The Death of Cursive Writing—and What It Means for Technology

This week The Atlantic offered a story titled, “How Handwriting Builds Character,” with the opening line boldly suggesting “Learning handwriting may be good for the brain.” Actually, that opening line was a quote—a reaction from a Wall Street Journal story covering the state of Indiana’s decision to abolish mandatory cursive handwriting instruction. And it's already clear that some folks believe the death of cursive writing will result in the decline and fall of Western Civilization itself.

This is not the first time the media has tried to bemoan the death of cursive. Just two years ago Time magazine suggested that those born after 1980 simply don’t have good penmanship. I can relate to this, although I was born more than a decade earlier.

My penmanship was terrible, and it was one of the subjects in school that managed to land me in hot water. My teachers told me that those who write well can go far in life. I’m a freelance writer and author today, and I think I’ve gone far in life. I’ve also been told that I write reasonably well, although that's not the kind of "writing" the teachers meant.

They meant penmanship. And as I took more and more “writing classes” in middle school and high school, I was forced to write out my drafts in cursive because for some reason teachers said it was easier to read.

Except for mine, that is. My reaction since the 7th grade was to type everything.

Hence was born my lifelong love affair with technology. Even before I took computer classes, I could type. And yet I still heard the teachers say, “Your typing isn’t going to do it, unless you want to be a secretary. You need to practice your penmanship.”

And all of this brings me back to technology. One of my first columns for AllBusiness.com some three years ago was on how the fax machine wasn’t quite dead. At the time, my wife and I were buying an apartment, and that meant signing documents and sending faxes. Fax machines are actually very old technology; they have existed in one form or another since the 19th century. The modern version we still use today has been around since the 1970s.

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As I am a freelance writer, I tend to need to send signed contracts and agreements, and in 2011 many clients still give me fax numbers for these things. Haven’t we gotten past this point? I have moved twice since 2008 when I wrote that the fax wouldn’t die, and I still have a fax machine. I just haven’t used it in more than a year and hopefully won’t have to do so. Instead of faxing it is easier to print and scan a document.

This takes us back to a big question about Indiana’s decision to drop teaching cursive—specifically, how will students learn to sign their names? Since learning to type, I can’t really say when was the last time I had to write out anything in cursive besides my name. The truth is also that most signatures are so sloppy anyway that a single class could probably suffice, beginning in first grade, on how to sign one’s name. It might not be worthy of John Hancock’s signature on the Declaration of Independence but it would be good enough for signing checks and passports.

It could also finally put an end to the fax machine.

New technology changes how we communicate

But could this go too far? It also annoyed me when my great uncle had said that schools needed to go back to the basics, and I thought it was crazy talk for someone who attended high school before going to fight World War II.

While cursive probably has little use today, much like the fax machine, the English language is suffering because of how people write and what they write. Texting results in short messages that are incomplete thoughts with poor sentence structure. These get the point across, of course, but at what price? The same is true of email and Facebook messages, but the worst offender could be Twitter.

I’m not a Luddite obviously, but a certain degree of communication is lost when we simplify it. I learned to type to make it easier for my teachers to read what I wrote. Texting practically creates a “code” thanks to shortened words (“U” for “you” and “R” for “are” as examples), use of symbols, and of course Internet abbreviations and slang. In Internet terms “I H8 reading how U R LOL rite now.”

Slow death of cursive writing inevitable

What I am saying is that technology is bringing us forward, and cursive will become a semi-dead "language" over time. While not a true language, it exists currently much like a language. And yet it has no practical use really. If anyone can think of why we need it, I'd love to know. But I also hate (as opposed to H8) to see how technology that makes it easier to communicate is destroying the art of communication.

Writing reasonably well via typing has actually taken me far in life. I just don’t know how texting and use of Internet slang will allow others to do the same. And finally, maybe we can finally unplug the fax machine for good and get back all those wasted phone numbers.

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