Putting a Cap on Cursive (OT)

To make a few brief comments as a coda to the discussion about cursive, called "joined-up writing" in the UK, I'm told, it seems probable that cursive writing developed because of the quill pen, an ink pen made from the wing feather of a large bird. The "pen knife" originated as the small blade meant for cutting and re-cutting quill pens. Quill pens were widespread as a standard writing implement for many centuries, from the 6th century, when they were invented by the Spanish of Seville, all the way to the beginning of the 19th century when they began to be replaced by metal nibs. Metal nib pens were "dip pens" at first, meaning they needed to be recharged with ink by dipping the tip into an inkwell just as you would do with a quill pen. Later, the "fountain pen" came about when the ink reservoir was incorporated into the body of the pen itself. The hollow calamus of the quill had been an excellent natural reservoir for a small supply of ink—not as much as could be held in a fountain pen, but more than a dip pen could hold.

These innovations are all surprisingly recent, as is the ballpoint pen, which for practical purposes only dates from around WWII. By contrast, the quill pen endured for well over a millennium as our primary instrument for writing with ink. The Magna Carta was written with a quill pen in A.D. 1215, and so was the Declaration of Independence more than five and a half centuries later. Thomas Jefferson bred geese at Monticello for a supply of quill pens (geese, swans, and, in the US, turkeys, were the source of the best feathers. And despite romantic depictions of quill pens in use, in reality many quill pens had the feathery vane stripped off, leaving only the bare quill. Sometimes a little tuft of feather was left at the end for a touch of je ne sais quoi).

I don't have much experience with quill pens—I never mastered the art of cutting the tip properly—but I used metal-nib dip pens for drawing when I was a boy (many of my artistic heroes were illustrators, and I particularly idolized the English illustrator Arthur Rackham, d. 1939, who made ink line drawings colored with watercolor). Dip pens, and I presume quill pens, are much easier to use if you don't start and stop your line in tiny scribbles, but keep the line going for as long as the ink lasts. And for a right-handed person, it makes perfect sense to drag the pen behind your hand with the nib slanted away from your hand, which is how such tips work best.

For a left-hander like me, a dip pen makes less sense for writing, although some people can manage it. You have to push the pen nib in what is naturally the wrong direction for it—against its point—and then you move your hand over the fresh ink you've just laid down. It's awkward and ineffective. I always liked the idea of fountain pens and I owned a few when I was a teenager, but I was not good at writing with them. I had to hold my hand in a claw-like curl to keep it above the line I was writing, so as not to smudge the ink, and I needed a broad, smooth nib so it wouldn't catch against the texture of the paper as I pushed the tip along in the wrong direction. 

I was taught cursive but only used it when I was forced to for school. I worked on my handwriting, though, and eventually worked out not just one but two distinct styles of what we calling "printing," meaning non-cursive handwriting like what is first taught to children, which I used alternately, for a while writing one way and then switching to the other. I even have two signatures—one that I worked out in 8th grade and another in my mature handwriting. I kind of got "stuck" with the first one because it went on various records along the way as "my" signature. You can't exactly put one signature on record at a bank, for instance, and then use a different one on checks.

Now I no longer write in longhand. I go days or even weeks without writing more that a few words, for instance on a check or to scribble a brief note. My handwriting is very rusty as a result; it's one of those skills you have to use regularly if you want to be fluent with it.

Aesthetics are important to me, and I view a lot of the world through that filter (a curse, sometimes). So I admire penmanship as manual craftsmanship and as an expression of artistic beauty. In 1968, aged 11, with my mother and her sister, my aunt, with my brothers and cousins, I visited Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, south of Lexington, Kentucky. They had an exhibit consisting of a real woman in period costume writing beautifully with a quill pen, and samples of her work were sold in the gift shop! I really wanted one, but my mother just asked, "what are you going to do with that?" as her way of saying "no." I got a Shaker mug instead, which I still have.

