Script-Writing Secrets

By Duane Sharrock

It’s the 21st Century and people are still arguing about the importance of learning to write in cursive, the style of handwriting also known as “script.” The thing is, "script" is not important, even though many people say otherwise, and the public schools are not to blame for its passing either way. We, the People, are to blame, and can't understand this mainly because we aren't asking the right questions.

Research should be useful for settling this argument, but it hasn't been. People who can barely hide their biased support for cursive will refer to research that says handwriting notes and essays are better than typing them because we remember more, but there hasn't been any research yet that clearly, empirically supports cursive over block print. But asking if cursive is better than handwriting print isn't even the question we should be asking.

We should be asking why aren't people writing in cursive even though they know how?

One thing that keeps getting overlooked in the cursive arguments is legibility and skill. I have not yet seen an argument based on "use it or lose it." Few people discuss the actual skill of writing legibly nor do they talk about how to maintain and develop the skill of handwriting.

You see most of us write by typing. That's how we communicate with each other electronically. We send messages by phone, not by handwriting but by texting, pecking away with our fingers and thumbs on various types of keyboards in order to text. We don't even like to talk on the phone if a simple text would do. We don't send handwritten notes to our friends. We don't handwrite letters. If we did, the postal service would be booming. Instead, we type.

A lot of people have terrible handwriting--not because cursive isn't being taught anymore, not because handwriting, in general, isn't being taught. We have bad handwriting because we don't write by hand. If we don't write by hand, our legibility suffers. This is because the point of writing is not to prove some kind of loyalty to Industrial Era values; it is to communicate. And bad writing--illegible writing--creates noise in those messages.

And we can't simply blame the computer keyboard and mobile phones for loss of legibility in our writing. After all, doctors have been around long before Macs and personal computers, but they are still well-known for their illegible writing. Daniel Sokol and Samantha Hettige write: "In centuries past, doctors scribbled notes to keep a personal record of the patient's medical history. The notes were generally seen only by the doctor. Today, doctors are no longer one-man bands. With dozens of other professionals, doctors are but one element of a large, multidisciplinary health care team. A consequence of this expansion is that illegible scrawls, hurriedly composed by rushed doctors, are now presented to colleagues with no qualifications in cryptology."

Marissa Laliberte, another writer, reveals even more reasons for our decrease in legibility, by looking at the quality of doctor handwriting: "Long days plus tons of writing equals a very tired hand. “If you’re writing literally for 10 to 12 hours a day and you’re handwriting, your hand just can’t do it,” says Dr. Brocato. Most doctors’ handwriting gets worse over the course of the day as those small hand muscles get overworked, says Asher Goldstein, MD, pain management doctor with Genesis Pain Centers." Again, because of our Information Age, more people--more women, men, and children--exchange information. If they do it by hand, legibility decreases over time.

And based on this and similar statements, another question can be asked: Is our rushed society to blame?

Thoughts about these kinds of statements can lead to different questions: Why are we so rushed these days? How do instant communication and access to information impact expectations and encourage instant gratification and feedback? Why do we prefer to text rather than to speak on the phone? Why don't we write letters by hand as the handful of literate upper-class men and women used to write back before cars were invented?

Why aren't we acknowledging that the good old days before Internet/Computer technologies were full of wastes of time and has often led to costly errors? For example, in the medical fields, Sokol and Hettige report: "deciphering the notes can be a nuisance, sometimes requiring the assistance of colleagues and, if a signature is present and legible, a direct call to the author. Often, no name is left on the form.4 The considerable time and frustration associated with this detective work far outweigh the extra effort needed to dot an ‘i’ or cross a ‘t’" and they note "From the patient's perspective, illegible handwriting can delay treatment and lead to unnecessary tests and inappropriate doses which, in turn, can result in discomfort and death. In 1999, an American cardiologist caused the death of a 42-year-old patient when his prescription of 20 mg Isordil, an antianginal drug, was misread by the pharmacist as 20 mg Plendil, an antihypertensive drug.5 Poor handwriting undoubtedly contributes to another inconvenient truth: the high incidence of medical errors in Britain, which is estimated to cause the deaths of up to 30 000 people each year."

Laliberte also reveals an ego-related reason for illegibility: "The jargon that doctors deal with also lends itself to bad handwriting. Case in point: imagine trying to write “epididymitis” without your computer’s handy spellcheck. “We have so many technical terms that are impossible to write,” says Dr. Thum. “You sometimes scribble to cover the error.” There is (probably) always somebody who will point out spelling errors to knock a doctor "down a peg" or to undermine the doctor's credibility. This suggests illegibility is not only semi-consciously intentional and ego-related but is also a means of protecting your status and credibility.

So, the nostalgic cursive-versus-block print arguments is full of lies. These lies are lies of omission though. They aren't asking the right questions. While people are waxing nostalgic about the beauty of calligraphy and cursive, and attacking "the system" and conspiratorial agendas, they are ignoring the pragmatism of sending clear, readable messages.

