Script & Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting
Kitty Burns Florey
New York: Melville House, 2013.
A friend on Facebook recently alerted me about a pen and writing show coming to Toronto: Scriptus. “Dangerous?” she asked. “Dangerous” does not begin to cover it.
I need another pen like I need a hole in the head, but my superabundance of writing supplies never seems to stop me from looking at/for more. The rainbows of coloured stationery! The many hues of ink! The tactile joy of letterpress printing!
This obsession of mine would be a lot more fun if I could share it with my near and dear ones, but the children really are not all that keen on pens and writing. Eldest (13) was never really taught how to write, and neither print nor cursive was taught with any rigour. I learned my lesson and made sure that Middlest (9) and Youngest (6) at least learned the stroke order for making letters. Middlest learned cursive in school last year, but has, of course, reverted to print since no one requires cursive of him. Do I want to be the mother who makes her kids do handwriting practice at home? Well, I want to be the mother of kids who will go into adulthood able to write cursive. So … I bought the Handwriting Without Tears books and have made stabs at teaching them at home. When we can. Sigh. Not often enough.
I can see why it has fallen to the wayside at school: there are always so many other things to do. I’m beginning to think we may have to compromise: 15 minutes of handwriting practice in exchange for 15 minutes of screen time….
Like Philip Hensher’s The Missing Ink, Script & Scribble (originally published in 2009, reissued by Melville in 2013) traces not only the history of the development of handwriting, but its demise as well. It is a wonderful mix of memoir and history, and I loved the balance she found between the two. There’s a wonderful history of writing implements, and she’s introduced me to new and dangerous wonderful places to find writing goodies.
I found Kitty Burns Florey’s history of handwriting instruction in America to be particularly interesting, and she discusses the ascendancy and decline of the North American styles of looped cursive taught in schools:
The Golden age of script began with the Spencerian style of the mid-1800s:
This was supplanted by the Palmer method in the early 1900s:
which was, in turn, supplanted by the D’Nealian style:
and the even less ornate (and upright) Handwriting Without Tears in the late 20th and early 21st centuries:
Each generation’s writing got a bit less ornate, a bit less fussy. Until today, when the majority of kids will not have a cursive hand to call their own (insert grumbling here). I have to admit that although I love the Handwriting Without Tears philosophy and method, I find it to be by far the least attractive of the lot. But given that handwriting is no longer part of the curriculum (insert more grumbling here), it’s the one I brought home.
Well, I’ve come away from Script and Scribble with a new bee in my bonnet: why do we even have to have loopy writing? Kitty Burns Florey asks this question herself, and she goes to a handwriting doctor to get her loops fixed. She feels they are too juvenile, that her writing, with its overly rounded connectors has “a disagreeably girlish look that almost cries out for those dopey little circles dotting the i’s.”
The prescription? She practices with an adult instructional book on Italic handwriting, which more or less brings us back to medieval Europe and the hand of Italian clerks, and she watches her writing go from “embarrassingly clumsy to terminally cool.” Medieval roots, yes, but look! Look at how lovely, stylish and easy to read it is!
And, like HWT, the Getty-Dubay instructional system comes in a six-book set!
I think it’s terminally cool because it looks more like the cursive that is still taught in England and Europe, where loops and scoops were never part of the prescribed method of writing cursive.
And if I can bribe encourage Middlest and Youngest to learn this style of writing, they, too, will be terminally cool.
Nathalie Foy 
I’m the “handwrlting doctor” with whom Ms. Florey consulted (as you can check for yourself, in the relevant pages of SCRIPT AND SCRIBBLE) — so I’ll be happy to work with you and/or your children.
To get them interested, you might show them my web-site on simpler, better handwriting — http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com —
and/or the site for the textbook (by two colleagues) that I recommended to Ms. Florey — http://www.handwritingsuccess.com—
and/or some other sites by colleagues of mine: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.briem.net, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html, http://literacyonline.tki.org.nz/content/download/24055/267096/file/teaching-handwriting.pdf
Perhaps it’ll help further if you let your kids know that I did not write decipherable or quickly (let alone attractively) till I was 24. The story is told in full on the “about Kate Gladstone” page of my site.
