The Write Stuff: Cursive vs Keyboard

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger 

“Writing by hand makes you more apt to hear the inner voice.”—John Updike

“Writing words by hand is a technology that’s just too slow for our times and our minds.”—Anne Trubek

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—11/28/11—A graduate school professor convinced me that if I really wanted to understand Emily Dickinson’s bedrock subtext, I had to read the loops and line-outs of her Ur-text.

There was just no substitute for the manuscript—the author’s last-known revision of her text; her final wish.

For years, I dreamed of cracking her “punctuation code”: the subtle implications of each dash depending on its angle, length, and width. But I never made it to Harvard’s Houghton Library, where the Holy Grail for Dickinson lovers is shelved.

To further explain the significance of handwritten documents and my feelings towards them, I need to back up a century or so to 1751, when seven of my kin landed at the Port of Philadelphia. I’ve long been proud of the fact that each signed his name in the ship’s register while many of their German co-travelers to the New World made crude X’s. (Of course, the seven men spelled their names four different ways, but that’s beside the point.)

When I showed my father a photocopy of the seven signatures, he was reminded of some African-American draftees in the engineer combat battalion he had commanded in World War Two. While many of these soldiers signed for their monthly pay with X’s, others had to be shown how to make an X, so Dad decreed seven additional weeks of basic training to teach his men The Three R’s. He doubted that he could mold an effective fighting unit until they could read, write, and do some basic computations.

After 20 weeks of Basic, no one was writing Spenserian stanzas, but there were no more X’s on the pay vouchers, either. More important, Dad says, the fact that every one of the 660 men in the 1698^th ECB could read and write at some level had much to do with the fact that no one died in combat, which included crossing the Rhine under heavy fire and advancing across Germany to the Elbe River.

As significant as the hand-printed or cursive signature is, the instrument for making one’s mark is not as important as how much and how often one writes. Because writing makes a writer, he or she is better off hunting and pecking a thousand emails than penning a handful of Palmer-perfect thank-you notes. In fact, I’d venture to say that if children only learned to keyboard and never learned to write cursively, neither the world’s forests nor the kids would be at a serious disadvantage.

I’m assuming, among other things that some terrorist doesn’t explode a nuclear device that fries all the hard drives and servers in the world. If that happens, we may well be looking for a pencil and explaining to our kids, “This pointy end is the cursor, this blunt end is the delete key, and your CPU’s memory is whatever you can hold between your ears.”

But to return to my 94-year-old father: I recently arranged nearly 200 of his printed emails in a scrapbook for our grandchildren. Before Dad had a computer, he seldom spoke of the wars he’d fought in and never that I can recall put pen to paper on the subject. But once he discovered email, the journalist locked in ice sallied forth. His production has slowed in the last couple of years, not because he’s exhausted the wars, but because he cannot remember how to operate the machine. Nevertheless, the computer made my father a better writer, as well as a vastly more prolific one. The same may be said for many friends and family who, before 1990, we were lucky to receive Christmas cards from with a name scrawled across the bottom.

While it’s true that typed notes lack the warmth and individuality of hand-written ones, especially ones written in soy ink on linen-content paper, I have reached the point where I wink and tell students that graphite causes lead poisoning. So do ball-point pens with blue, green, or red ink. Frankly, my aging eyes would rather read a typed assignment than anything handwritten by a 20-year old with steroid-enhanced thumbs. The Educational Testing Service has long known that legible papers receive higher marks than messy ones. Once all students start keyboarding their SAT essays, we can expect the scores to rise even higher on a level playing field.

For years, I was convinced that handwriting was essential to memory. If I could not recall a name, I’d write it ten times as I spoke it aloud. My better students told me that they used the same technique while studying for their exams. Something about the physical act of handwriting, they said, helped engrave information in the memory bank.

Once, I even tested my thesis by asking a class of 22 to write my wife’s unusual maiden name ten times. Actually, one third wrote “Barmwater” cursively, the second third printed it, and the control group just watched as I wrote it on the board for the others to copy.

I then took up the papers, saying nothing about why I was doing this. Five days later, I asked all students to write my wife’s name on a piece of scrap paper. In the cursive group, one wrote “Barmwell,” another wrote, “—water,” and seven had no idea.

In the print group, one wrote “Bramhammer,” another wrote, “Bumwater,” and eight had no idea.

In the control group, one wrote “Bromwater,” another wrote, “B—,” and seven had no idea.

The results were sadly inconclusive. I just wish there had been enough students with laptops present to see how they would have fared by typing the name.

Despite my love of the keyboard, I confess to feeling a compulsion to write on every steamed mirror I pass, but the future surely belongs to QWERTY.

The French may keep their Bonapartes, the Germans their Friedrich Wilhelms, and we our John Hancocks, but the sooner we all switch, the sooner 38 million letters will arrive annually at their proper destinations instead of the dead-letter office. The sooner thousands of taxpayers whose addresses no one can decipher will receive $95 million annually in refunds. And the sooner some 7,000 of us will stop dying annually as a result of illegible prescription orders.

Despite all the scribbling monks in the scriptoria of medieval Europe, there is nothing sacred about taking quill, pen, or pencil in hand. I will, of course, continue to write congratulatory and condolence letters by hand in ink but, just as the Irish monks devised Uncial to distinguish themselves from Roman Catholics, and English Puritans devised a script called Copperplate to distinguish themselves from Catholics, so should we not be afraid to change “fonts.”

Personally, I’d continue to teach handwriting, but only as an elective after the fifth grade. Cursive is as quaint today as Coca-Cola’s Spencerian script. But when was the last time you heard someone order a Coca-Cola instead of a Coke?

Cursive is the new Latin written in Victorian gingerbread.