The other lie is the implication that people who were taught cursive have continued to write in cursive. I know this because I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood AFTER the 1960s, and people had different attitudes toward “script”. If it weren’t for this meme below making its post-repost rounds on the Internet, I would have still floated through time in the haze of pro-cursive propaganda.

See below this picture of a note in block-print. This note brings it all back, back when I was a kid. The note was obviously rushed, scribbled onto the nearest piece of paper the parent could find on the way out the door to work. The parent was probably pissed because the kitchen was full of dirty dishes, there were shoes and stinking socks on the living room floor, the beds weren’t neat, and there were no leftovers to heat up for dinner. Someone was going to have to cook, and they were sick and tired of being the maid. The note was not a request. It was not a negotiation.

Mom and Dad Did Not Write in “Script” When They Were Angry

Many people my age were left notes like this when we were kids. The only difference might be where we actually read it. Maybe you would find it on the floor at the front door when you got home from school, or when you got a snack, or when you were about to sit down to watch tv. But you would definitely see it. It would be stuck in some spot in the home you always went to. It was in a place that the parent knew you would get to eventually.

This note wasn't something you ignored. It was your marching orders, and there would be a whooping if those orders weren’t followed.

And that whooping was real; not a metaphor.

Also, the note was NOT in cursive--btw! Cursive is formal, upper-middle-class, gentile. Print--in all caps--is REAL and it carried a stinging promise of what was to come if you did NOT do what you were told to do. This is true about some of the note-writing back then. This is the power of the block-print font.

Cursive writing was and always has been a social class thing. It was also a feminine thing. People forget this about the 70s.

This was around the same time that the middle-class was first studied as a class according to Wikipedia: “One of the first major studies of the middle class in America was White Collar: The American Middle Classes, published in 1951 by sociologist C. Wright Mills.”

Independence and nonconformity were considered masculine. It came with the "boys will be boys" deflection. Men had to make their marks in the world, after all. Cursive represented the opposite of this virtue: “Cursive was “all about conforming to rules, other people’s rules,” said Tamara Thornton, a University of Buffalo history professor and author of “Handwriting in America: A Cultural History.” Again, the Wikipedia article about the Middle Class did say this was mainly a middle-class value: “Largely attributed to the nature of middle-class occupations, middle-class values tend to emphasize independence, adherence to intrinsic standards, valuing innovation and respecting non-conformity.[2][5]”

Feeding into this promotion of middle-class values, progressive educators gave their support: “Back then, the preferred handwriting of artistic-minded free spirits was good old block-letter printing, introduced into schools by progressive educators such as Maria Montessori and John Dewey, who believed “writing should be about expression and communication,” Thornton said. Because cursive required a level of fine-motor skills not typically accessible before third grade, printing was embraced as a way to get younger children to express themselves through writing.” Admittedly, this does say that educators did have a part in killing cursive, but it came from a good place: they didn’t want to torture kids who couldn’t physically do this, but it was a practice quickly accepted and adopted by parents and teachers alike.

Somehow, a lack of skills is often called “masculine”. Don’t know how to “talk right” (as in to communicate tactfully)? That’s masculine. Not knowing how to talk in polite company? That’s masculine. Can't enjoy novels or studies? That's good. A real man takes action and does stuff. He doesn't sit around reading books like some kind of a nerdy bookworm. It seems like somebody sees certain inabilities and weak skills and frames them into something we should all strive towards. Very often, "can't" becomes "won't".

Direct-speaking is seen as a virtue. It is also considered "manly" because a man doesn’t care what people think. He says what’s on his mind. This is something Joan C. Williams talks about in “What So Many People Don’t Get About the U.S. Working Class”: “Directness is a working-class norm,” notes Lubrano. As one blue-collar guy told him, “If you have a problem with me, come talk to me. If you have a way you want something done, come talk to me. I don’t like people who play these two-faced games.” Straight talk is seen as requiring manly courage, not being “a total wuss and a wimp.”

Asserting your masculinity is a key feature of high school life in a town populated with blue-collar and middle-class families. Men made their marks. Men took what they wanted. They took risks and bluffed and strutted around. A man needed to look confident. Young men and older men alike sneer at femininity and at any hint that someone is acting “uppity.” Older adult men did masculinity mainly by being quietly stoic. They also backed their childbearing women who directly or indirectly threatened a whooping or two if the man was too busy putting food on the table to give that whooping himself.

This is another reason why boys don’t write in “script” unless they were writing a “theme”, an essay assignment, for a teacher. When boys sent notes to each other or even to girls, they block-printed them. If anything, writing script was a girl thing. You didn’t curl your letters, stringing them along and decorating them with flowers. You scratched them into the paper.

Like a man.

This was how it was done. If the guys got their hands on some curly-cued written note you had written, you were dead. Cannon-fodder. It would be bad enough that you were writing a note to a girl who might not even like you (rather than approaching her face-to-face), but if the note was intercepted, greater humiliation was inevitable. The contents could be publicized, but the feminine style, the spindly lettering, would have been like whiny-icing on a pretty pink cake. Flowery writing with flowery wording? Doom.

