Cursing the Curse of Cursive [Hackaday]

View Article on Hackaday

Unlike probably most people, I enjoy the act of writing by hand — but I’ve always disliked signing my name. Why is that? I think it’s because signatures are supposed to be in cursive, or else they don’t count. At least, that’s what I was taught growing up. (And I’m really not that old, I swear!)

Having the exact same name as my mother meant that it was important to adolescent me to be different, and that included making sure our signatures looked nothing alike. Whereas her gentle, looping hand spoke to her sensitive and friendly nature, my heavy-handed block print was just another way of letting out my teen angst. Sometime in the last couple of decades, my signature became K-squiggle P-squiggle, which is really just a sped-up, screw-you version of my modern handwriting, which is a combination of print and cursive.

But let’s back up a bit. I started learning to write in kindergarten, but that of course was in script, with separate letters. Me and my fellow Xennial zeigestians learned a specific printing method called D’Nealian, which was designed to ease the transition from printing to cursive with its curly tails on every letter.

We practiced our D’Nealian (So fancy! So grown-up!) on something called Zaner-Bloser paper, which is still used today, and by probably second grade were making that transition from easy Zorro-like lowercase Zs to the quite mature-looking double-squiggle of the cursive version. It was as though our handwriting was moving from day to night, changing and moving as fast as we were. You’d think we would have appreciated learning a way of writing that was more like us — a blur of activity, everything connected, an oddly-modular alphabet that was supposed to serve us well in adulthood. But we didn’t. We hated it. And you probably did, too.

A Fountain of Reinforcement

Was it the rote memorization of these hieroglyphs? The excruciating attention to detail that our teachers seemed to pay to our handwriting when it came to grading literally anything? Maybe it was the fact that in the States, there’s no real rite of passage attached to learning to write in either script or cursive, except that you escaped the bad marks in the penmanship department. Or maybe it was that regardless, eventually you got to use a pen instead of a pencil. I remember being stoked to write in thin lines of indelible blue ink instead of fuzzy, erasable graphite.

In other countries, kids are forced at some point to use fountain pens. According to Editor-in-Chief Elliot, the German kids all go to the store at some point and pick out their first fountain pen, which gave me an a-ha moment. Is this all that’s missing from the Stateside cursive debate? A little bribery positive reinforcement? Yeah, maybe. If there’s one thing that’s easier with a fountain pen than a ballpoint, it’s the ability to make more creative letterforms. Fountain pens are all about dancing with different pressures to form thick and thin lines in proper balance, whereas hard-pressed ballpoints only produce darker, monoline letters.

The Connected History of Cursive

Believe it or not, cursive has gotten easier over time. From 1850 to 1925, the time of widespread adoption of the typewriter, everyone in the US learned Spencerian script, which is a wispy, high-contrast hand developed by one Platt Rogers Spencer. The Palmer method was meant to simplify Spencerian script, as was the competing Zaner-Bloser script, which was developed around 1900. Zaner-Bloser took over with its two distinct alphabets for print and cursive, but the wide differences between the two in the letterforms led to the development of D’Nealian in 1978. By adding ‘monkey tails’ to each print letter, children grew accustomed to the idea that letters could easily be connected together — and start to believe that cursive is much faster than print.