So I'm not sure keyboards are what killed cursive. The truth is more likely that, unless someone is skilled enough to write more quickly that way, there's been no real reason to write in cursive since the ballpoint pen reached technical maturity, seventy or sixty years ago.

Mike
Flickr page / New Yorker author page

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Featured Comments from:

Richard John Tugwell: "I like the (apocryphal?) story that NASA spent millions developing a ballpoint pen for astronauts that could be used in zero gravity. The Russians gave them pencils."

Mike replies: As you guessed, that's an urban legend. The Fisher Space Pen was developed with private equity, although Paul Fisher did spend approximately a million dollars to develop the special ink that was used. The government bought 400 Fisher Space Pens in 1967 for $2.95 each (about $24 in 2022 dollars). NASA had previously used pencils, but pencils posed a danger because broken graphite tips and graphite dust could float around forever in zero gravity and get into spaces where they shouldn't be, like inside sensitive electronics. And the Soviets also used Fisher Space Pens too once they became available.

You can still buy an original Fisher Space Pen today.

Kevin Crosado: "As a historical researcher I've spent a lot of time deciphering (or attempting to decipher) 19th century handwriting. Sadly, most of it wasn't remotely like the fine cursive you admire—generally it was some sort of block/cursive hybrid with all sorts of idiosyncrasies unique to each writer. For a 21st century reader it doesn't help that many writers didn't believe in a lot of punctuation either. I guess commas and periods were a bit tricky with dipped-nib pens—which would also explain why quite a few writers, when they did bother to separate their sentences, used dashes."

darlene: "Excuse the dust. I designed my kitchen's crown molding to hold mugs from our travels, and here is one of my favorites from where the wall meets the ceiling. I want to go back to Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill, as the 35mm slides I took from our day there are nice, but I did have to sign a paper saying I would not publish them, so I do not know how they would feel about a Mamiya 6 taking pictures. That was probably 25 years ago. Man, how time flies when you are having fun!"

Shannon Scott: "I still take notes at work in cursive. With a fountain pen. And I'm a lefty. I find writing in cursive to be faster than block printing. And many of my co-workers can't read it!"

Patrick Perez: "I was taught cursive in my elementary schooldays (1970–76) but it hasn't stuck with me. Fun fact: I attended the first Magnet school in America. My late mother (b. 1931) had penmanship virtually identical to millions of women, younger and older, who grew up all over the U.S. I can't fathom how the teaching of writing was so rigid that it permeated so completely, but here we are."

RubyT: "Fascinating. I write my grandson every week because getting letters is fun. I print for him, because he's only 8. Cursive is so much easier on my wrist (if not on the recipient's eyes). Sometimes I write old friends just to enjoy not having to print. Despite being right-handed, I am a poor candidate for a fountain pen."

Dave Pawson: "620,733 words in my journal to date, all cursive, all written with a fountain pen. Love 'em!"

Tom Passin: "Long ago, when I learned some calligraphy and played around with quills, I succeeded at making a quill nib that I could insert into my cheap Schaeffer fountain pen in place of its original nib. It was very pleasant to write with, and lasted a surprisingly long time for such a contraption. I don't know if I could ever have made another one that worked...."

R. Edelman: "As a lefty, if you wrote in Farsi, Hebrew, Arabic, or in Taiwan, you'd be in good shape for quill or fountain pens, as you'd be writing right to left. I was surprised to discover that despite the advantages of the ball point pen, fountain pens are still quite popular. A good fountain pen will write very smoothly and actually help to improve your penmanship. Many fountain pens are quite beautiful, and there is a respectable community of fountain pen aficionados, some of them left-handed, who collect these pens, which can become addictive. There are those who also collect ink, of which there are hundreds of choices, and are sometimes chosen to match the color of the pen."

Doug Vaughn: "I bought my wife one of these about two years ago so the would always know which camera was hers (we have identical cameras). She loves it!"

Tom Burke: "That was an interesting post, Mike.

