Thank Q

A colleague has decided to stop writing comments on paper in cursive because her students can't read her writing. Nothing wrong with her handwriting--it's neat and regular enough to earn high marks from my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Davis, who walked up and down the rows with her white hair piled high and a white handkerchief up her sleeve as she drilled her students relentlessly in the correct way to make loops of uniform height and tilt. My colleague can do that; her problem is that her students never learned to write in cursive and have little experience reading it.

I suppose it had to happen eventually, but already? As we move inexorably toward the day when texts written in cursive will be legible only to those with special training, let us pause to celebrate the moments those who don't learn cursive are cursed to never know:

As a child I had struggled to get the loops of the lower-case f to go the right way, but what a thrill it was to master the upper-case Q with its big loose swirl. Uniformity was the goal: Mrs. Davis frowned upon teetering cross-ties on the lower-case t and roundly condemned dotting an i with an open loop. But even the Palmer Method cannot hog-tie the personality forever; by junior high my friends and I were vying to create distinctive handwriting--dotting i's with bubbles or hearts or varying the way I wrote the capital Z to display varying levels of formality and flair.

Journalism killed my handwriting. I always took copious notes very quickly, but those hasty scribbles had a very short shelf-life: if I didn't transcribe my notes within 24 hours, they became about as legible as the Thorkelin transcripts of Beowulf.

These days my handwriting is hopeless. I think back to the first day of tenth-grade biology class when Mr. Hatcher told us students to go to the blackboard and write a word indicating something we valued, and amidst all the adolescent scrawls one girl I didn't know (yet!) wrote "Intelligence" in a cursive script so perfect it made the rest of the words on the board look lazy, unpolished, and stupid. Today all my handwriting looks that way, so I write comments on student papers electronically, thereby enabling students to forget that cursive writing ever existed.

The language of classification of ancient handwriting is almost hypnotic: insular half uncial, Merovingian minuscule, prescissa, curialis, cursiva Anglicana--words to conjure by or curse. How will future generations classify twentieth-century American cursive hands? Cursiva Mrs-Davisana, bubble-i totter-t, journoscrawl? It won't be long now before the experts unleash their vocabulary, tack a name to every departure from the Palmer Method, and direct disseration research projects on deciphering immense corpora of hand-written postcards and thank-you notes.

They won't find my thank-you note to Mrs. Davis because I never wrote it, so I'll write it here: Thanks, Mrs. Davis, for forcing me to master a skill that flourished for a while and served me well but will soon become a lost art.