Friday, May 29, 2009
The Curse (?) of Cursive
Grammar buffs—writers, teachers, editors, and copyeditors, all of which I have been—took delight from Kitty Burns Florey's slim volume about sentence diagramming, Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog. It was witty, anecdotal, and well-designed, even if it didn't quite explain how to diagram sentences (although there were examples and enough discussion of the principles to bring much of it back). But its goal was not to teach us how to; it was to remind us that, no matter how well or poorly diagramming works to teach us grammar, a solid knowledge of grammar is useful.
Florey's new book, Script & Scribble (190 pp., $22.95, Melville House) addresses the problem that penmanship seems to be going the same way as diagramming. She claims that many school districts are no longer teaching cursive, replacing it with “keyboarding” (what was billed as “typing” when I took the course in the summer of 1965). We don't write letters, college papers are typed (or keyboarded), and our handwriting gets worse and worse. Doctors are being sued for illegible prescriptions.
Like the last book, this one hangs from the framework of dual histories: that of the process and that of the author's connection to the process. Writing has a longer (and frankly more interesting) history than diagramming, and Florey's discursive approach gives us story and context together. The book's design also highlights her footnotes, which constitute a strong argument for more footnotes in popular writing (unfortunately, one of the numerous production glitches that diminish the pleasures of this book sets the notes and their reference numbers out of sync through most of the first chapter).
While these features are entertaining, they aren't necessary to get us interested in the meat. Most of us don't write well, and most of us don't feel good about it. Most of us (at least most of us of a certain age) were also trained in some variant of the Palmer method (Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian cursive, popular in Tennessee, are both derived from Palmer). So is the problem with us, or with the people who taught us cursive, or with cursive itself? Should we give up trying to write with anything other than block letters?
Florey combines realism with optimism, so her answer to the last question is no. To the question before that, she says yes: all three factors share responsibility. She gives numerous examples of what even the notoriously difficult Spencerian script can do when taught well to students who apply themselves. But she also realizes that most of us won't put in that much work, since we already haven't. We prefer to think that our illegible handwriting is a sign of how unique we are.
The art of handwriting interpretation comes out of and supports that conclusion. As Florey points out, there is little science to say that graphology works, or how it might work, but that does not stop us from believing in it. However, many of the systems of graphology (and there are nearly as many as there are systems of cursive script) depend on elements that are not universal, such as looping ascenders and descenders. There may be something to it, but I'm afraid that it is, like Florey's discussion of it here, only an interesting diversion.
But many of us really do need to write legibly, and not only doctors and those of us who draft with fountain pens. Florey's entertaining little book cajoles us into a reasonable solution, one that has been tested in school systems and self-education programs. It isn't the latest idea, but it's clear and relatively easy to learn. I, for one, will be trotting off to teach myself how to write the “fine Italian hand” of 16th-century italic.