"I could come back at great length about my experiences with pen and ink in years gone by—like you, I'm left-handed—but I will just say that at most of my junior schools pencils were the writing implement of choice. Was this not so for you?

"I was struck by your comment that you rarely write in longhand. I would say that until a few years ago that was true for me as well, especially as I had spent the last 25 years of my working life in IT. But shortly after I retired in 2015 I started keeping a journal, just about daily, and I write that in longhand. Not cursive ('joined-up' writing as it was known here) but printing. I'm now on my ninth A5 notebook. Actually writing it seems to make it more private and personal.

"At first the journal was simply a record of things—what I'd done, money spent, etc.—and the entries were very short. After the first 18 months or so I started recording my feelings about what I'd done, the events of the day, etc. This aspect of it has grown, especially during the last nearly three years.

"I have come to really enjoy doing the entries, and indeed going back to read them subsequently. For example, it's interesting (and instructive) to look back to the entries for early 2020 and see how late it was before I first mentioned COVID, and even that was in the context of 'would it affect a planned trip to the US in April?' (Yes it did, of course.) In recent years I've also done a much longer entry, a 'thoughts of the year' entry, at the end of each year, and it's interesting to see what I felt at each such moment.

"Here in the UK we have a specialist retailer, Paperchase, which sells notebooks, diaries, stationery, travel journals, etc., of all types. They seem to be surviving even in the face of significant competition, which suggests that some people at least are still writing. Do you not have something similar in the US?"

Rob: "This reminds me of my father who was left handed. Being at school in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and '30s, he wasn't allowed to be left handed—children were beaten for using their left hand as dominant. Later in life he still retained is impeccably neat copperplate right hand script. I used to find it almost impossible to read. Probably because all the letter slopes were identical. It looked great but was useless! Of course, as soon as he left school he used his left hand to write with and we could all read that. As far as I know, there were plenty of schools in the UK that would not let children write with their left hand into the 1970s. Possibly because of the pen technology of the time or possibly because left handed children are 'sinister.' Catholics seemed to associate it with the work of the devil. Ah, the good old days."

Mike replies: I was never beaten, but I had my left hand tied behind my back in first grade, at the Buckingham School in Cambridge, Mass. As a result I learned to write with my right hand as well. So when the teacher put exercises on the board that we were supposed to copy, I wrote with both hands at the same time! We had to put out hands up when we were finished with the writing exercise and I was always finished much sooner than any of the other kids.

In seventh or eighth grade I decided to try returning to being a right-hander, and I switched to rightie for about six weeks. I started out writing messily but legibly, and by the end of the six weeks was writing very well with my right hand. But it just never felt quite right, so I switched back. When I play pool now—right-handed— I sometimes switch hands to reach hard shots. I'm not nearly as good left handed as I am right handed, but I'll take short shots as a leftie.

Comments

[Kye Wood]

A fellow leftie? That explains soooo much Mike.

Are you like me, in that I only write left handed. Racket sports, throwing a ball etc, all right handed. And funnily enough, if I write on a blackboard, I have to use my right hand.

Cursive is worth learning, simply for the beauty of it. In this sometimes cruel world, teaching people a skill that is intrinsically beautiful may have more value than is immediately apparent.

[Nigli]

Cursive is still taught in Germany.My son learned it in the third grade with a fountain pen. Now, in the 5th grade, I'm impressed with his handwriting.
I notice I think differently when writing by hand.

[James]

I wound up with 2.5 styles of printing, one for my own notes (many letter forms like cursive, because I write with a fountain pen, so words wish to be connected), one to be legible to others (a like print a, and that is only the beginning), and an in between that is for doing math, which tilts one way or another.

Having discovered fountain pens early, I write my cursive like the tourist-trap declarations of independence you find. I like it, but others find it hard to read, hence the print style. My wife somehow keeps near perfect elementary school style cursive. Even the Q is right (flashback to Bart trying to read cursive, and reading aloud two-wentin, astonishing mostly because who can write cursive on a chalkboard? Chalk leans to print letters even harder than ballpoint!). I suppose I should practice my cursive. But I should also practice my math, practice my typing, practice my photography. Oh my.

