Over the last decade, a bunch of states, including three of the four where I have been a resident—my home state of Arkansas as well as Illinois and Massachusetts—have enacted laws requiring public schools to teach students cursive. (The fourth Zac-affiliated state is New York, which has no such requirement.)
In the case of Arkansas, I assume the people who run the state worried that instead of devoting precious classroom time to curlicues and loop-de-loops, teachers might inform children of the existence of racism or lesbians. Not on Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s watch!
Okay, fine, she wasn’t governor when the cursive mandate went into effect. And the penmanship-pushing efforts of solid-blue Illinois and Massachusetts probably indicate this is a bipartisan thing.
Still, I’m skeptical.
Or maybe it’s that I’m bitter because I’m a left-hander and much of the penmanship instruction I received as a child involved telling me I was doing it wrong. Nobody forced me to use my right hand or anything, but I do recall learning that my form was no good, especially the inelegant way I hook my wrist up as I write.
I’m inclined to argue, from my present vantage, that how you hold a pen is your own business. Course, I’m also pro-lesbian so what do I know.
Here’s the kicker: When I write stuff on paper nowadays, I nearly always use cursive. I don’t know whether to blame habit or hypocrisy.
Writing happens to be my profession, but I do very little of it in longhand apart from making lists, taking notes, and occasionally remembering to record my days in my diary. All but the lists are composed in cursive.
My favorite kind of pen is the good ol’ trusty Bic Cristal ballpoint—the kind with the plastic, see-through hexagonal barrel designed, as Bic’s website explains, “to let you see how much ink remains” and accompanied by a “matching cap” with a “handy clip for easy attachment to pockets or notebooks.”
I prefer blue ink. I have no interest in fancy pens. I don’t see the point.
At the start of this year, I followed a self-help book’s 6-week program for sparking creativity. One of the main aspects of the undertaking required writing three stream-of-consciousness pages in longhand immediately after waking up each morning.
The idea is that it takes your ego 45 minutes or so to reassemble itself at the beginning of the day, so if you set to scribbling during that window you’ll tap into the wisdom and imaginative power of the unconscious. I believe the notion is Jungian.
I’d say I had mixed results. Seems like a lot of my pages had to do with needing to pee (the book advised putting pen to paper before doing anything else), getting hand cramps from writing, and feeling early-morning horniness. The ego might need 45 minutes to wake up, but the body does not.
What I liked about the practice was also physical and, as a matter of fact, is what I like about cursive: the act of putting words onto paper in graceful arcs and swoops. Even if my hand looks deformed and crablike as I do it.
[Incidentally, while researching Arkansas education laws for this post, I noted, with some horror, that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a fellow southpaw. There goes all our progress in overturning the conventional belief that there’s something sinister about left-handers.]
Indirect Objects 