It’s easy to forget the importance of masculinity back in the day except it is often remembered as toxic. Some of it was just fine though. As long as you toed the line.

So, no. You didn’t write cursive if you were male. You just didn’t. Your parents didn’t either unless they were inviting their friends to a formal event. It was all about social class and gender politics.

Except, teachers often block printed too. Of course, there will be exceptions, but teachers usually didn’t write cursive classroom notes on the dusty blackboard unless it was to model cursive writing. Instead, we all used block-print. (note: I chose a number of teachers in front of printed notes on blackboards for a reason.)

For people who want data with their anti-nostalgia, there is this: “The problem, too, is older than Common Core. Among students who went to U.S. elementary schools in the 1990s, only 15% used cursive on their SAT essay section, CollegeBoard reported. Within the popular media, stories like this one in a Vox suggest that the primary argument of cursive defenders stems from nostalgia about reading historical documents in their original form.” So, 85% of the college hopefuls wrote the essay in block-print.

How Do Kids Today Learn To Adult?

People trying to argue for cursive will keep repeating the same argument. In this Wired article, one of those arguments is: “if you don't learn cursive writing how will you sign a document?” And, in a historic flip flop, other people argue that script is self-expression: “Your signature was the one place where people could express themselves.” Karen Heller writes, just as, at one time, block-print was considered self-expression by others. It's confusing, but so confusing when considering how the teaching of cursive writing is being used.

It’s really politically motivated: “Cursive’s resurgence, Thornton argues, is — like so much else these days — tied to politics. “Society has gotten nervous about deviating from what is the norm,” she said, and cursive “tends to make a comeback when conformity is threatened.” As was suggested in the SAT essay data though, this was not a "norm" for students applying to college. 15% of people applying to college is not a "norm." And since that data was taken from the 1990s, the falling use of cursive is more than 20 years old. It is NOT a recent development.

Another argument encouraging a return to the learning of cursive is that a generation of students won’t be able to read our nation's sacred documents which were handwritten by the United States forefathers. This is another example of forgetfulness and the illusion of nostalgia.

We need to think back to how some of us were actually taught about the nation's sacred documents. People forget that their textbooks used translations and paraphrasing displayed beside reprints of the original documents. Most textbooks included the opening sentences of the documents and may highlight specific amendments and laws but rarely included the documents in entirety.

We continue to struggle with understanding these documents even though they are published in block-print in various non-cursive fonts. Many of us really don't understand the meaning of many terms used in the US Constitution. If you don’t believe me, here’s a glossary for the words found in the US Constitution. Test yourself. And when you find yourself bogged down and confused and repeatedly researching terms in various dictionaries, don't feel too dumb. After all, there are lawyers who specialize in Constitutional Law. There is also a process involved in interpreting the laws in terms of the spirit versus the letter of the law.

But yes, there are other reasons why writing is important. There is research saying that people learn better and remember more when they handwrite their notes instead of typing them. This research though doesn't say that writing in cursive is better than block-printing.

Back in the Day

If there is one thing about the American identity shared by the middle classes across the country it is that since the 70s and Vietnam (war), we hated the elite. When we weren’t making fun of them as snobs, we were protesting them as fascists, even while we idolized them. 

Don't believe me? Go on YouTube. Watch some TV shows like Chico and the Man, Laugh-In, Saturday Night Live with Garrett Morris, Jim Belushi, Chevy Chase, and Gilda Radner (“Much of the talent pool...was recruited from The National Lampoon Radio Hour”) to name a few. Watch some old television commercials: “Pardon me. Do you have any Grey Poupon?” Many of us who grew up in this time of working-class sitcoms and lampoons loved these shows and this humor. We loved this kind of social commentary that often featured the many differences between us.

The bottom line though is that this is the old “do as I say, not as I do,” right? Keep in mind that people from my generation will confuse the script capital "Q" with cursive capital "Z". And often, most of us write a mix of cursive and block print. Rarely are our handwritten letters written completely in cursive--if we do write letters at all.

Suddenly, we want our kids to practice a skill that few people were using because we are afraid that the skill of writing cursive will be lost. We want our kids to learn script because we want them to be able to sign their bank checks and to read--but not understand--national sacred documents.

Maybe, with the digital era making paper-based records irrelevant, people will still occasionally draw their signatures with their fingers on black or white screens. Maybe they won't have to sign in some other way, needing to prove their identity and to convey their consents in different ways, biometric ways.

Maybe.

The so-called crime of dismissing cursive instruction was not committed by public school education departments. It's not because of teachers or because of education policy. In fact, many elementary schools in the United States still teach cursive. So stop blaming them. Although it is probably true that there are some schools that do not offer cursive, this is not because of teachers. It's society’s fault. It's because of our expectations, our urgency for getting immediate feedback, our insecurities, our desperate fear of missing out, but it's also because of our desperate need for being understood. We are more aware than ever of our need for legible, accurate messages. It leads to more engagement.