Math print mostly has to do with the fact that it uses graphemes from two alphabets plus numerals, so without discipline, rho and p look the same. Heck, try distinguishing O fro 0 from Ø. No matter which way you write 0, you have problems. See https://johnkerl.org/doc/ortho/ortho.html

Also, I learned to type poorly in my middle school years. My right ring finger and pinky share their work wrong. This started to shift when, forced by wrist pain, I went to an ergonomic ortholinear keyboard. If you want a distraction, wade into keyboard enthusiasm. One thing about hunt and peck typing is that your hands don't get into excessively poor postures. Count yourself lucky in that way.

At any event, I think slower than I can type. Which, given that typists who have to record human speech in real time can only keep up using specialized chorded keyboards (go watch a court reporter at work), means that I talk much, much faster than I can think.

[Peter Croft]

At age 75, I remember not feather pens, but using metal nibs on handles(?), dipped in an ink pot in the top right of the desk. This was in primary school, about ages 6-8, 1953-55.

Then we changed to Biros mid '50s. They were great! Unless they leaked, not uncommonly.

Then on into high school, 1960-1964, it was fountain pens. First the ones with the little lever to suck the ink in. Parker Quink ink. Then cartridges came along, so no more buying bottles of ink.

And every pen had to be worn in, the nib used repeatedly until it wore a profile depending on your hand and the paper. Aaah, memories.

[Thomas Mc Cann]

I used a steel nib pen when first in school. In those days the desks had little pots let into the desk to hold ink. If you were the teachers pet you got the job of filing these little pots. The pens were a bugger to use. One bad move and tou had a big splotch on your copy and a clips round the ear for making a mess.

[Bob Johnston]

Maybe it's because I am older than you, or maybe it a UK thing, but I write in cursive. It's much faster. My grandchildren 10,11 and 15 years have all been taught cursive.

[James Weekes]

This raises question for me. Can you print as fast as you can write in cursive (or script as we called it in school)? I cannot, but my printing skills are very rusty.

[Dogman]

I'm envious of past generation's cursive writing. I look at my paternal grandfather's notes and signatures with awe. People were proud of their writing abilities in those times.

Me? Don't ask. I never had very good handwriting and it got worse over time. My first semester at college killed my abilities with cursive writing completely. My class notes were unreadable so I developed a way to print quickly and legibly. Today, I'm only able to write my signature. And that's an illegible flourish. I was told once that a person's signature was to be recognized not necessarily read. I guess I took that as gospel so now I just scratch what kinda looks like some letters.

[Albert Smith]

"...there's been no real reason to write in cursive since the ballpoint pen reached technical maturity..."

So can we expect the signature line on checks (and legal documents) to go away, or will an "X" suffice?

[John Krumm]

For the longest time, the only cursive I wrote was when writing checks. But then I thought, why do I do that? From then on, I just printed. I print in my journal as well. As children, one of our punishments for bad behavior was writing lines in very neat cursive, like we were in The Simpsons (my dad was a school teacher and thought it was a good way to modify behavior). I could write neatly, but only if I did it extremely slowly, like I was drawing each letter. My adult cursive looks horrible, like a pile of wrinkled clothing, so I'm happy to be rid of it.

[KeithB]

It is amazing that many ladies of a certain age have excellent penmanship, and they all seem similar.

I am convinced that college ruined my penmanship. Copying voluminous notes quickly made my writing such that even *I* can't read it sometimes. I suspect that this is why doctors have such notoriously bad writing.

[Bruce Bordner]

Thank you so much.
Now I finally have an excuse that sounds believable.

[Marco Sabatini]

Leonardo da Vinci used to write as a left-hander:

https://www.tuttografologia.com/la-scrittura-di-leonardo-da-vinci/

Amazingly, he could also write as a right-hander!

