Cursive

March 25, 2023 - 9 minutes read - 1714 words

Like most American children, I was taught cursive writing around 4^th grade. I was then obligated to write in it, and my poor teachers were forced to read it, through the 8^th grade. As students entered high school, we were deemed intelligent enough to decide which handwriting scheme we preferred. All of that, of course, was becoming moot by the rising prevalence of electrical typewriters and computers. But when my school-supply-kit-issued Bic ball-point pen reached paper, I opted for print letter-forms.

But somewhere in my 20’s, I rediscovered cursive and now primarily write in it with a fountain pen (when I’m not at a keyboard). And when I saw linguist John McWhorter take cursive to task in a recent Times article, I saw both a pragmatic (wrist pain and hand cramp) and an aesthetic reason that it should remain in curricula.

Inspired by my 9^th grade history teacher whose architect-style, high-contrast letter printing on the blackboard was clear and sharp throughout the room, I decided to drop cursive and adopt an all-caps style of printing at the beginning of high school. For the first time, complaints about the illegibility of my penmanship seemed to decrease as the whimsy and room for interpretation occasioned by cursive was squished out and cut away like excess plastic on an injection-mold die. I became a human Gutenberg letter-pressing machine.

Concurrent with my high school years, computers appeared more and more frequently in homes and classrooms. With these changes, it was relatively easy to find a computer to transform notes and idiotically banal observations about The Lord of the Flies into grist for the maw of public education. So my volume of writing was decreasing and I found a “decent enough” style of writing to not vex my teachers too much. To be frank, I think my hand-eye motor skills were simply immature and undeveloped. I didn’t hit a pitched line drive until my 20’s and I suspect that’s also why my letter-forms were erratic and unpredictable.

In any case, one class pushed my handwriting output considerably upward: AP-exam-preparatory senior English. The “preparatory” part was fulfilled by having us write longhand, timed essays, often.

My body suggested, and I was not yet tuned to listen to it, that the ergonomic configuration used during this experience was not ideal. After an essay, my aching wrist would be exhausted and fingers cramped. It was the first hint that the bio-mechanics and the tools were not optimal. It seemed the roller “stic” pens and Mead notebooks with their need for pressure and friction to activate ink were causing discomfort. The only solution I could think of at the time was to upgrade to the inky, precision Pilot disposable pens.

Naturally enough, in short order I headed off to college with a box of Pilot extra-fine pens and set myself to the task of earning my bachelors degrees. But if the amount of writing in practice AP essays revealed a flimsiness in mechanics and tools leading to discomfort, the crushing volume of collegiate note-taking and Blue Book essay writing made the ergonomic failure inescapable.

Of course, I can’t say that I detected any problem then - for I had no alternative for comparison. The fish can’t know his native waters are polluted, it’s all he’s ever known. So I figured that this sort of discomfort was simply what happened when one was a serious student. One must, I gathered, “toughen up” and this was the “no pain, no gain” of being educated.

But after my sophomore year, I headed to Europe and was shown a better way: fountain pens (and cursive).

I think it was shortly into the new year of 1998 when, one day in the class' symposium room, I noticed that the majority of my colleagues were not using Bic crystal stics, nor were they using inky disposables. To a person, they were all using heavy, art-object-grade, resin-and-gold fountain pens. Even the girl with the UPC code tattooed on her neck who lived in an anarchist collective was using a fountain pen. I realized that these were the sorts of gifts one received from proud (grand-, god-) parents as one graduated from the gymnasium (college-preparatory high school plus Latin and Greek) or scientific-preparatory tier (college-preparatory high school plus advanced STEM topics) of higher education in the Germanic education model. These writing implements marked one as being of the scholar class, destined to use similar implements to attest contracts, issue decrees, and enter roll books of esteemed higher education institutions. These pens were the tools of councillors, board members, and those who would, in their turn, steer colleges themselves.

The scales fell away from my eyes as I realized I was looking at a class signal. While I’d understood cars and clothes and watches to be signifiers of class in America, in the bike-and-public-transport cultures of Western Europe, your pen communicated whether your thoughts were considered, whether they were valuable and you, therefore, in the leadership or wealth stratum of the society.

