COVID-19 Kills Cursive
Image by Katie Phillips on Pixabay
Cursive: a fancier form of hand-writing that is typically used for letters and signatures.
Already on the decline as technology switches people over to typing and makes writing obsolete in comparison, cursive penmanship may go entirely extinct after the COVID-19 pandemic passes over.
With school buildings across the nation shut down for the rest of the year and the education system switched over to virtual learning, the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting quarantine have drastically decreased the use of handwriting even more. With almost all assignments being online and then sent to teachers, most students are typing all of their work. Other than school and personal journals that are not kept online, most students no longer write by hand at home. In fact, the only time most children and young adults ever write by hand nowadays is to fill out government, banking, and medical documents.
However, with banking, government and state paperwork, and school, as well as official tests, all moving to online documentation and interaction, as well as people suggesting that virtual learning and online business become the new normal for the future, writing may become a method and skill of the past. More specifically, cursive writing, which has been on the decline for the past few years already, may completely disappear.
While cursive fonts are offered on Microsoft and Google Docs, the teaching of it may no longer be a part of the educational system, especially if everything switches over to virtual learning. Most people will say that there’s no need to teach a style of writing when everyone types everything, and they aren’t wrong. However, we should not abandon a style of writing that is centuries old, nor should we abandon the skill of writing in general.
As a student and passionate writer, I couldn’t agree more that typing is so convenient. It’s much faster than writing by hand. There are no mistakes that can’t be fixed by an undo button or a backspace key while keeping the neatness of the document; grammar and spelling errors are checked by the document itself; and there are additional add-on programs available to edit and check people’s documents for them. A text message and an email get sent faster than a letter through the mail, and there’s the benefit of not wasting paper or having to find a pen.
However, a change toward virtual learning and online interaction between organizations and people doesn’t have to be the death of writing by hand and cursive, nor should it be. In fact, everyone knows that writing will actually coexist with technology because everyone fears the day the power will go out or an E.M.P. attack will leave us without access to the Internet, but will cursive survive and work alongside technology?
Going back to the days of feathers and ink, cursive has always been an important part of human culture, including the signing of critical American documents used to create this great nation. In fact, cursive existed long before print and printing were around. However, penmanship classes have become rare, and they are primarily taught at private schools, and public schools only briefly touch upon the subject. As more and more people grow up without learning cursive or more than just their own signature, the use of it is rapidly on the decline. Almost all public texts, such as news headlines, articles, subtitles, signs, and advertisements, are in print rather than cursive. Even books only use cursive if the author inserted a fictional letter, relic, or sign.
Combined with a major reform and push toward typing due to the COVID-19, cursive will almost disappear within the newest generation or two.
Vince is a senior at LRHS and a prominent staff writer for The Lancer Ledger. He has been a dedicated writer for over two years straight, devoting most...
Noah C. Johnson • Jun 21, 2021 at 3:10 pm
if it were not for the fact that multiple people make it, I would think the “EMP” argument was a joke. if computers fail, we will use handwritten print, you know that exists right? handwritten print is the form of words literally carved in stone by ancient Romans, and which the old fashioned printing press (of the type Gutenberg used) was used to set up, it also looks like what you see in books, and on digital devices; and you can even use an old fashioned typewriter to write it, so in an emergency situation without computers, it’s also simpler to write, handwritten print will do fine. the need for something generally does not automatically guarantee a need for particular forms of it. do not conflate a need for handwriting generally with a need for a particular type of it, if only handwriting is needed, any form of handwriting will do, and handwritten print is still handwriting. But if we are preparing for an apocalypse, we should probably prioritize hunting, trapping, and food growing over writing with loops and curls, or maybe make sure everyone knows how to get the power back on as soon as possible. the sole reason cursive ever caught on what that centuries ago people wrote with feathers dipped in ink, which could smudge easily and often broke when lifted, for those reasons alone it was a good thing to not have to lift the pen any more then absolutely necessary at that point. no one, not even the largest cursive proponent writes with a feather dipped in ink anymore. the invention of the ball point pen (which happened in 1888) removed any semblance of practical use for cursive. in particular cursive has no place being mandatory, if you want it to be an elective, offered on the understanding that only those who are specifically interested in it will choose to take it, and everyone else will say no, I am with you on that. but the moment you make it mandatory, you waste everyone’s time with your outdated hobby. there are some things that are and should be desire dependent, meaning that those who want them should have them, and the rest of us should not, I think cursive pretty clearly falls into that category. the benefits of cursive are unproven, if not a myth. the most proven ones simply have studies linking any handwriting to it, not just cursive, and remember that hand written print is also handwriting. there are studies that show that it is actually slower to write legibly then print is, for some people it can be faster if legibility is no concern , but for others it is not even that. For those of us who have trouble with long handwriting anyway, cursive is torture, I am one of those people, and to me being water boarded sounds preferable to writing cursive. Cursive is no more an essential skill then Latin, and in my opinion, Latin is more interesting. IN SHORT CURSIVE HAS NO PLACE BEING MANDATORY, BUT HAS A PLACE AS AN ELECTIVE.