[Dave]

If you think your handwriting is poor, how about a video of a master penman doing a portrait of MLK with one single line?

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXYAcjjNgQI)

[Dave]

Mike,

Maybe you would get along with a Waverly nib.

[https://www.wellappointeddesk.com/2017/01/pen-review-pilot-custom-912-waverly-nib/]

[George Davis]

I don't use them often, but I have quite a few "handwriting" (i.e., cursive) fonts, many of relatively recent vintage. (All in free collections from various sources.) I don't use them often, but apparently they are still popular. So rumors of the demise of cursive may be, well, you know...

[Reg Feuz]

When I started school in British Columbia, Canada in 1948 we learned to write and print using the H.B. MacLean Method. The illustrated textbook was designed for writing with your righthand. And even some lefties learned to use their righthand, if they were keen.

The problem for the lefties was they weren't taught how to change the orientation of the writing surface to accommodate their handedness, hence why as you did Mike, it was necessary to curl your hand into a claw and write with your hand suspended over the page. My younger-by-four-years brother was a leftie and like you, that was his technique. Hence like all the other lefties any kind of writing was almost illegible.

I always wondered why lefties weren't instructed how to change the slant of the writing surface opposite to that of a righthander. It really is that simple; and I had figured that out when I was seven! I've known lefties who wrote in the correct orientation for their hand, and they wrote beautifully.

But like anything else, well written cursive is all about practice. And some of us are better at that than others. And if you're good you can be very quick. I wasn't as good as I was quick, but nonetheless I could still read all my lecture notes.

Happy Cursive Holidays.

[craig]

mom had been a country school teacher and used the palmer penmanship method, as did the local school system

dad was totally ambidextrous but favored his left...the nuns in the deep south tried to beat that out of him...it didn't take, he wrote beautifully with either hand

we had a mess of kids and all but one wrote lovely public school cursive, we had a mix of lefties and righties

i developed a hybrid script for the graphic work i did and used it until a greater variety of similar fonts arrived on the scene

anyway, maybe because handwriting was so important in our family i find myself very judgmental when looking at the written word

i have noticed that arthritis and computer graphics has affected my own cursive

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Yeah, I went to blockprint and upper-case only in 8th grade. Because back then, computers didn't have lowercase, and variable names in programs were short and had (of course) to be exactly right (6 characters for most of the languages I used then). When reading actual English there's lots of redundancy to help you along, but short arbitrary variable names have a lot less and you have to really read them.

Then I did everything in uppercase block-print for quite a long time.

Then I started working on more modern computer languages and terminals that supported long variable names and that supported lower-case characters. That was a mess. I had to go back to cursive for that since I had completely lost the details of printing lowercase letters. Finally things evolved far enough that even the first drafts and notes were mostly typed, but I still have to write lowercase now and then so I still can do cursive in my own weird way.

[Harry Lew]

Don't get me going on the death of cursive. I've written longhand most of my life. But when my now 21-year-old daughter was in elementary school, I realized our school system had abandoned cursive instruction. At the time, I didn't think much about the significance of this.

Fifteen years later, when my daughter turned 18, I photocopied the journal entry I wrote several days after she was born. In it, I had lovingly described everything that happened in the run-up to and immediate aftermath of her birth. I also wrote about what it was like taking care of an infant as a 46-year-old man. Having written in cursive all of my life, I wrote her birth account longhand, as well.

I thought she would be thrilled to read about her birth from her Dad's perspective. But when she opened the gift package that contained my story, she looked at me funny. She couldn't read cursive.

[C.R. Marshall]

There is a subset of fountain pen enthusiasts who are also handwriting enthusiasts (Not calligraphy, but Italic and classic cursive). My writing is a mix of Italic print and cursive which gives me the best chance of getting semi-legible notes on paper quickly. 90%+ of my writing is with fountain pens with stub nibs which produce nice line variation(think vertical lines wider than horizontal lines). 90%+ of the remaining writing is with traditional nib fountain pens.