Maybe you can reach me (my contact-info is on my site) — if you like, I can also let you know how to reach Ms. Florey, whose own work on handwriting plainly means so much to you.
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone • handwritingrepair@gmail.com • 518-482-6763
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
I’m so glad you found this post, Kate. I think it’s wonderful what you do. What a calling! Thanks for the information.
I am so crushed that kids these days aren’t learning cursive anymore. It does make sense, but it bums me out. I love writing things in cursive, and I’d have been happy to have been taught that same elegant cursive that all our grandparents learned. My handwriting could be better.
It’s always astonishing to me to see exercise books from, say, the 1930s or 1940s and to realize how stringent were the rules about cursive. In a tiny local museum, there’s a school project on a (now) vanished community and every time I look at it (which is quite often as the museum is a place to which we take our houseguests), I think of both the beauty of the handwriting in the small preserved scribbler as well as the excellent grammar of the child who compiled the history of her home.
Handwriting matters — but does cursive matter? The research is surprising. For instance, it has been documented that legible cursive writing averages no faster than printed handwriting of equal or greater legibility. (Sources for all research are listed below.)
More recently, it has also been documented that cursive does NOT objectively improve the reading, spelling, or language of students who have dyslexia/dysgraphia.
This is what I’d expect from my own experience, by the way. As a handwriting teacher and remediator, I see numerous children, teens, and adults — dyslexic and otherwise — for whom cursive poses even more difficulties than print-writing. (Contrary to myth, reversal in cursive are common — a frequent cursive reversal in my caseload, among dyslexics and others, is “J/f.”)
— According to comparative studies of handwriting speed and legibility in different forms of writing, the fastest, clearest handwriters avoid cursive — although they are not absolute print-writers either. The highest speed and highest legibility in handwriting are attained by those who join only some letters, not all: joining only the most easily joined letter-combinations, leaving the rest unjoined, and using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes disagree.
Reading cursive still matters — but reading cursive is much easier and quicker to master than writing the same way too. Reading cursive, simply reading it can be taught in just 30 to 60 minutes — even to five- or six-year-olds (including those with dyslexia) once they read ordinary print. (There’s even an iPad app teaching kids and others to read cursive, whether or not they write it or ever will wrote it. The app — “Read Cursive” — is a free download. Those who are rightly concerned with the vanishing skill of cursive reading may wish to visit appstore.com/readcursive for more information.)
We don’t require our children to learn to make their own pencils (or build their own printing presses) before we teach them how to read and write. Why require them to write cursive before we teach them how to read it? Why not simply teach children to read cursive — along with teaching other vital skills, such as a form of handwriting that is actually typical of effective handwriters?
Just as each and every child deserves to be able to read all kinds of everyday handwriting (including cursive), each and every one of our children — dyslexic or not — deserves to learn the most effective and powerful strategies for high-speed high-legibility handwriting performance.
Teaching material for practical handwriting abounds — especially in the UK and Europe, where such handwriting is taught at least as often as the accident-prone cursive which is venerated by too many North American educators. Some examples, in several cases with student work also shown: http://www.BFHhandwriting.com, http://www.handwritingsuccess.com, http://www.briem.net, http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com, http://www.italic-handwriting.org, http://www.studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/curriculum.html )
Even in the USA and Canada, educated adults increasingly quit cursive. In 2012, handwriting teachers across North America were surveyed at a conference hosted by Zaner-Bloser, a publisher of cursive textbooks. Only 37% wrote in cursive; another 8% printed. The majority — 55% — wrote with some elements resembling print-writing, others resembling cursive.
(If you would like to take part in another, ongoing poll of handwriting forms — not hosted by a publisher, and nor restricted to teachers — visit http://www.poll.fm/4zac4 for the One-Question Handwriting Survey, created by this author. As with the Zaner-Bloser teacher survey, so far the results show very few purely cursive handwriters — and even fewer purely printed writers. Most handwriting in the real world — 75% of the response totals, so far — consists of print-like letters with occasional joins.)
When even most handwriting teachers do not themselves use cursive, why glorify it?
Believe it or not, some of the adults who themselves write in an occasionally joined but otherwise print-like handwriting tell me that they are teachers who still insist that their students must write in cursive, and/or who still teach their students that all adults habitually and normally write in cursive and always will. (Given the facts on our handwriting today, this is a little like teaching kids that our current president is Richard Nixon.)
