Recently I was talking with some people about young people no longer learning cursive writing. I don’t know if it’s everywhere or just some places. I have no strong feelings about it. They don’t need it. Make it optional.
I’m much less concerned about the loss of cursive than I am about the loss of capitalization and punctuation. But then: old lady shakes fist at clouds. The world moves on.
I wanted to look at my writing over the years so I pulled out my notebooks. The above isn’t the complete set.
I’m wondering what to do with all of these. I hate to throw them away. There’s no reason to keep them. No one is going to want to look at them. Just today looking for cursive samples — there are all kinds of notes inserted and little doodles. I’ll have to think about it.
Look at this adorable cursive for my “creative writing” assignment in seventh grade! (1977).
I really struggled to find writing samples that I could take a picture of. I wrote lots and lots and lots of weepy, angsty, damp-eyed teen garbage that even now, I am too embarrassed to show.
This is from a trip in 2002. There is a lot of 90s writing in the notebooks but see above. I had a lot of feelings that I never got tired writing about.
This is from the Hawaii trip we took at the end of last year. I don’t really write cursive anymore. It’s more of a hybrid of cursive and printing but more heavily on the printing. Every once in a while I try to slow down and write true cursive. It doesn’t come naturally at all.