I needed to investigate these hypotheses.

I went back to my shared student house and asked a housemate about when he had started using a fountain pen. For a moment he got a faraway look in his eyes as his mind plied the misty waves of memory like a cutter in the fog. With a warm smile he told me that it had been a tween-age birthday present. He would later become a barrister, but it was clear that that class’ trappings and signals had begun coming to him as of that remembered birthday. He didn’t seem to have any recollection or regard for what sort of pens he used prior to that point: they were immature tools for immature hands. He had put disposable pens away like crayons or Legos and had taken up the fountain pen around the same age that one might take up a wine, a beer, a cigarette, or French kissing. Fountain pens were for adults writing down things that mattered.

I looked over his shoulder and saw a beautiful glass pot of Qink on the desk behind. Before it, the seafoam green resin and gold on his pen reflected the midday light.

I asked him to show me his pen, and he let me scribble my name a few times. It was blotchy and unpracticed. He advised me, and here was the revelatory moment, to use less pressure, it wasn’t needed because the ink wanted to flow out. I’ll never forget it, he used the verb of “to want.” To be honest, that statement hit me with the force of a ton of bricks. I suddenly realized why my wrist hurt: I was using a child’s tool to do an adult academic’s job. Using a roller stic was fine when someone needed to sign up on the chore chart, but for thought and writing that mattered, this was the proper type of instrument.

Suddenly the pained and cramped essay exam’s experience came into clear view: it was those flimsy-ass, cheap, mass-produced pens that were to blame. Couched as they were in class-obscuring totems of American bourgeois identity, I had been writing with an inferior tool and paying the cost.

I went to the local department store and bought a cheap fountain pen, a small blonde hardwood box to carry it and two refills in, and started using it. True to the description given by my friend, the ink wanted to flow. After a few weeks of leaks or inky fingertips and I learned to wield my Parker properly.

But then I had a new problem: because the ink wanted to flow, my inefficient letter-making from the disjointed lines of print invited the ink to pool and smudge. I needed a writing style that embraced the flowing ink that wanted to run out onto the page. I needed my nib to run ahead like Atalanta, while I needed the ink to chase it like Apollo. The solution was to (re-)embrace the old and hone my cursive.

So I want back to the letterforms and techniques I had learned in 4^th grade. In short order, I found my new tool helping me keep up in lectures and fill up notebooks with research notes that would go on to form the basis of papers that became well-received blocs of scholarship. Even after returning to the States, I kept using the fountain pen through graduation and on into my post-graduate years. I even worked through some adult penmanship workbooks to achieve a consistent style. That’s now been some twenty years gone by.

Just as the suit gives its wearer the feeling of importance and communicates to the workplace that the wearer is a person of care, the fountain pen and the curved letter-forms bespeak elegance, distinction, and a care with the written word. The former signals style; the latter, care.

To go back to McWhorter’s article that set off this cri du coeur, it’s true, the keyboard and even thumbs are replacing writing and most definitely are replacing cursive writing. And many of the reasons to retain cursive instruction are not compelling (so they can read letters from their grandparents, so they can read historical media, etc.). Those reasons have the odor of “we must ensure everyone learns Latin because Latin teaches you to think and you can’t hope to do quantum mechanics without the good thinking Latin teaches.” That’s utter hogwash, although I understand the mechanics of that claim.

Ultimately, I can’t mount any better defense of cursive (preferably with fountain pen) than this:

When I write cursive with a fountain pen, I feel important; I feel like I listen with better care; I feel like I take notes with more attention; I feel like my word choices should matter. And when I look back on a filled page, I see elegance and minimalism with words-shapes that are a beauty to regard. And while I contemplate what to do next, I do so with an ache-free wrist and un-cramped hand.

Addendum: The story of the engineering marvel of the ball-point pen and its ink and the place of handwriting in our modern world in “How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive” by Josh Giesbrecht in The Atlantic follows similar contours to this post and is worth a read.