Is It Bye Bye, Cursive?

Remember in the early grades, when we school children practiced the Palmer Method to get ready to write cursive?  We'd already learned to print both capital and lower case letters.  As we'd already learned not to arbitrarily mix the two.  (As can now occur when someone wants to trade-mark a name.)  So, as the Palmer Method instructed, we children sat at our desks with paper and pencil making continuous ovals over and over--not stopping--in order to get the arm and shoulder muscles appropriately tuned up so that we could then join the letters into cursive script.  Then, as a special refinement, we sometimes drew a line down the middle of each letter as a test to see if the lines were parallel and the letters were thus all angled in the same direction. 

Here's my recreation of what it looked like.

Making the ovals ... then writing the script so that it all angled in the same direction

Learning to write cursive was simply part of our preparation for joining the adult world.  There was no question as to whether or not we learned it.  We all learned it.  So I had a bit of a set-back not long ago when I took my written list of movies to the local video store and asked the young man if he had any of them.  He looked at the list, handed it back, and said, "I don't read handwriting."  (My penmanship would take no prizes, but it is legible and neat.)  So I stood at the counter and printed everything out for him.

But as I did, I also grumbled to myself about how one could consider oneself to be an educated person if one could not write or read cursive?  (He probably never gave it a second thought.)  I also wondered about a school system that allowed anyone to graduate without that basic knowledge.  Of course, I realized that keyboarding--what we used to call typing--has taken over.  And I've subsequently heard that cursive is no longer being taught in some schools.  What a pity!  Don't we still need a degree of refined as well as practical skills?  

Of course, someone always comes up with new methods to take over the old.  I don't know what method has replaced the Palmer Method (or if the whole thing has totally collapsed), but sometime in the 1890's, it took over from the Spencerian which was considered too full of flourishes to be practical.  The Palmer Method was faster; it didn't require lifting the pen off the paper.  Now, of course, there is no pen and paper.

On thinking about it, I also realized that a lot of "handwriting" these days is simply printing.  And this seems particularly true for men.  The men of my generation (educated by the Palmer Method) can write a very readable cursive ... but younger men all seem to print.  Have you noticed? (Perhaps those oval-practicing drills did more to establish good cursive neural pathways than we realized.)

I suppose hand-written thank you notes, condolence notes, bread-and-butter letters will all go the way.  Maybe meditative journals, too.  Save your old ones.  They may become curiosities and go for big bucks--that quaint old custom of putting pen to paper.