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Indignity Vol. 2, No. 77: Let cursive stay dead.
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Indignity Vol. 2, No. 77: Let cursive stay dead.

ARCHAIC HABITS DEP'T.

Tom Scocca
Sep 21, 2022
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A photograph of a red-on-white stenography pad, on which mediocre print handwriting in pencil reads: Is Handwriting Dead? Drew Gilpin Faust, the former president of Harvard, wrote in the Atlantic—the print edition—that the current generation of college students cannot read or write cursive. She seemed to be trying to thread a needle between wistfulness and moral panic; she noted that the moral panic already happened more than a decade ago, when the Common Core standards eliminated the cursive requirement in 2010. Faust even links to the Atlantic's contribution to the moral panicking at the time. Nevertheless, the Atlantic slapped the moral-panicky headline "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive" on it, and—as the Atlantic does—sent it out into the online world to make people mad. Those ignorant kids today, destroying the culture! Those hateful old fogeys, blaming the kids yet again!
Another page of the same writing in the same stenography pad reads: Faust's wistfulness is mostly (but not quite enough) grounded in her concern that college students can no longer read original sources in manuscript form. (She is also dismayed that they may not be able to read a thoughtful book inscription or thank-you note from her own pen.) But cursive wasn't some universal standard that's now been lost. It was, or in the eternal academic perspective still is, a bunch of different conventions, with different degrees of mutual intelligibility or unintelligibility. Faust notes that penmanship varied by era, class, and gender, among other things. American's grade-school training in handwriting covered only a narrow subset of the possible forms of cursive. For people who want to read manuscripts, there is a whole discipline of paleography, giving researchers the skills they need, rather than expecting them to meet the mysteries of the past armed with whatever they can remember from third grade.

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