- TODAY, IN THE AGE of near-universal computer access in the United States, 42 states have stopped teaching cursive in favor of keyboard proficiency. (Massachusetts is one of the few holdouts.) The United States Postal Service teeters on the brink of bankruptcy for want of handwritten letters. That the importance of handwriting has diminished should surprise no one, but British novelist Philip Hensher’s ardent defense of it might.
Hensher knows a lot of handwriters still, so what are we talking about here? Schools haven't stopped teaching handwriting, they've stopped teaching cursive. As long as humans continue to pass on the opposable thumb gene, we'll be using it take hold of instruments with which to write. Don't everyone go out and stock up on paper. And not that the evolution of writing isn't interesting, because it is. I just think the water is a bit muddy in this article. EDIT: Or maybe I'm missing something. I googled 'handwriting' and what I see are pages of cursive. Am I to understand that handwriting is the same as cursive? When I print something by hand, isn't that also handwriting? I always thought the term handwriting encompassed both print and cursive writing styles. Am I going crazy?I write my books by hand. I thought I was virtually alone in this, but there are all sorts of writers that continue writing their books by hand.
You're not crazy. I always thought "handwriting" was writing by hand, and that cursive was a specific kind of handwriting (as in not printing).
I would have agreed with you that "handwriting" encompassed both cursive and well, non cursive print but, it looks as though cursive and handwriting are synonyms.
It was always referred to as handwriting in my schooling, cursive was a word I first heard in the Simpsons I believe.
I think a good indication of the decline in handwriting, is that people and institutions are showing less concern towards it. I learnt handwriting in primary school, but other than being told to take care with the neatness of the figures that I drew, there was very little direction. Perhaps the teachers were intending that we should develop a personal style, rather than conform to a very specific handwriting technique. But as I progressed through school, the handwriting lessons were abandoned, and the students around me allowed their hands to deteriorate into chaos and indiscipline. And, perhaps most telling of all, teachers didn't seem to care so long as the writing was legible. Handwriting used to be so important that people studied penmanship, and would, in their adulthood, apply themselves repeatedly to exercise after exercise that was designed to improve the regularity of their lines. Some quick images retrieved from Google:
Most astonishing to me is that people could actually write like this, with such perfect uniformity that their writing came to resemble the perfection of a machine. The craft of penmanship doesn't seem to be practiced any longer, and I think this indicates that handwriting is certainly declining, and that some day, even if handwriting itself is not forgotten, the time when people wrote with impeccable faultlessness will be; the finger and thumb will serve the purpose of creating nothing more than a tumultuous scrawl.
I love receiving a letter from someone with good handwriting. It is a waning discipline and as such, these letters are all the more valuable. My grandmother has lovely penmanship, my wife also has does but I don't think I've written in cursive since primary school. -Let's try that last bit out in cursive and see how I fair: Pretty horrible, isn't it?!
I always got bad marks in handwriting throughout school. I was sometimes grounded for weeks at a time for bad handwriting. I just have shitty handwriting. It wasn't until I took a drafting class that I was shown a style of writing that I could legibly write in. Make me want to say I hope that handwriting's grave is a cold one but at the same time I admire writing done with grace and style.
It's interesting, you rarely see cursive used in the United States, yet in Russia it seems to be used predominately (outside of printed books/internet, obviously), or at least so I've been told by native Russians. That said, my penmanship is much, much better in Cyrillic as opposed to English.