The Perils of Penmanship

Friday, July 30, 2004

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

The Perils of Penmanship

By J’AMY PACHECO

In June, my newly-graduated second grader presented me with her second annual “Summer Fun Wish List.”

This list, now posted on our refrigerator, predictably contains some big-ticket items, like trips to theme parks, as well as less expensive outings—newly-released and upcoming movies; visits to grandmothers, libraries and museums.

It also includes a few items that can be done in the comfort of our air-conditioned home: remodel the dollhouse (in progress), learn to bake Snickerdoodles (done and eaten) and recreate Peter Pan’s Never Land entirely out of candy (still trying to figure out how to accomplish this one).

To my great surprise, the list contained one item of some educational value: learn to read and write cursive.

I suppose I should not have been surprised to find mastery of cursive writing on the list. To those unable to decipher it, cursive writing can seem like a mysterious code parents use to communicate when they can no longer keep secrets by spelling words out loud.

My daughter made a halfhearted attempt to learn cursive writing last year. The result consisted largely of her printed letters being linked by swirly little lines.

I bought an erasable plastic worksheet, sort of like a placemat, imprinted with cursive letters. The idea was that she could practice forming the letters by tracing them; erase them, and start over.

Instead, she used it to cover a crack that had formed in the roof of her Barbie house. I admired her resourcefulness.

With that in mind, and to help her summer effort, I bought a child-sized tablet of lined paper and wrote the entire alphabet in cursive, upper and lower case. Only then did I realize how dreadful my own penmanship had become.

It’s not from lack of experience—I learned to write cursive in third grade. Although many years have passed, I still can recall a youthful woman named Miss Kranwinkle standing at the blackboard in an ancient classroom inside San Antonio Elementary School, showing our class how to create those magical lines that would bind our letters together.

The first word I learned to write in cursive was “airplane.” I remember sitting at the kitchen table that night writing it over and over and over, forcing every member of my family to watch the miraculous transformation taking place at my fingertips and to voice admiration for my work until ultimately, they ran screaming from the room.

Over the years, however, my cursive writing has deteriorated. It started when I was a teenager and “cutesy” writing became more acceptable; dotting the “i’s” with little hearts; making flowery “J’s” that everyone mistook for “S’s.”

The fact that 99 percent of my writing is now done on the computer hasn’t helped, and today, my handwriting is, to put it mildly, pretty stinky.

So I threw my early sample pages away, pulled the roof patch from the Barbie house, and studied the proper form for each letter. (Boy, have I been making my capital “I’s” wrong!)

I wrote them again, clearly, carefully and properly, for my daughter to trace.

After a few practice letters, she was anxious to test her cursive wings, so to speak. I watched her first efforts, and realized it’s not always clear where to start when forming particular letters. The result was a credible-looking word, with loops in funny places.

As I’ve observed my little girl struggling with the proper formation of cursive letters (and struggled to write perfect examples myself), I’ve wondered how it came to be that we had two written forms of the language. (I’m guessing that the same diabolical being who decided we should have words like “there” and “their” and “to,” “two” and “too” is somehow responsible.)

I asked Jeeves, that portly dispenser of Internet knowledge, about the origin of cursive writing. As I interpret things, it goes back to the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians, who believed writing was a gift from their gods. The printed word is meant to be practical, cursive writing is meant to be artsy and beautiful, and while the written language has endured for centuries, nobody knows how it will evolve in the coming years.

So, while my daughter may see our penmanship practice as the fulfillment of a simple summer wish, I now see it as preserving centuries of tradition.

And if that doesn’t make you look twice at the way you write “airplane,” I don’t know what will!