9

handwriting is important first of all because it mattered to people

“

“¹

¹Thornton, Tamara Platkins, Hand-

writing in America: A Clutural His-

tory, New Haven and London: Yale

University Press, 1996, pg. x.

Cursive and Personality

11

So much of what is lost in typing a message to a friend or sending a

small happy face emoji is that sense of personality. When a note was

slid on to your desk from across the classroom, there was no ques-

tion of who was the sender. You knew your best friend’s scribbles

as well as you knew your own. These days it’s lucky if you’ve even

seen something that was written by a close friend. Many don’t even

realize this is missing from their life. Philip Hensher, author of The

Missing Ink:The Lost Art of Handwriting discusses his own personal

experience with this in the introduction to his book.

“About six months ago, I realized that I had no idea what the hand-

writing of a good friend of mine looked like. I had known him

for over a decade, but somehow we had never communicated

using handwritten notes. He had left messages for me, emailed

me, sent text messages galore. But I don’t think I had ever had a

letter from him written by hand, a postcard from his holidays, a re-

minder of something pushed through my letterbox. I had no idea

whether hid handwriting was bold or crabbed, sloping or upright,

italic or rounded, elegant or slapdash.

The odd thing is. It had never struck me as strange before, and

there was no particular reason why is had suddenly come to mind.

We could have gone on like this forever, hardly noticing that we

had no need of handwriting anymore.” ¹

¹Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink:

The Lost Art of Handwriting, New

York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2012,

pg. 29–30.

Cursive and Personality

13

“Can you write in cursive? Here write this line for me.”

This line was greeted with giggles and exclamations of, “God, do I

even remember how to do this?” There may have been initial doubts

but as soon as a sentence was either hastily scribbled or carefully

put down, the personality of each individual shown through. People

laughed and pointed at certain characters, saying “Oh, yeah, that

looks just like him,” or “Figures that you would be the perfect one.”

Coming from the hand, cursive is innately connected to us as people

and who we are. This connection can’t be found in a simple typed

email or text.

Cursive and Personality

15

our handwriting is an expression of our personality and humanity

“ “

¹ Philip Ball, “Curse of Cursive,”

Prospect: The leading magazine

of ideas, accessed March 26, 2015,

http://www.prospectmagazine.

co.uk/magazine/cursive-handwrit-

ing-philip-ball/.

¹

Cursive and Personality

17

In 2013, Alyssa J. Kersey and Karin H. James did a study focused

on the connection between reading and writing and the differences

between cursive and manuscript. Their full research, named ‘Brain

activation patterns resulting from learning letter forms through ac-

tive self-production and passive observation in young children,’ has

some interesting insites into what is happening in the brain when a

child reads or writes in cursive.

“Only letters learned through printing experience,

not typing, promote functional connections between

a letter perception area in the left fusiform gyrus

(L-FuG) with sensorimotor regions.”¹

¹ Karin James, “The Cognition and

Action Neuroimaging Laboratory,”

Department of Psychological and

Brain Sciences Indiana University,

accessed March 12, 2015, http://

www.indiana.edu/~canlab/research.

html.

The Science of Cusrsive

19

“Although previous literature suggests that writing practice facilitates

neural specialization for letters, it is unclear if this facilitation is driv-

en by the perceptual feedback from the act of writing or the actual

execution of the motor act. The present study addresses this issue

by measuring the change in bold signal in response to hand-printed

letters, unlearned cursive letters, and cursive letters that 7-year-old

children learned actively, by writing, and passively, by observing an

experimenter write. Brain activation was assessed using fmri while

perceiving letters—in both cursive and manuscript forms. Results

showed that active training led to increased recruitment of the sen-

sori-motor network associated with letter perception as well as the

insula and claustrum, but passive observation did not. This suggests

that perceptual networks for newly learned cursive letters are driven

by motor execution rather than by perceptual feedback.”¹

Really, all this just boils down to the fact that a young child watch-

ing someone do cursive doesn’t activate the same areas as a young

child actually actively writing it.

Figure A

This analysis revealed that when

comparing all cursive letters to rest,

an extensive region in the Lateral

Occipital complex, including the fu-

siform gyrus, was active bilaterally .

Figure B

When comparing the individual

learning conditions to rest, only the

actively learned cursive letters re-

cruited this region, and only in the

fusiform gyrus, more than rest.

