As the designated family packrat, I have accumulated boxes and crates and mouse-eaten folders of written records handed down through the generations. I have the letters my grandfather wrote to woo my grandmother, I have the scrapbooks my grandparents kept on their months-long trips through Europe (before photography was so cheap and easy, their books consisted mostly of menus and matchbooks and itineraries). I have dozens and dozens of my mom’s daily journals.
And I mean “daily.” Every single day, without fail, she wrote down what she did. Who she had lunch with, who called, who wrote, what happened in the news. She was a master data recorder, and they were quite full because the woman did not sit still. She was always going to a meeting or having lunch or “dropping in” somewhere (SO unlike me, who writes every engagement in huge red letters because, even pre-covid, I have always been a homebody).
Years ago, I remember looking through some of these documents with my mom and mistaking her my grandmother’s daily diary for my mom’s (my grandmother was also a busy woman). “But that’s your handwriting!” I said. We compared hers and my grandmother’s side by side and it was exactly the same.
It was the nuns, she said. Raised Roman Catholic, they both were educated by nuns who were extremely strict about cursive writing. Apparently it had to be perfect, or you’d get the ruler on the knuckles treatment. So I imagine classes and classes of young women, their handwriting all exactly the same. I don’t know whether to be depressed by the uniformity of it or impressed at how they valued writing by hand.
Given all the evidence for how good writing by hand is for the brain, how it helps learn language and make connections, it’s hard to believe that most public schools don’t teach cursive anymore. My kids went to a Waldorf school in the early years, where there was almost (but not quite!) a nun-like dedication to handwriting. As a result, both have beautiful handwriting (and are often told so by their public school teachers).
My grandfather, I should say, was absolutely not educated by nuns. His cursive is atrocious. He was a phenomenal writer (he worked for the Minneapolis paper and later in PR), but it takes me hours to decipher one letter. He later started composing his letters on a typewriter to save the receiver the agony of working out the sentences. I wonder what the nuns would have thought of that.
Kate Staples 