Jacklyn Hobbes was the cleverest girl in my grade at primary school. She spoke in plummy English, not rough and wrong like the rest of us. By an extension that seemed logical, her cursive writing practise books were a thing to marvel at.
When we were taught to join letters — once we’d learned to read and write — the mantra was ‘light up, dark down’. The upstrokes were done lightly, the down ones more firmly.
The capital letters and risers on b, d, f, h, k and l had to touch the line above the baseline. The descenders of f, g, j, p, q, y and z had to touch the line below the baseline.
Jacky’s writing met all these criteria, and her downstrokes were so firm that a page of her careful handwriting in blue ballpoint rendered the paper crinkly. I wanted my pages to feel that written on, but I was too lazy for the effort required. I was a bit jealous of her dedication and meticulousness, but also relieved not to be her and to be compelled to such perfection. It seemed like it could be tiring.
‘Good’ cursive writing must be fluid, quick and even, and be executed without causing fatigue while remaining legible. Cursive isn’t, as I thought it was when I was seven years old, an induction into the adulthood, but an efficiency skill.
I remember Jacky’s cursive writing better than my own at that age. Now though, my right-leaning scrawl is more familiar to me than my own face.
But is my handwriting necessary? Is yours?
It’s been about a decade now that many States in the US abandoned the teaching of cursive. It took too long to teach it, teachers said. And why was it necessary? Typewriting on digital devices seemed more important and ‘keyboarding’ was less demanding and frustrating for children than learning to join up their ABCs on the page.
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