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Post a day, Jan 23 (Yeah, I know)
January 25th, 2025 10:13 pmHandwriting Day: Do you still write by hand? Can you write (and read) cursive? Do you think cursive should be taught in schools?
Yes, Yes, and OMG, Yes!!!!
It infuriates me that the defense of cursive has become an 'ok, boomer' topic, when there is solid science indicating considerable benefits to learning cursive. I'm also a huge calligraphy geek, AND a fountain pen nerd (I need to get some pen porn up in here....), so handwriting and cursive are incredibly important to me. As a historian, it's so blindingly obvious how important it is to be able to read cursive - there are already tons of forms of script that we must employ experts to read—one word: Sütterlin.
If you're not familiar with it (or if you didn't have half a dozen generations' worth of German ancestors and their ephemera milling about), Sütterlin was the last iteration of a class of scripts known collectively as Kurrent, which evolved alongside German blackletter in about the 16th C. Sütterlin was developed as a 'modern' form of Kurrent around 1911, and used widely in Germany, or then, Prussia. Up into the 1940s, it was taught as the sole form of written script in German schools. It was briefly banned by the Nazis, and while enjoyed a brief resurgence after the war, it never came back into prominence. Now very few people are left who can read it without special training. All the letters, postcards, diaries, and journals written in that period by an entire nation, including those that lived through and documented both World Wars - unreadable to most.
Already, people interested in things like history or genealogy struggle to read census records and other documents written in cursive. The current political climate already threatens to destroy any meaningful past. Much of that past is recorded in cursive. To me, it almost seems like knowing cursive is, if you will pardon the unintended and klunky rhyme, almost subversive...
Yes, Yes, and OMG, Yes!!!!
It infuriates me that the defense of cursive has become an 'ok, boomer' topic, when there is solid science indicating considerable benefits to learning cursive. I'm also a huge calligraphy geek, AND a fountain pen nerd (I need to get some pen porn up in here....), so handwriting and cursive are incredibly important to me. As a historian, it's so blindingly obvious how important it is to be able to read cursive - there are already tons of forms of script that we must employ experts to read—one word: Sütterlin.
If you're not familiar with it (or if you didn't have half a dozen generations' worth of German ancestors and their ephemera milling about), Sütterlin was the last iteration of a class of scripts known collectively as Kurrent, which evolved alongside German blackletter in about the 16th C. Sütterlin was developed as a 'modern' form of Kurrent around 1911, and used widely in Germany, or then, Prussia. Up into the 1940s, it was taught as the sole form of written script in German schools. It was briefly banned by the Nazis, and while enjoyed a brief resurgence after the war, it never came back into prominence. Now very few people are left who can read it without special training. All the letters, postcards, diaries, and journals written in that period by an entire nation, including those that lived through and documented both World Wars - unreadable to most. Already, people interested in things like history or genealogy struggle to read census records and other documents written in cursive. The current political climate already threatens to destroy any meaningful past. Much of that past is recorded in cursive. To me, it almost seems like knowing cursive is, if you will pardon the unintended and klunky rhyme, almost subversive...
