hobbit day

[calimac]

It was Bilbo and Frodo's birthday today, and going on an unnecessarily extended quest for fried chicken for lunch was an appropriately incongruous way to celebrate it.

In another world, one in which we all had better luck with health matters, I would have spent the later afternoon with a bunch of friends settling toastily into the auditorium at the Haggerty Museum of Art in Milwaukee, surrounded by its Tolkien manuscript exhibition, listening to Carl F. Hostetter talking about "Editing the Tolkien Manuscript." In the event, neither of us was actually there, and the whole thing was conducted by Zoom. Carl talked more about clues to dating the manuscripts and the characteristics, changing over time, of Tolkien's handwriting and penmanship, than about transcribing the text, defeating challenge though, he admitted, that can sometimes be.

So what should I then find but a post, a couple days old now, by John Scalzi on the decline of cursive writing. He says it's not being taught in schools any more. Oh really? Good riddance; I thought it made no sense when I encountered it (in fourth grade, not, as Scalzi reports as normal, second), some years before Scalzi was born. "Now we're going to learn a new way to write," the teacher said brightly, and I remembered how much trouble it had been to learn the old way to write - printing - and I was dashed if I was going to go through that again.

So I didn't. I just flatly refused to learn cursive, and I never have. Eventually my mother pointed out that I was going to have to learn to sign my name, so I learned enough cursive for that (though I never quite got the hang of the "v"), but that's it. The only things I handwrite these days are 1) notes and occasional first drafts for concert reviews; 2) annotations on printed out proofs; 3) memos to B. on the backs of old one-a-day calendar pages. And those are all printed, not cursive. As a result of which, any future scholars studying my manuscripts are going to have a lot less trouble reading them that Carl, or even sometimes the author himself, has or had with Tolkien's.

Comments

[andrewducker]

My cursive was always horribly unreadable. Thankfully, I've not had to use it in decades.

[cmcmck]

They taught me Marion Richardson script (not ideal for a leftie) which I still sort of use.

[calimac]

Not something that I think has ever made it to the US. I was quite unfamiliar with the name and (when I looked up images of it) the script.

[nancylebov]

I don't see any reason for people to learn to write cursive, but there's enough cursive around that people can gain from learning to read it.

When I was a kid, I learned to write cursive, but there was something about it that I didn't like.

When I became a calligrapher, I found out that the cursive letters (the capitals were worse than the small letters) were based on normal letters, but their fundamental shapes were obscured.

If it's important for children to learn a hand skill (it might be), italic is a much better style.

[calimac]

Handwriting print-style letters is already a hand skill. That was enough for me.

You're right about the shapes being obscured in cursive. I was particularly irritated by the capital Q which looks more like a 2.

[ranunculus]

Ok, I have to be the odd person. I love cursive which I learned very early (maybe 3rd grade?). I hated block printing. Cursive flows from the hand to the paper in a string of lovely moves, none of which is square or even rectangular. Brutalist architecture is the opposite. Regimented, non-curving. Nothing that represents the every curving, ever slightly different path of nature.

[calimac]

That argument was made to try to persuade me to learn cursive, that it was easier and smoother to write with. But that's only true once you've learned it. It was the painfully extended learning process to which I objected.

[athenais]

I'm surprised you found it hard to learn to write, but then, people who don't find something hard generally do think everyone else must surely feel as they do. So I'm sorry it was an issue.

My cursive writing is a thing of beauty and I always loved learning and using it. I print nicely, too, but I prefer cursive. Both my parents had a distinctive cursive style that I admired. I recall trying to "write" like my mom when I was four and covering sheets with gibberish...but flowing, artistic gibberish, I'm sure! :D No surprise that I took to calligraphy like a duck to water. I wonder why I gave that up? Like so much of my artwork, it just stopped being an obsession sometime in my twenties.