Conclusion
“Just put your John Hancock here,” the car dealer or mortgage broker might say, and you know what he means. John Hancock’s signature is something a vast majority of Americans can see in their minds’ eye, those very large, very clear letters, complete with a flourish, those squiggles below the name. Hancock’s round-hand script gained him robust posthumous fame. He became a synonym for what counts as legal proof of one’s identity, one’s personhood.
Signatures are one of the last lines of defense for pro-handwriting advocates. (“Imagine if our children cannot sign their names!”) It is also a source of embarrassment and even shame for some: Without practice, handwriting atrophies. But the history of the signature as legal proof of identity is short. Being able to make one’s mark—a cross or an X or a thumbprint—has been good enough for most of Western history, and since 2000, with the passage of the electronic signatures law, digitally clicking “I agree” has sufficed as a signature for huge swaths of bureaucracy. In terms of security, if one is concerned about authenticating identity, credit cards and SIM cards—newer forms of identity protection—are arguably more secure and sophisticated than signatures. But the signature retains cultural resonance, and John Hancock continues to be interchangeable with signing one’s name. For this reason, National Handwriting Day is every January 23, on John Hancock’s birthday.
National Handwriting Day is the brainchild of the Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association (WIMA) representing the $4.8 billion industry of pen, pencil, and marker manufacturers. A lobby located about a block away from the White House, WIMA was formed in 1943 “to bring together pen, marker and mechanical pencil industries.” In 1994, in a moment of conglomeration, it merged with the Pencil Makers Association. They sponsor the national day, created in 1977, to celebrate handwriting’s “purity.” Their website contains information about industry standards, the history of the association, and “fun facts,” such as “A typical pencil can draw a line 35 miles long or write about 45,000 words.”
But the first words in the description of National Handwriting Day indicate a slight desperation: “Handwriting is an [sic] true art form and one of the few ways we can uniquely express ourselves.” For the pen and pencil lobby to call handwriting a “lost art” indicates just how quickly the decline of handwriting has occurred—how different the sales pitch needs to be today than it would have been just twenty years ago: “Handwriting allows us to be artists and individuals during a time when we often use computers, faxes and e-mail to communicate. Fonts are the same no matter what computer you use or how you use it and they lack a personal touch. Handwriting can add intimacy to a letter and reveal details about the writer’s personality.”
This charming yet flummoxing lobby reminds us that handwriting is a business, since some of the outcry over the “lost art” is coming from those with a financial stake in keeping us writing thank-you notes on gift cards or teaching our students D’Nealian, the easier, stripped-down script invented in the 1970s by Donald Thurber and commonly taught in American schools today. Zaner-Bloser, the large and very profitable publisher of penmanship curricula, sponsors research studies and conferences often cited in press accounts of the importance of teaching penmanship; that the research was funded by a company invested in keeping us learning cursive is not readily apparent.
You know a technology has officially become antiquated when it becomes, like vinyl records, mainly emblematic, a form of hipster cool, and evidence shows that handwriting, particularly cursive, has made this transition: A store called Cursive New York opened up in Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan in 2009. Among twentysomethings, getting literary tattoos—quotes from famous novels or lines of poetry—is popular, and many ask their tattoo artists to ink the quotes in cursive. One woman featured at Contrariwise, a website devoted to literary tattoos, has a Shakespeare quote: “Sleep thou, and I will winde thee in my army,” done in a careful italic script. Book publishers must find that handwriting sells, because book jacket designs, like the one on this book, are increasingly being printed in fonts that emulate script. Several programs allow one to create an entire font based on your handwriting.
Some consumer electronics are encouraging a return to handwriting. Electronic tablets are now being released with styluses, and Samsung Galaxy included a stylus with its smartphone to allow people to write notes directly on the screen. In an ad for Galaxy, teenage girls revise each other’s poems in class by writing in clichéd teen-girl script: big, rounded letters with hearts to dot i’s. “Because life needs more than texts, smiley-faces and xoxo’s,” the text on the screen proclaims. Then a child is shown writing “Wish you were here!” over a picture on the screen, and we are told that this is “a pen so smart it [can make] something no one else can.”
Handwriting remains the dominant writing technology in prison. Although I received thousands of responses to my previous writing on this topic, I have received only three handwritten responses, all of which were sent from inmates, and came in envelopes stamped “INMATE MAIL” across the front. “Dear Professor Trubek,” begins one, the letters uniform and graceful. “Although I am incarcerated in a state prison in Pennsylvania I hold both undergraduate and graduate degrees in the biological sciences. I have vivid memories of ink wells and the accompanying pens in my elementary school desks—I can also remember the cursive script of the alphabet, both capital and small letters, above the blackboard.” He writes how he was praised for his handwriting and received an A in eighth-grade penmanship in West Scranton Junior/Senior High School in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The second letter is also written on lined notebook paper, and the writer has extraordinarily stylized script, the cross on the t always at a perfect 45-degree angle, the loop on the d’s huge and regular. It is so pretty, it resists reading: One wants to simply admire the patterns. So I was surprised to read his words: “The keyboard has made the usefulness or should I say rendered the usefulness of handwriting these days, partially obsolete. In fact, I’d go on to say, that outside of senior citizens and shut-ins and lest I forget, we prisoners, handwriting, is something no longer practical nor utilized.” Despite not having access to keyboards—and he is part of a growing, not decreasing, population who cannot access keyboards—he can accept handwriting becoming obsolete.
