Just before I was supposed to start second grade, I caught whooping cough. I don’t remember too much about it, but I’ve been told it was pretty serious and it took me a long time to recover. Shortly after that, my parents moved from Tampa to New York City, looking for work. We stayed with my grandfather who lived in the Bronx and by the time they got settled and found a permanent place to stay and a job, the school year was well underway. I did not go to school at all that year.

After a year, we moved back to Florida, near Miami, and I started second grade at Clearview Elementary in Hialeah. After just two weeks, my teachers felt I was too old for my fellow students, and they felt I could make up some of my lost time, so I was “double-promoted” to third grade. This would have been unthinkable today, but was not uncommon in the ’50s. In fact, I was double promoted again, skipping fourth grade as well the following year–but that’s another story.

At any rate, I never did learn cursive writing properly. I remember I had to be force-fed the skill in a hurry, and I never really got good at it, or comfortable with it. I still have a huge callus on the middle finger of my right hand because I never really was comfortable writing in longhand. My handwriting was barely legible, even to me and if I expected other people to read my work, say in correspondence or schoolwork, I always had to copy it over when I was relaxed and comfortable, and take my time with it.

My mother was a professional scribe (a stenographer, actually) and she was schooled during a time when great effort was applied to giving students good penmanship. After all, communicating clearly and effectively without mechanical aid was critical not all that long ago, and people took pride in a beautiful and clear hand. But most of my mother’s work was done on a typewriter, and her notes and dictation were in shorthand, although her penmanship was beautiful, she usually took notes in block letters, all caps, when she expected others might have to read them.

During my time in the service, one of my official duties was to keep the deck log, and Navy regulations required it be written in block letters, all caps, for legibility. The rough logs are an official record, with legal weight, and are contributed to by many different watchstanders, so legibility and consistency were paramount. As a result, I soon forgot my cursive altogether, and have not used it since, except for short scraps which quickly fatigue my fingers. One thing I have noticed, my block printing is indistinguishable from my mother’s. I wonder if there’s a genetic component.

There’s very little emphasis on teaching cursive writing today, with the extensive use of keyboards. Many educators aren’t emphasizing it at all, and consider it an anachronism of a kinder, gentler age. I even understand that some Conservatives have taken it up as a cause, and that if long hand was good enough for the founders, it should be good enough for us. They see it as some kind of Common Core Conspiracy designed to lead us into godless atheism and internationalism, and will make it impossible for us to read our Declaration and Constitution in the original script. Its the same attitude that insists that we should all retain Elizabethan speech so we can read the King James Version just like god wrote it. As for me, I admire and envy those with good penmanship, but feel it has become out of date, and not worth the extra effort required to teach it to the masses. We should instead be concentrating on maths, like getting kids to memorize the multiplication tables instead of expecting them to use a calculator. Particles like “seven times nine is sixty-three” need to be automatic, like verb conjugation. You can’t stop and think about it when doing algebra. My mother never bothered teaching me good handwriting, but she spent hours of her precious free time drilling me on the multiplication tables, an exercise which I hated at the time, but which I am now eternally grateful for.

Good penmanship wasn’t even possible until the invention of paper. Papyrus and parchment were too rough to allow the flowing curves of cursive, and it wasn’t until paper became common that longhand came along, allowing writing at the speed of conversation. Shorthand has been around since classical times, but it could only be read by the writer. Lower case letters are also a medieval invention, allowing faster writing without loss of legibility, but it was not really possible until the availability of cheap paper. Parchment and papyrus was just too rough a surface. We all are familiar with the beautiful script of lower-case Greek, but it too was invented in the late middle ages, for copyists to be able to transcribe faster. The Greeks and Romans used a Runic-style alphabet of capitals, made up primarily of straight lines, easy to scratch on potsherds or chisel into stone.

The world will survive the loss of this art, just like it survived the loss of the skill of writing in complete darkness, or being able to sketch good likenesses of ordinary objects, or of recording verbatim dictation with shorthand (all once indispensable skills for naturalists and historians).