The Pleasures of Cursive

A Paean to Penmanhip

Some of my life-long pleasures have now become old-fashioned, including the pleasure of handwriting. These days, this delightful practice is of little use, except for shopping lists, journal entries and the very occasional check.

I am writing fewer checks now because there has been an abundance of check theft in my village, with thieves fishing out envelopes, obtaining checks, then bleaching out recipients and amounts and writing in new ones.

I realize many people pay directly by Zelle, dictate shopping lists into the Notes app, and type on keypads into electronic journals—and so do not ever use script. I feel sorry for them.

Some, poor things, have never even learned to write script. My own children, who are now approaching middle-age, were never taught cursive in schools. Penmanship was rapidly disappearing from the curriculum in favor of typing, and now in our digital age, keyboard and thumb skills reign supreme. Even my friends who once learned penmanship in grade school are so out of practice they claim they could never read their own writing.  

But in abandoning cursive writing they are foregoing an everyday pleasure that may well be good for the brain.

For instance, Steve Graham and Virginia Berninger have published many studies on the cognitive and educational aspects of handwriting. They discuss how practicing handwriting affects learning and brain development, and they argue for its continued inclusion in educational curricula. In Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting, he cites a longitudinal study of 700 children that shows those with good handwriting skills also fared better in reading, composition and memory recall.

Hmmm. Could cursive writing help one’s memory in the later years? I cling to that desperate hope! But where’s the fun in it? you may ask. How can I call it a pleasure?

People are often fussy about their pleasures and for this one, I need the right pen and the right paper. The pen must be rolling kind, preferably with a point that ‘s not fine or ultra fine. (I like a Uniball Signo, Impact 207.) A rolling pen does not require any pressure, so it seems the words are going from my brain directly to the paper. The paper is white with lines, spiral bound between cardboard covers so I have a backing and can write anywhere.  Thus equipped, I set down my thoughts, carefully shaping each letter and word. I cannot say why it is so pleasurable to write cursive on the page—I only know that it is! Setting my thoughts down in my individual handwriting, using pen and paper, is strangely fulfilling. And, later on, reading my particular words in my particular script is also a pleasure.

When we were on a layover flying to Cambodia, we had seven hours to kill in a Chinese airport where (the horror!) there was no internet. Out of boredom, my husband began to write the next chapter of his novel in the notebook he always carries with him. He found the flow from thought to page was so easy that from that day on, he has always written his first drafts on paper and not on the computer.

People once thought that your personality could be deduced from your handwriting. “Graphology” became popular a hundred years ago, with graphologists believing that slant, pressure and pacing could reveal aspects of a person’s character, emotional state, and even career aptitude.

Some of these beliefs lingered on.  When I heard in college that some people devined one’s personality from one’s handwriting, I objected, “But what if a person has very conventional handwriting and does not deviate much from the model?” I was thinking of myself. The answer was a triumphant: “Doesn’t that tell you something about the person?”

In my case, not much, as I have usually taken a minority stance and am unconventional in various ways. When I told a friend I hadn’t seen in a while that I’d become more radical with the years, she asked, “How is that possible?”

Anyway, graphology has long been discredited by science.

One’s handwriting doesn’t change much over the course of a lifetime.  I recently came across a postcard my mother wrote at age 17. Eighty years later, her handwriting was exactly the same. Hers is an original style. The orientation is up and down, not slanted; the lower letters like “a” or “e” are tiny, with the taller letters “b” or “l” towering over them.

Calligraphy is handwriting pushed into beauty so it approaches art. My sister has practiced calligraphy for decades. She says it is soothing. She travels everywhere with her calligraphy pen and dashes off the most beautiful place-cards and birthday notes. I wish I had learned it earlier and could produce such elegant results.

What I can do is improve my own penmanship, forming my letters slowly and mindfully, resisting the urge to scrawl as I write in my journal. I carefully roll out the words and the sentences. There’s no hurry at all.