Cursive’s farewell dance
If you’re over 40, you’ve probably used cursive to take notes in university lectures. Until the 21st century, almost everything was written with a ballpoint pen on paper, and that was the standard for recording information. I studied at a school at the edge of centuries and technology, and although I remember the discipline of writing and a copybooks with a slanted line, in practice I never used cursive and took notes in separate block (printed) letters. Today I am learning to write cursive on my own to understand the principles of construction and connection of different letter shapes, and it is incredibly interesting, although it takes a lot of time to practice.
It’s ironic, but cursive writing is no longer taught in many US schools these days. Accordingly, children who do not learn to write in cursive also have difficulties with its reading. The demand affects the supply. In recent years, book designers have increasingly received recommendations from publishers not to use cursive fonts in children’s books, as children are unable to read such text. University professors also increasingly receive requests from their students asking them to decipher the professor’s handwritten comments, as they are unable to read them.
At present, we are using the ballpoint pen less and less. In opposite, we type letters on a keyboard, physical or virtual. New tools replace old ones and make our life more convenient and mobile. Sometime in the early 2000s, I spent a week mastering the method of blind typing on the keyboard, which saved me a lot of time in the future. I no longer have to take my eyes off the screen to check which key I’m pressing. And now I’m wondering if blind typing should become a standard discipline in the school curriculum, because we all do it, so why not do it more effectively?
It’s sad to admit, but it looks like the art of writing beautifully and quickly by hand, as well as reading such records, will eventually cease to be widely used and will become the work of such narrowly focused specialists as masters of lettering and calligraphy and decipherers of ancient writings.
Cursive (Script, Quick writing) is a writing method in which the pen rarely leaves the paper, and the letters are connected to each other. Historically, it appeared not only to write down text faster, but also to preserve the resource of the quill, which is fragile and eventually broke from constant contact with paper. The first examples of writing a text with connected letters are in the Syriac script (Estrangelo) dating back to the first century, that is, about 200 years after the invention of the first alphabet by the Phoenicians.
People often confuse Script, Cursive, Italic, and Oblique, and while they all have some level of slant in the construction of letters, they’re easy to tell apart once you understand the principle. Script is handwritten text in which most of the letters in the words are joined together. Cursive is the same as script, but the term is more commonly used to refer to a subset of the font letters. Italic is similar to cursive, but the letters are separated, and its use in printed books dates back to the beginning of the 16th century, that is, 50 years after the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg. Oblique (lazy or faux italic) is simply slanted roman (upright) text without changing the construction of the letters, although with certain optical corrections.
An italic is actively used in printed text to emphasize certain parts of it, such as quotations, while cursive is more often found in logos of handmade masters or postcards, as if to say “it is made by hands”. In recent decades, cursive fonts are very popular, and most adults have no problems with their perception, because they learned the discipline of cursive writing. But the same cannot be said about the new generations, who have difficulty reading cursive text. It is quite likely that the use of cursive fonts may decrease in the next decades.
Do you have rock star autographed posters at home? Autographs are written in cursive to indicate the author’s identity and uniqueness. The handwriting of each particular person says a lot about his personality, character, habits, and individuality. A postcard that is signed by hand has a completely different perception and value than one with printed text. This is a certain aesthetic and conveying something personal. Will we lose this part of self-identity due to global digitization and the inability to recognize handwritten text?
Compared to printed text, cursive requires more time to be perceived by the eye, because the connected letters are often similar to each other. But the world around us is speeding up and densely saturated with information, and instead of the need to quickly write down the text, the need to read it quickly becomes more urgent. Perhaps future generations will perceive cursive in the same way as ancient manuscripts that need to be deciphered, and in a few generations people will completely stop writing by hand. Perhaps our time is a cursive’s farewell dance. Perhaps.
