What Makes Cursive Superior?
Like most kids of my generation, I learned loopy handwriting. Once the novelty wore off, I returned to printing my words. This upset the cursive evangelists in my life.
When I played school with my childhood best friend, she-as-the-teacher insisted I write in the convoluted style. According to her dragging my pen between individual letters makes writing faster. When I-as-the-teacher insisted she write in print, she yelled at me. It was fine for her to make me write in a style I disliked, but she also believed turnabout was foul play.
Not much later, I was seeing occupational therapists to treat my dysgraphia. The first one provided me a cursive workbook. She wouldn't back down when I told her I printed all of my schoolwork. Somehow, writing in a style I didn't use outside of occupation therapy would help me?
This was where I first realized cursive didn't work with my dysgraphia. In the path between my brain and hand, letters will vanish from words at random. With print, I can squeeze in between the gaps. Cursive gave me no gaps to work with.
The second OT evangelist repeated the lie my friend said about pen dragging making handwriting faster. Printing gives me a predictable rhythm, where I lift the pen after each stroke. Cursive is irregular. With some words I can drag my pen all the way through. Others have "i"s and "j"s to dot, or "t"s and "x"s to cross. To say nothing of capital letters that don't connect to their neighbors. If I want to write quickly, which was usually the case for school, this broken rhythm is infuriating.
SATs were a special kind of gross. Before I began, I had to write a multiparagraph promise I wouldn't cheat. Cursive was mandatory. The infernal test wanted to burn out my brain cells and inflict me with hand pain before I filled out the first bubble. The SAT 2 with the essay portion added insult to injury by demanding still more cursive, while my already frying brain had to compose and perfect an essay on the spot.
The occasional teacher was also bad about forcing us all to write cursive for tests. While not as long or draining as the SATs, this convoluted writing still diverted brain cells from test content.
I'm not sure why these exams demanded cursive. If it was in the name of legible writing, they didn't get it from me. My "r"s, "m"s, and "n"s look similar, and my "s"s can look like "a"s or "p"s, depending on the individual letter.
As an adult, I only use cursive for signatures. While I start out fine for the first few letters, I always reach the "oh please make it stop" phase, when letter devolve into illegible bumps and points. None of this feels superior.
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