But many eighteen-year-olds resist any proposed curricular changes to reduce handwriting instruction. In a course I taught at Oberlin College, “Technologies of Writing: From Plato to the Digital Age,” every student balked at the idea that handwriting might not be taught to elementary school students. They were quick to offer examples of why handwriting is important. “If you were on a desert island, you would not be able to spell ‘SOS.’ ” “The things I write in my notebook are more permanent than what I write on my computer.” “What would we do if the lights go out?” I quickly found faults in their logic, and eventually most conceded that a primarily emotional attachment to handwriting made them argue for its continued place in the American school system: They were raised in a culture that connected handwriting to individual expression and personality, and it forms some of their earliest memories of schooling.
My son, Simon, would have been thrilled if handwriting had been left out of his elementary school education. When he was in second grade, in 2006, he had to stay in for recess almost every day because he could not properly form his letters. I was called in for “interventions” and warned that he would fail the fourth-grade Ohio Proficiency Test if scanners could not read his test answers. For Simon, homework was terrifying, as it was dominated by penmanship exercises. He would stare at a blank page for an hour. Then he would write one word and then stop, write a few letters and then stop. Soon, he began to fear taking up a pencil at all, and we had nightly battles over his language arts worksheets. He began to worry about not having anything to say, not knowing how to say it, or he would come up with ideas that he would not write down because they would take too long, and thus he would write nothing. Perennially being told his handwriting was bad transmuted in his mind into proof that he was a bad writer—a poor student incapable of expressing ideas. He simply hated the physical process of writing. And since handwriting dominated his education in grades one, two, and three, he hated school, too.
I feel for any student assessed on his intelligence based on the quality of his penmanship. Most of my family is penmanship challenged, being a strong line of left-handers, and like many lefties I have always had poor handwriting. I don’t have many vivid memories of my earliest years, but I do have a very distinct recollection of receiving an “NI,” “Needs improvement,” on my second-grade report card. I know well what it is like to be taught by people who, as one second-grade teacher told me, believe that “it makes people seem more intelligent if they can write clearly.”
In 2010, the Common Core State Standards Initiative advised all school districts in the United States on what they should teach at each grade level. Strikingly, the new standards pay scant attention to handwriting. In fact, the only time handwriting appears is in kindergarten and first grade, when students are “expected to be able to write legibly.” Instead, the Common Core State Standards Initiative focuses more heavily on typing standards: by the end of fourth grade, students should “demonstrate sufficient command of keyboarding skills to type a minimum of one page in a single sitting.”1 Many school districts were taken aback by the lack of printing and cursive standards, and some rejected them. Since states are allowed to expand on the standards, some have put handwriting back in. In a recent example, New Hampshire lobbied that cursive should be put back into the curriculum using conservative rhetoric, arguing cursive is as important as reciting the Pledge of Allegiance each day. A Catholic school advertises for students by describing its advantages over public schools: a dress code, teaching of moral values, and cursive writing.2
Our concerns over handwriting tell us as much about us as they do about technology. We are all, like Ellie, living through a transitional moment. Although we may disagree on the merits and demerits of cursive instruction, few would argue that we are writing less than we were a generation ago. If anything, we are in a golden age of writing: Most Americans write hundreds if not thousands more words a day than they did ten or twenty years ago. We have supplanted much talking and phone calling with texting, e-mailing, and social media. One of the most surprising aspects of the digital revolution, in fact, is how very text based it has been. As we keep writing more on different surfaces, we create new methods of making letters: We press our fingers onto glass, we swipe across touch screens, and we talk to Siri, dictating our words to a digital scribe, just as Socrates, Caesar, the popes, royals, and novelists of the past did. The pace of change (with the exception of our stubborn commitment to the QWERTY keyboard) has been so rapid, it is easy to forget how quickly and sweepingly we have changed.
If the history recounted here repeats itself, there will be less heterogeneity soon; keyboarding—perhaps done by swiping instead of pressing—will become ubiquitous in American elementary classrooms, and we will develop new cultural, emotional, and individual associations with the rhythm and look and feel of pressing letters, ones that we may then impart to our children when they learn to write. Meanwhile, handwriting will shift in meaning yet again. Preserving handwriting’s artistic aspects, be it through calligraphy or mastering comic-book lettering, is worthy. In schools, we might transition to teaching handwriting in art class or specifically as a fine motor skill, and encourage calligraphers as we do letterpress printers and stained glass window makers. These arts have a life beyond nostalgia.
Not for a long time will handwriting cease to be taught at all—for us to have the interview with the “last handwriter” as we do today with the last living speakers of some languages. By 1600 B.C.E. all Sumerian speakers had died, but people did not stop writing Sumerian for another thousand years, until 600 B.C.E. Even the revolutionary Greeks spent four hundred years doing little with writing, preferring their oral culture. The shift away from handwriting will bring about losses. But those losses will also give rise to changes—in accessibility, in democratization, in advantages unimaginable to us now—that should be celebrated.