What, I wonder, are the educational and psychological effects of teaching, or trying to teach, something that the students can probably see for themselves is no longer a fact?
Cursive’s cheerleaders (with whom I’ve had some stormy debates) sometimes allege that cursive has benefits which justify absolutely anything said or done to promote that form of handwriting. The cheerleaders for cursive repeatedly state (sometimes in sworn testimony before school boards and state legislatures) that cursive cures dyslexia or prevents it, that it makes you pleasant and graceful and intelligent, that it adds brain cells, that it instills proper etiquette and patriotism, or that it confers numerous other blessings which are no more prevalent among cursive users than among the rest of the human race. Some claim research support — citing studies that invariably prove to have been misquoted or otherwise misrepresented by the claimant.
So far, whenever a devotee of cursive claims the support of research, one or more of the following things has become evident as soon as others examined the claimed support:
/1/ either the claim provides no source,
or
/2/ if a source is cited, and anyone checks it out, the source turns out to have been misquoted or incorrectly paraphrases by the person citing it
or
/3/ the claimant correctly quotes/cites a source which itself indulges in either /1/ or /2/.
Cursive devotees’ eagerness to misrepresent research has substantial consequences, as the misrepresentations are commonly made — under oath — in testimony before school districts, state legislatures, and other bodies voting on educational measures. The proposals for cursive are, without exception so far, introduced by legislators or other spokespersons whose misrepresentations (in their own testimony) are later revealed — although investigative reporting of the questionable testimony does not always prevent the bill from passing into law, even when the discoveries include signs of undue influence on the legislators promoting the cursive bill? (Documentation on request: I am willing to be interviewed by anyone who is interested in bringing this serious issue inescapably before the public’s eyes and ears.)
By now, you’re probably wondering: “What about cursive and signatures? Will we still have legally valid signatures if we stop signing our names in cursive?” Brace yourself: in state and federal law, cursive signatures have no special legal validity over any other kind. (Hard to believe? Ask any attorney!)
Questioned document examiners (these are specialists in the identification of signatures, the verification of documents, etc.) inform me that the least forgeable signatures are the plainest. Most cursive signatures are loose scrawls: the rest, if they follow the rules of cursive at all, are fairly complicated: these make a forger’s life easy.
All handwriting, not just cursive, is individual — just as all handwriting involves fine motor skills. That is why any first-grade teacher can immediately identify (from the print-writing on unsigned work) which of 25 or 30 students produced it.
Mandating cursive to preserve handwriting resembles mandating stovepipe hats and crinolines to preserve the art of tailoring.
SOURCES:
Handwriting research on speed and legibility:
/1/ Arthur Dale Jackson. “A Comparison of Speed and Legibility of Manuscript and Cursive Handwriting of Intermediate Grade Pupils.”
Ed. D. Dissertation, University of Arizona, 1970: on-line at http://www.eric.ed.gov/?id=ED056015
/2/ Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, and Naomi Weintraub. “The Relation between Handwriting Style and Speed and Legibility.” JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 91, No. 5 (May – June, 1998), pp. 290-296: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542168.pdf
/3 Steve Graham, Virginia Berninger, Naomi Weintraub, and William Schafer. “Development of Handwriting Speed and Legibility in Grades 1-9.”
JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH, Vol. 92, No. 1 (September – October, 1998), pp. 42-52: on-line at http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27542188.pdf
Zaner-Bloser handwriting survey: Results on-line at http://www.hw21summit.com/media/zb/hw21/files/H2937N_post_event_stats.pdf
Ongoing handwriting poll: http://poll.fm/4zac4
The research most often misrepresented by devotees of cursive (“Neural Correlates of Handwriting” by Dr. Karin Harman-James at Indiana University):
https://www.hw21summit.com/research-harman-james
Background on our handwriting, past and present:
3 videos, by a colleague, show why cursive is NOT a sacrament:
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CURSIVE —
TIPS TO FIX HANDWRITING —
HANDWRITING AND MOTOR MEMORY
(shows how to develop fine motor skills WITHOUT cursive) —
Yours for better letters,
Kate Gladstone
DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest
CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
handwritingrepair@gmail.com