The Death of Cursive
Keyboards are killing it. The few blogs I've read on the topic all agree that "hey, no one writes in cursive anymore anyway, right?"
I handwrite in cursive, typically for an hour and a half a day (though I aim for two hours). I am a very fast typist, and when I type I can reach the end of a thought very quickly; writing by hand slows me down so that by the time I reach the end of a sentence, my mind has already begun to formulate the next. I think it also forces me into a sparer style, which I end up having to correct by expanding on revision. Many other writers, by contrast, describe revision as mainly a cutting process. Finally, when I am stuck I use free writing to overcome problems (a debased form of automatic writing), and I can't imagine doing that on a computer.
Am I alone? Do any of you use cursive regularly?
I handwrite in cursive, typically for an hour and a half a day (though I aim for two hours). I am a very fast typist, and when I type I can reach the end of a thought very quickly; writing by hand slows me down so that by the time I reach the end of a sentence, my mind has already begun to formulate the next. I think it also forces me into a sparer style, which I end up having to correct by expanding on revision. Many other writers, by contrast, describe revision as mainly a cutting process. Finally, when I am stuck I use free writing to overcome problems (a debased form of automatic writing), and I can't imagine doing that on a computer.
Am I alone? Do any of you use cursive regularly?
posted by Antid Oto @ 1:03 PM
3 Comments:
At 5:41 AM,
Anonymous said…
That came up just the other day at work. No one writes cursive anymore, but I've heard some reporters say they still write shorthand in a pinch.
I write cursive almost everyday, but I started noticing in high school that a lot of people were giving it up for typing.
In an interview somewhere, Vollmann said he still began writing whatever he's working on in his notebooks, although I don't think he mentioned whether it was cursive or block.
Primo Levi used to complain that writing with a keyboard made him prolix.
It must be my desk job, but there's a satisfying physicality to writing cursive, isn't there?
At 11:59 AM,
Antid Oto said…
I can believe Vollmann begins things in notebooks, but he's just waaaaay too prolific for me to believe he finishes there. The man spits out pages like a broken copier.
And yes, handwriting is physically satisfying. For years I've written with a lightweight plastic fountain pen on ultrasmooth vellum notebooks, and now I have a Pavlovian-level relaxation response to just settling down with those implements.
At 11:41 PM,
Solomon Grundy said…
I handwrite a lot, but not in cursive. I guess I use a sort of informal pidgin cursive, sort of. Something more than print, less than cursive. Or is it the other way around?
I actually wasn't even taught cursive in school, though it should be said that I went to ghetto schools.
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