Cursive Writing

 

 

 

By Sandy Nachlinger

Can you read the writing above? I was surprised to learn that many people can’t (and it’s not because they’re illiterate).

Way back in 1962-63, Mrs. Cox taught English and handwriting to 10th graders at Dallas’s Kimball High School. Penmanship for high school sophomores?! As you’d expect, everyone in the class moaned and groaned—me included. We’d all learned cursive when we were nine years old and had used it ever since, so why did we need to study it now? Why did we have to practice every letter, over and over? Why was the legibility of our handwriting a part of our grade? We even had to use ink pens—not ballpoints. But we grumbled through the once-a-week exercises anyway. Under Mrs. Cox’s tutelage, by the end of that year most of us could produce a legible handwritten report.

So, when a friend recently said her high-school daughter could barely read cursive, I couldn’t believe it. “It’s like a foreign language to her,” she said. “It’s no longer taught in school.” My shock was so great I had to sit down. No, she can’t be right, I thought. Her daughter must be dyslexic or something.

As always, when seeking information, I turned to the Internet. The number of hits that came up in my search surprised me. An item from The Washington Post, a National Public Radio broadcast, and articles from dozens of other sources (including education websites of various state governments) confirmed the awful truth: in the majority of public schools, cursive writing is taught only briefly, and often its use is optional after the 3rd or 4th grade. I also learned that although the SAT exam will require a handwritten essay, cursive writing is not required and printing (also called “ball and stick”) will be allowed. Based on this overwhelming evidence, I had to accept that cursive writing has become passé.

However, other articles I found stressed the value of teaching cursive and bemoaned its passing. Some educators said it fosters eye-hand coordination and believe forming cursive letters aids in learning to read. Others said that using cursive develops a certain part of the brain. Still another teacher promised that cursive writing helped left-handed students write legibly by positioning their papers properly, avoiding the curled-over left-hand posture.

Then I wondered about the long-term effects of this change in other areas. What will happen to all those handwritten letters I’ve saved over the years? Will they be decipherable in the future only by eccentric academics with training in Ancient Cursive Hieroglyphics? What about those wonderful handwritten memoirs from The Greatest Generation with their loopy capital L’s, crisp W’s, and Q’s that looked like the number 2? Will future generations be unable to learn from them or will they shrug and say, “It’s Greek to me”? Will future job applicants list “cursive” under “other languages” on their employment applications?

Poor Mrs. Cox. She must be spinning in her grave. As for me, I’m not sure how I feel about the demise of cursive writing. On the one hand, I’ll miss the graceful letters on a page. But then again, most handwriting I’ve seen lately has been almost indecipherable. If you can’t read what someone has written, then what is its value?

Of course, on the bright side, if I ever want a second career, I may be able to find work as a cursive translator.

Nothing Daunted is a real delight

by Dee Ernst

One of the treasures of my childhood were the ‘Little House’ books by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read them all, cover to cover, in order, several times. My favorite parts were when Laura was off teaching school, surrounded by strangers during a long, harsh winter, rescued every Friday by Almanzo Wilder, driving his cutter to bring her home. This section appealed to my sense of adventure, as well as romance, and I loved to think of myself doing something equally exciting, going off to an unknown place and carving out a piece of the world for myself.

That feeling of romance and adventure came back to me while reading Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West , by Dorothy Wickenden. It’s the true story of Wickenden’s grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff, and her best friend, Rosamond Underwood. These two well-educated, well-brought-up young ladies, in the year 1916, left their comfortable lives behind them to teach school in the settlement of Elkhorn, Colorado.

Dot and Ros became friends in kindergarten, and remained friends until the end of their days. They attended Smith College together in 1906, and after graduation, did the traditional Grand Tour of Europe. They returned to their home town of Auburn, New York and did what all the other society girls their age did – wait to get married. But as they approached thirty, they started looking for something else to do with their lives. A casual conversation with a friend of a friend led to the girls learning of a need for two women to teach in a brand new school out in what was still considered the Wild West.

The school had already been built by Ferry Carpenter, a man of vision and energy who talked his neighboring ranchers into building a completely new and modern schoolhouse. All that was needed were teachers. Unknown to the two women, Ferry was also looking for brides-to-be for the many bachelor s who owned the vast ranches in Colorado. Their photographs counted as much as their educations in applying for the jobs.

