Cursive, foiled again!

I have a confession to make. I’m a card-carrying member of Cursive Writers Anonymous. I’ve been in recovery since, oh, about junior high.

From the day teachers didn’t care whether I turned in papers in cursive or printed letters I’ve been phasing out the former from my skill set. Except when I’m required to provide a signature, which is just a corrupted version of cursive that isn’t supposed to be legible, anyway – ask any doctor or professional athlete – I’m strictly a print man.

Cursive was a write of passage

Cursive has never felt right to me. Cursive is beauty and art; print is plainness and functionality. And in the handwriting universe I’m less Monet and more Dogs Playing Poker.

Besides, Indiana is writing cursive off. Why shouldn’t I?

This past spring the Indiana Department of Education announced that it would no longer require schools to teach cursive, so that more time can be spent on typing instruction. More than 40 other states are ditching cursive for the keyboard, as well.

I’m not sure what I think about eliminating cursive from school curriculum. All I know is cursive never worked for me.

I remember those long, painful penmanship classes, where we started by tracing cursive letters and then moved to writing on wide-lined paper with dotted lines. Everything about that exercise set me up for failure: pencils as big around as storm sewer pipes; confusing rules about which parts of letters touch the top line and which parts go only as far as the dotted line; capital letters which look nothing at all like their printed equivalents; and sitting beside the girl in class whose cursive writing could be displayed in the National Archives next to the Declaration of Independence.

Whether they actually believed they could turn me into John Hancock or just wanted to get me to a C grade so they could pass me on to the schmo in the next class, my teachers agonized over my cursive writing.

“Steve, that’s not a capital F. That’s a capital T,” a teacher would say. “Do you know what you did wrong?”

“I didn’t print?” I’d say. Not really, but I wanted to.

“No, Miss Wallflower. Can you tell me?”

“Of course, Steve. You forgot to cross the F in the middle. Try to remember that next time, all right?”

“Okay, Miss Wallflower,” I’d answer, making a mental note to never again start a sentence with a F or T.

Eventually, I was handed off from teacher to teacher enough times that I reached the grade level where we traded the wide-lined paper for thin-lined notebook paper. It was a terrifying experience. I felt like a New York City apartment dweller dropped into the middle of an Amazon rainforest. Worse yet, we laid our pencils aside and picked up ink pens.

No more erasers?!? How was I going to expunge my numerous penmanship errors? I couldn’t rely on ink erasers – a satanic invention if ever there was one – because I discovered early on that they were of no use. After minutes of rubbing the grayish wedge against the page, disaster would strike. The moment ink began to disappear the eraser would tear through the paper, leaving me to hand in an assignment that was 30 percent wood pulp and 70 percent Scotch tape.

My handwriting analysis: It stinks

Over time I chose the alternative. I covered my mistakes in a thick layer of ink and accepted the consequences for failing to turn in a “clean” paper.

By high school my teachers ran up a white flag, allowing me to print all my assignments. Then, as a sophomore, I took a typing class, where I was introduced to Wite-Out – a heavenly invention if ever there was one. Years later the manual typewriter was replaced by the word processor and then the personal computer, which rendered corrective tape and liquid obsolete. I had arrived at the throne of God.

Today I’m about as far removed from cursive writing as Lindsey Lohan is from The Parent Trap. The photo accompanying this blog might be the most cursive writing I’ve done since George Bush was president (the first one), and it only took me 10 minutes and a Google search on what cursive letters look like.

So THAT’S a capital Q in cursive? And I thought I was writing the number 2.