Remember those looping, joined-up letters that for centuries have stood as signs of education and sophistication? We used to call that bit of artistry penmanship, or, so as not to offend anyone, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s call it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153penpersonship.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
It seems that handwriting, particularly the act or connecting letters, called cursive writing, was emphasized more in parochial schools than in the public sector. When I assisted in a summer journalism workshop at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc80s and \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc90s, my director, Ray Newton, and I used to bet on which hand-written essays came from junior and senior applicants who attended parochial schools.<\/p>\n
Penmanship constituted an important part of the curriculum at Immaculate Conception School, where all my family attended; a number of students received certificates for performing extra well. Of course, there were a few notable exceptions.<\/p>\n
Although the product of public schools, my father was one whose penmanship dazzled. It was almost as if he had duplicated exactly the patterns on the white-on-green alphabetical characters that hung over blackboards in every classroom. More likely, I believed at the time, companies that supplied those letters had copied them from my dad. My three sisters, Dolores, Dorothy and Evangeline, all developed their distinctive handwriting \u00e2\u20ac\u201d quite legible, but different, and my brother Severino and I did not.<\/p>\n
As a long-time newspaper reporter, I struggled trying to accurately render the rapid exchanges among irate city council members in whatever city I covered public bodies. Too often, in an effort to write down everything these city dads said, I became careless and unable to read my own writing.<\/p>\n
Clearly, cursive writing is supposed to make people write faster. If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re writing a timed essay in longhand, you have more time to edit than if you printed each letter.<\/p>\n
And except perhaps for DNA findings, about the most personal statement one can make is through handwriting. I still love the sensitive, albeit infrequent, personal notes from former students, or hand-written sympathy cards, or personal invitations with the writer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s distinctive signature. Not so welcome are those generic pre-printed thank-you notes that appear at place settings at wedding receptions.<\/p>\n
What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s my personal interest in penmanship, a skill I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve lacked all my life, and an activity that used to make my third-grade teacher at I.C. School go ballistic? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve always been fascinated by the handwritten word and the type font. But now, it turns out, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plenty of support for a plan to remove the handwriting requirements for kids in the lower grades in Indiana public schools.<\/p>\n
Third grade, the year when students generally learn how to tie letters together, represents the basis for moving out of the horse-and-buggy style of tediously printing each letter. It seems that third-graders have much on their plates. In New Mexico, there was strong momentum to hold back third-graders unable to read at the proper level. Now, if Indiana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plan takes hold, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re going to see changes.<\/p>\n
Already, kids spend a lot of time punching keys on cell phones, laptops and computers. Since much communication takes place that way, with no regard to the orthographic shape of things, or for the use of fine motor skills to craft letters and words by hand, some find it merely easier to eliminate the requirement that kids learn cursive writing.<\/p>\n
Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t that the rationale for much of the change in education today? If students struggle with something educational, just eliminate it?<\/p>\n
A Wall Street Journal contributor, Theodore Dalrymple, calls Indiana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s plan \u00e2\u20ac\u0153sad and extremely shortsighted.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d He criticizes the removal of the tactile sense in people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s writing and worries about whether this decision by Indiana officials could mean the death of handwriting, as we know it.<\/p>\n
If students never learn proper penmanship, or even how to handwrite their names, does this mean that when they marry they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ll need to hire an out-of-stater or an immigrant to do the signing honors?<\/p>\n
It used to be that handwriting stood for something, and even though as a teacher, I required that students sign their names to their English essays, it took little time to look at the interesting curlicues and orthographic curi-oddities and thus identify most of my students. And that was decades ago.<\/p>\n
Alas, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s true that computers have made the exchanges of the printed word much more efficient, and it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s also true that when people want to be positive about what someone else is writing, they ask them to print, this form of writing presumably being more legible.<\/p>\n
Yet, I fear the trend. We communicate also through our voices. We used to think of voices as distinctive, but now there are even computer-generated voices \u00e2\u20ac\u201d flat, mechanical, monotonous, expression-less \u00e2\u20ac\u201d that read entire books to us, sparing us the trouble of doing it ourselves.<\/p>\n
So, in addition to allowing someone else to sign our marriage certificates, maybe in the future, a synthesized voice will say \u00e2\u20ac\u0153I do\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s time to utter the wedding vows.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Remember those looping, joined-up letters that for centuries have stood as signs of education and sophistication? We used to call that bit of artistry penmanship, or, so as not to offend anyone, let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s call it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153penpersonship.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d It seems that handwriting, particularly the act or connecting letters, called cursive writing, was emphasized more in parochial schools […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=795"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":796,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/795\/revisions\/796"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=795"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=795"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=795"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}