Figure C

Passively learned letters did not

recruit this region greater than rest .

Figure D

Compared unlearned cursive let-

ters to rest, which recruited the left

LOC, but not the fusiform gyrus. No

regions were significantly active in

the remainder of the brain above

rest, including motor cortex.

¹ Alyssa J. Kersey and Karin H.

James, “Brain activation patterns

resulting from learning letter forms

through active self-production

and passive observation in young

children,” Frontiers in Psychology,

September 2013.

The Science of Cusrsive

21

23

then when that had been thoroughly mastered, you were introduced to the joys of joining your letters together.

“

“¹

¹Philip Hensher, The Missing Ink:

The Lost Art of Handwriting, New

York: Faber and Faber, Inc., 2012,

pg. 88.

Cursive in Education

25

Cursive has been struggling in the classroom. There’s been some

question of whether it’s important to teach this skill to children. Why

bother when they could spend that time learning technology skills,

like typing and working with digital interaction. The way things

stand currently are described by Philip Hensher in his book.

“In third grade in American schools—seven to eighths— now as it

has been for decades, a cursive hand is introduced. In 1984, the

New York Times reported a recommendation by an emeritus profes-

sor of education from Buffalo, New York, that schools should ‘de-

vote about five to ten minutes to teaching handwriting two to three

times a week in elementary school.’ They also managed to find that

Houston did spend twenty minutes a day in teacher-directed hand-

writing instruction from first to sixth grade—this was join the early

1980s. In recent years, a program called Handwriting Without Tears

has encouraged teachers to devote ten to fifteen minutes a day on

handwriting. Other twenty-first-century initiatives included teach-

ing American schoolchildren cursive from the start. There seems no

doubt that, here and there, there are many individual schoolteach-

ers in America sufficiently convinced of the importance of handwrit-

ing lessons in their own education not only to reintroduce such les-

sons but actually extend them downwards and upwards.”¹

Philip discusses how in America—he’s a English novelist, giving us

a different point of view on the whole situation internationally—a

school teacher “boldly said in 2001 that ‘about 50 per cent of kids

have illegible handwriting.”² Many states are taking actions to rem-

edy this situation while others are allowing cursive, or handwriting

in general) to fall to the wayside. England’s National Curriculum,

however, now stresses handwriting specifically. ‘The four criteria

of the Sats level two handwriting test are legibility, consistent size

and spacing of letter, flow and movement, and a confident personal

style.’³

This fight for the preservation of handwriting as a skill isn’t anything

new. Tamara Thornton speaks to the slow degrade in her book,

Handwriting in America: A Clutural History.

¹Philip Hensher, The Missing

Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting,

New York: Faber and Faber, Inc.,

2012, pg. 29–30.

² ibid.

³ ibid.

Thornton, Tamara Platkins,

Handwriting in America: A Clu-

tural History, New Haven and

London: Yale University Press,

1996, pg. 178.

“In 1924 Pittsburgh’s supervisor of commercial education reported

that “since the introduction of the typewriter in our junior high

schools, there is a tendency to minimize the importance of the teach-

ing of handwriting.” Within a few years, the typewriter threatened

to eliminate even elementary school penmanship as school systems

experimented with teaching kindergartners and first-graders how

to type instead of how to write. By 1956 and article in Look maga-

zine maintained that “handwriting nowadays is as out-of-date as the

hand lettered book.” Business letters, government forms, even so-

cial correspondence, it was argued, are all typed. “Why, then, do

we force children to master this archaic system of putting ideas on

paper?”4

4

27

Common Core has been taking the educational front by storm, usu-

ally followed by a flurry of question and controversy. Already, 43

states (see fig. 1) have fully adopted Common Core, while other

states have partially adopted these standards. There’s a huge split

with opinions about this new curriculum; some think it’s the best

thing to happen to schools while others are more sceptical.

Common Core as described on their own website:

The Common Core is a set of high-quality academic standards in

mathematics and English language arts/literacy. These learning

goals outline what a student should know and be able to do at the

end of each grade. The standards were created to ensure that all

students graduate from high school with the skills and knowledge

necessary to succeed in college, career, and life, regardless of where

they live. Forty-three states, the District of Columbia, four territories,

and the Department of Defense Education Activity have voluntarily

adopted and are moving forward with the Common Core.

