Cursive

There have been heated debates in recent years about whether elementary students should learn to write cursive.

My opinion: Reading cursive may be a valuable tool, but I hope no one ever writes in it again.

Cursive can be extremely difficult to read. Nothing made this clearer than this week when I was indexing. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with indexing, it's a program through FamilySearch where you transcribe the information off of old records so that the information is searchable electronically. This week, the priority project was marriage records from the 1930s. These documents were written in cursive. And many of the names were names of immigrants, so they weren't names I was familiar with.

It can be practically impossible to read these records. Often, you will see one or two letters, but the rest of the word is just a series of bumps. These bumps could be any combination of u's, m's, or n's. And if the writer wasn't particularly careful, which happens more often than not, the bumps could also include v's, r's, i's, s's, w's, c's, and e's. How on earth are you supposed to guess that?

At work this week, I actually verified a transcription of a cursive record written by a teenage girl more than a hundred years ago. Her handwriting was very clear, and yet there were some places I couldn't read, particularly with Japanese terms. I was so happy when I tried multiple combinations of letters to see what she meant and finally found the Japanese word. But that took me a fair amount of work to figure out. The transcription had been typed up by a senior missionary. She, therefore, would have been more familiar with cursive than I am, since she would have grown up with it more than I have. And yet I found numerous places where she read it wrong--"That is clearly a capital L, not a capital S!" This summer, I did another transcription verification project, and there were times when I successfully deciphered words that others could not. Therefore, I think I'm fairly proficient at reading cursive. But then those indexing batches were just impossible. If I can't read them, who can?

I remember my teachers telling me to use cursive because I would use it the rest of my life. ERRT--wrong! I only use cursive to sign my name.

Now, I do like having the ability to read cursive. I can read old documents, including letters in old movies, back when they preferred to show you the letter rather than read it to you.

But as a writing system today, what use does it have? Cursive may be more elegant. If you are accustomed to using it, it may be faster than script, since you don't have to pick up your pen as much. But when there are series of bumps that are illegible, it might just as well not have been written.

I also think that there are more variations in writing in cursive. In script, each letter almost always looks the same. But there are multiple ways to form cursive letters. As I look over old documents, I even see how a letter may be formed different ways within the same sentence by the same person! Cursive is practically useless as a legible medium.

Cursive exists because it can be faster than script--but even cursive is not faster than typing. So cursive is going into obsolescence. And as it gets more and more obsolete, the only people who will need it are those who work with old records. And those people can learn to read it fairly fast.

It is nice to be able to type and write cursive and write script. But if there's only time for two of the forms, cursive has to go.

Sometimes when I read cursive, I think it's called cursive because it makes me want to curse.