 1990s and 2000s some of my college students were still typing with two fingers. The word-processor eventually replaced the typewriter. When people started using Apple computers they used the mouse; later, with Siri responding to verbal commands and the arrival of voice-to-text dictation software, the need for typing skills decreased even more.
After “keyboarding” we heard loud cries for the schools to teach young people to write computer code. It now seems that computers running on artificial intelligence will soon take over the job of coding.
Is handwriting a useless skill these days, as some argue? Is it worth the time and effort it takes to learn?
The arguments in favor of teaching cursive include scientific studies that concluded that learning cursive helps children’s brain development, it improves their memories, and it makes handwritten documents accessible to them. People who can’t write in cursive have trouble reading things that are hand written. So, if you are having trouble reading this, it may be because you have not been trained to write in cursive.
All I can say is that learning to write clearly helped me and boosted my self-esteem.
Here’s one last thought about cursive writing. Many, many people who are my age or older have something that I don’t think younger folks will ever have. Somewhere in our homes, maybe in an old shoebox or in the back of a drawer, there is a batch of smallish envelopes, possibly tied together with a ribbon or an old rubber band. Those are love letters—notes people sent to their significant others in the mail. This was something people did for hundreds of years.
Sometimes love letters were written when we were far apart, but also when we just needed to tell our special person how we were doing. Some have X-X-X and O-O-O for kisses and hugs. A few have stains, possibly from tears. These letters were special to us and that is why we kept them.
Love letters are not really a big deal. Few of them could be considered great literature or poetry. But they conveyed emotions in a truly human way. I just can’t see a text message or a bunch of emojis having the same kind of meaning. Young people don’t know what they have lost.
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{I am not citing sources here, so feel free to type in some keywords and look these studies up online.}
