Handwriting losing importance in digital age?

Cursive writing rapidly becoming passé

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

When I read stories like these, I really wonder if I’m really getting that old, or if news outlets are merely making mountains out of molehills on slow news days. When I was in elementary school (which I swear wasn’t that long ago), handwriting, whether manuscript or cursive, was a big deal when it was taught and then put into use. As far as manuscript handwriting (known to most people as “printing”), I even learned two different methods à cause de my being an Air Force brat and attending schools in three different states during my formative years.

Ironically, the same thing that allowed me to learn both Denellian and Zaner-Bloser manuscript actually resulted in my never having had formal instruction in cursive handwriting. One school I went to didn’t teach it until the fourth grade. The next had taught it in the second grade and I had missed out. The third school had taught it in my grade level (which, if you haven’t yet determined by process of elimination, was third), but more toward the beginning of the school year.

Now, the really warped part of all of this is that, despite having never having had classroom instruction in cursive handwriting, I did have some grasp of it at the point where I seemed to keep missing out on its instruction. My mother attributes this to my having learned Denillian manuscript, which supposedly forms more of its letters like cursive. I don’t think that had much to do with it, though. You see, when I was really little, I used to get letters from my grandma written in cursive. It frustrated me to no end because despite being able to read, I couldn’t make heads or tails of what she’d written because they looked nothing like the letters and words with which I was familiar. So, when I was about five, my mother started teaching me about cursive handwriting, how the letters looked different and how they were all connected. I started learning how to write in cursive a little bit at that point, but for the most part I took it as being sort of idle doodling and something I would simply grow into when I got “old.”

So with this scant background, I took a fistful of cursive writing practice worksheets and got to work on practicing the form of handwriting which I would be required to use on all classroom assignments for the next two or three years. My teachers were familiar with my background and knew that I hadn’t had handwriting instruction, so some of them did offer to make an allowance for me to be able to do my assignments in print. But I’ve always had a bit of a stubborn prideful streak which pretty much insists that things should never be made easier for me than for anyone else. So I pushed on ahead with practicing my handwriting on my own, and despite a few unorthodoxly formed letters (I never cared for the cursive ‘Q’ and I felt that the ‘H’ needed to be prettier and loopier since it started my name), I developed fairly neat and legible cursive handwriting.

I will admit that almost as soon as it was acceptable for me to write in manuscript on my assignments again, I did. However, after several years of having had to write everything in cursive, I noticed that my handwriting would morph into a print-cursive hybrid, especially if I was writing in a hurry. The more that time went on, my natural handwriring became more cursive than print, especially when my mind was trying to outrun my pencil. So I guess I did sort of grow into cursive handwriting.

Now that I’ve reminisced about my own handwriting past (as warped and jumbled as it may be), I’ve got to wonder: have things really changed so much? Even in high school (most of which took place in the current decade for me) it was rare that a teacher would require that anything — even a formal paper — be turned in typed. Many suggested that it was encouraged, but there were still a handful of people who turned in their senior English research paper — handwritten and skipping lines — on notebook paper. So I can’t imagine that it’s become the norm in such a short time for handwriting to become so shunned.

At this point, I’m actually very curious, so those of you in high school or younger sound off and tell me: does the article that sparked this diatribe of mine really ring true? Or, for the parents of younglings: how are they being taught to write, if at all? Is classroom and academic computer use really being pushed so strongly to elementary schoolers? I really want to know.