For years, the academic progress of our nation’s students has been

stagnant, and we have lost ground to our international peers. Par-

ticularly in subjects such as math, college remediation rates have

been high. One root cause has been an uneven patchwork of aca-

demic standards that vary from state to state and do not agree on

what students should know and be able to do at each grade level.

Recognizing the value and need for consistent learning goals across

states, in 2009 the state school chiefs and governors that comprise

ccsso and the nga Center coordinated a state-led effort to develop

the Common Core State Standards. Designed through collabora-

tion among teachers, school chiefs, administrators, and other experts,

the standards provide a clear and consistent framework for educators.

What even is Common Core? What does this have to do with Cursive?

Common Core makes up the majority of a state’s curriculum, with

15% available for states to add what they feel is important for their

students to learn. One subject with the adoption of Common Core

has been that fact that these new standards cut out cursive in favor

of more technology standards. While many states have accepted

the exclusion of cursive some states still believe it’s an important

part of education. Of the 50 states, 25 have added cursive, specifi-

cally, into their standards. (see fig. 2)

From the Kansas Handwriting Curricular Standards

“The Kansas State Board of Education believes that cursive as a student

skill still holds an important place in the instructional practice of

every school’s curriculum and can be integrated in multiple content

areas. Research supports the role that handwriting instruction plays

in the cognitive development of children and this activity is even

more important in an increasingly digital environment. The Board

expects educators to ensure that all students can write legibly in

cursive and comprehend text written in this manner.”²

¹”About the Standards,” Common

Core State Standards Innitiative,

2015, accessed March 6, 2015,

http://www.corestandards.org/

about-the-standards/.

²”Kansas Handwriting Curricular

Standards,” Kansas State Depart-

ment of Education, December

2013, accessed February 20, 2015,

http://www.kansas.com/news/local/

education/article10892210.ece/BI-

NARY/Kansas%20Handwriting%20

Standards.

States with Common Core

Figure 1

States without Common Core

States requiring Cursive

States not requiring Curisve

Figure 2

The Common Core is informed by the highest, most effective stan-

dards from states across the United States and countries around

the world. The standards define the knowledge and skills students

should gain throughout their K-12 education in order to graduate

high school prepared to succeed in entry-level careers, introductory

academic college courses, and workforce training programs.¹

Cursive in Education

29

“When in 1994 Ronald Reagan

revealed himself to be a victim of

Alzheimer’s disease in a handwrit-

ten farewell letter to the American

public, it was as much the medium

as the message that lent his words

their emotional intensity.”

Emotional LevelA sense of emotion comes through when something is handwrit-ten. Something about cursive, especially, shows the train of thought, the stops and goes in the writing. History is filled with cursive, ev-erything from the incredibly official to the extremely emotional. President Reagan’s letter to America is an example of history that needed to be written in cursive.

“When, in 1994 Ronald Reagan revealed himself to be a victim of Alzheimer’s disease in a handwritten farewell letter to the american public, it was as much the medium as the message that lent his words their emotional intensity. “After nine years of studying him with objective coldness,” wrote Edmund Morris in the New York-er, “I confess that I, too, cried at the letter, with its crabbed script and enormous margin (so evocative of the blizzard whitening of his mind).” Had it “been keyboarded to the world,” the letter would have lost half its poignancy, continued Morris, for “matrix dots and laser sprays and pixels of the L.C.D.” can never convey “the cursive flow of human thought” embodied in script, “every waver, every loop, every character trembling with expression.”¹

¹Tamara Plakins Thorton,

Handwriting in America: A

Clutural History, New Haven

and London: Yale University

Press, 1996, pg. 191.

31

Spencerian writing was the popular mode of writing in America from

1850 to 1925. The book on the Theory of Spencerian Penmanship

wasn’t published until after the founder’s, Platt Rogers Spencer,

death. His five sons carried on teaching Spencerian Script and gath-

ered the teachings of their father to publish them under “the Spen-

cerian authors.” The introduction states:

“Writing is almost as imporant as speaking, as a medium for com-

municating thought. For this reason it is said that ‘Writing is a sec-

ondary power of speech, and they who cannot write are in part

dumb.’ Scrawls that cannot be read may be compared to talking

that cannot be understood; and writing difficult to decifer, to stam-

mering speech.