Once out west, the women did fall in love – with the mountains, the beauty of the countryside, and the people. Both women wrote long and detailed letters to their families back east, and the delight and enthusiasm of their new surroundings comes across clearly. Their students walked up to three miles, sometimes in blinding snow and freezing cold. That was how important the school was to these people. Dot and Ros became more than teachers – they became part of a community that never forgot them or what they did for the children of Elkhorn.

Nothing Daunted is first and foremost the story of the deep friendship between the two women, and the equally deep relationships they built in the west. It is also a story of the clever and determined men and women who carved a civilization out of the unforgiving Rockies. This is a real pioneer adventure, complete with blizzards, desperados and community gatherings at the schoolhouse. Written with charm and style, leaning heavily on the actual words of the major characters, it’s an entertaining look at two women who bucked the system, defied all sorts of odds, and still managed to get married, have children of their own, and live happily ever after. Great fun.

Review: The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry

Initially, I was interested in The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry because it’s the success story of a self-published author making it into the big time, and a two million dollar contract. In doing my research for this post to get the particulars, I came upon an NPR story that aired back in 2008. According to that piece, Ms. Barry and her husband thought they could publish the book themselves, since they had a company which published games, but found that the game experience, while helpful, wasn’t exactly the same. The book is set in Salem so they started locally there, and gained support from local book stores, who recommended The Lace Reader to book clubs nearby. The first two clubs got printed pages of the book in boxes, as none had been printed yet, and the book clubs were encouraged to respond with feedback.

Eventually they printed 2000 copies, word of mouth spread to book clubs all over the country and the local bookstores talked the book up and helped them make important contacts in the publishing world. This led them to a publicist who got the book to the influential Publishers Weekly, and the book got a good review.

Once that happened, a Ms. Rebecca Oliver happened on the scene, a literary agent with a somewhat snarky manner and a disgusting Valley Girl accent. “When one thinks of self-published, there’s a sort of a whole UHHM idea of what self-published means and that’s that the author has probably tried to sell the book previously to New York publishers and they’re selling it out of the trunk of their car now. And you assume there is a certain quality to the work.” I wonder if Ms. Oliver has changed her mind, as three years have gone by since she said this and, as we know, the self-publishing world has evolved just a bit since then, and many agents are looking for other ways to make a living.

I wish there were a way to get that VG accent onto paper. The growly, twanginess and that cute little uplift at the end of the sentence, which makes it, like, a question?

Supposedly, the book has “the kind of plot twists that readers like to dissect”. That the book has a “very compelling ending”.

I beg to disagree. The ending has been described by some to rival The Sixth Sense. Remember that one, where the guy finally realizes he is dead and neither he (nor the audience) had known that before? It worked, but it was a stretch. Well, this novel’s ending is a real stretch and it doesn’t work. I am frankly amazed that such a poorly thought out ending could be described as “compelling”. To me, it was a contrived and unbelievable. Yes, I know. It’s fiction. But still.

I liked the book mostly, the editing was perfect. It started on a somewhat funny note, a nice hook, which I always appreciate. The characters were not perfect people, which I also liked, but the mystery surrounding the drowning death of one woman, and the disappearance of another, while compelling, was resolved in a ho hum sort of way. The real clincher came very near the end, and I nearly threw the book away at that point.

There were pretty, almost poetic lines at the beginning of each chapter, about the lace and how it could be read, which I liked. There were characters who didn’t need to be in the story at all, which I didn’t like.

I’ll do the Page 99 test on this book and find something I liked and something I didn’t. This page happens to be the first page of Chapter 11. I like the blurb at the beginning of the chapter, it is well-written. The half page of text contains short, choppy sentences. I lot of “I did this and then I did that” – Hemingwayesque, without the distinctive writing style.

The book is written in first person present tense, very difficult for an inexperienced author to do, but I thought this was done well.

I liked it well enough, I had started it once, got halfway through and shelved it before taking it up again and starting over. It was a compelling enough read for the most part, but the ending blew it for me. Three stars.