Theory directs, and Art performs; therefore inform the mind and

train the hand. If you would attain high excellence in Penmanship,

you must master the principles, and faithfully practice them.”¹

Spencerian System of Practical Penmanship

¹Spencerian Authors, Theory

of Spencerian Penmanship,

Fenton, Michigan: Ivison,

Blakeman, Taylor & Co., Inc.,

1874, pg. 1.

Types of Cursive

33

“The appeal of Spencer’s approach was that it was unprecedentedly sys-tematic, analyzing letterforms as that combination of various Principles and Elements, demanding an exact understanding of proportion of the lengths of letters above and below The Line.”

Types of Cursive

35

Emily Dickinson’s early manuscripts of her poetry, then just written

in letters to her sister-in-law, were scribbed in a form of Spencerian

that had moved away from the strict traditional script. Dickinson’s

writing caused a lot of problems for her publishers later on, with

her erratic capitalizations and punctuation. Her distinctive oblique,

looped script also makes for occasionally difficult reading, like in

these manuscripts from 1861.

“The Coca-Cola logo was first published in the late 19th century and contains only characters from the Spencerian Script; therefore it is not under copyright. However, it is still protected by trademarks.”

Types of Cursive

37

Austin Palmer created the Palmer Method in response to the com-

plicated nature of Spencerian. His form of writing was a simplified

and more efficient. It became quite popular in the late 19th and

early 20th centuries.

“Palmer was clear on the shortcomings of Spencerian scripts. What

he described as copybook writing is very pretty, but, he added,

that’s all. With its ornate forms, which often required extensive lift-

ing of the pen and meticulous shading, which entailed the rework-

ing of letters, copybook script was more akin to painting than to

writing. It was far too slow, insisted Palmer. Speed it up, and the

arm not only tires quickly, but the script becomes illegible.”

Palmer Method of Business Writing

¹Spencerian Authors, Theory

of Spencerian Penmanship,

Fenton, Michigan: Ivison,

Blakeman, Taylor & Co., Inc.,

1874, pg. 1.

Types of Cursive

39

By the time of Palmer’s death in 1927, over 25 million Americans had learned Palmer Method.

Types of Cursive

41

Palmer Method eventually fell away and was replaced by the Zaner-

Bloser method for handwriting in the 1950s. The difference that Zan-

er-Bloser had was that it encouraged the teaching to manuscript, or

print, before teaching children cursive. Zaner-Bloser is the result of

a joint effort between Charles Paxton Zaner and Elmer Ward Bloser.

Zaner was able to streamline Spencerian by adapting handwriting

that was more practical for business documents and personal com-

munication.Zaner-Bloser is what is commonly found in schools in

current day as the type of cursive taught to 3rd and 4th graders in

the schools still teaching it.

Zaner-Bloser Handwriting

Types of Cursive

43

Some of the best memories we have are the ones that are shared

with others. Meals are most commonly shared with those we love.

Nothing smells better than Grandma’s kitchen filled with the scents

of dinner to come. It’s hard to capture those memories, though.

Take a picture? That won’t hold the same feelings, especially the

tastes, and it won’t translate as well for others. Recipe cards are a

way to capture some of those moments. They enable people to rec-

reate and relive some of their favorite family moments. These reci-

pes can be passed from parent to child. Sometimes they even have

fingerprints of dinners passed. So often, Grandma’s best recipes are

written in cursive with an overlay of grease spatters and other ingre-

dients. Children can page through a box of recipes and remember

each meal or look at the surface evidence of recipes made many

times over, sometime messily.

Written Memories

Memories in Cursive

45

One of the best parts of

hand written recipes is

being able to tell who

they came from. Like the

delicious pumpkind bread

recipe from ‘Mom.’

Memories in Cursive

47

Specific artifacts can remind us of the strangest things. Small simple

nothings can hold the strongest memories. For me, cursive reminds

me of my mother as it is. She’s always had the most perfect script

that I’ve ever seen. Then I find items like the one to the right and I

can clearly see her scribbling down a messy recipe over the phone.

I can tell it was over the phone because, for as long as I can remem-

ber, she’s always mindlessly doodled on sheets of paper when she’s

talked on the phone. It happens less now that cell phones have

become more prevalent but back when old corded phones were

mounted in every home’s kitchen, without fail, little scraps of paper

with cursive notes and doodles could be found scattered on the

counter. Cursive holds memories like that for me.

Reminds Me When...

Memories in Cursive