Script and Scribble

by Kitty Burns Florey

  —making sure it’s open enough to show clearly that this is indeed an e and not an r or part of a u or an undotted i.

  Better yet, learn to write the “Renaissance two-stroke e”—basically a hook and a comma:

  It’s a very handsome e, but I find it slow and difficult to write, and the results I get are clunky. I’m practicing—the e of Michelangelo is worth striving for!—but I fear I’m going to end up a one-stroke e kind of person, which is sort of like someone who can only drive automatic shift, or who buys pre-chopped garlic in a jar.

  My lower-case k is a happier story. Gladstone showed me how to construct it from an h: start to make an h, but stop as you reach its humped back and add a graceful downstroke:

  It’s a lovely way of doing it, and it works, but it’s hard to get used to because, in an unconscious throwback to a sixth-century Uncial script, I’ve been making little k’s like sloppy, smaller spinoffs of my vaguely Palmerish big K’s most of my writing life:

  You can see my hesitant beginnings of reform in beekeeper. I still have a long road to travel.

  As I combined Gladstone’s personalized instruction with some of the ideas in the Getty-Dubay books, my writing, unexpectedly, began to look like a looser and less constipated version of the pretentious, arty script I used in college. I remember how hard I had to concentrate to produce it, especially taking notes in class, aware of the fact that my friends and I often traded notes when we studied for exams. Twit that I was, I was writing to impress. All these years later, what I want is ease and freedom, and that’s what my handwriting practice began to give me.

  I found the all-time best Getty-Dubay tip was to avoid what they call “scoop and loop,” the overly rounded connectors that can lend to many people’s handwriting—mine, at least—a disagreeably girlish look that almost cries out for those dopey little circles dotting the i’s:

  Instead, I’ve been trying to use a straight diagonal line when joining letters—not a U-shape but something closer to an angle:

  This may seem trivial, but the neat and pointy results in my own script impressed me so much that I called Barbara Getty to thank her. She told me she and Inga stole it directly from Arrighi. Which brings us back to dear old Wilfrid Blunt, who put it like this: “I have often been asked why we should turn to sixteenth-century Italy for our pattern. I can only reply: where else can we find a better, or even an adequate, model?”

  Once I started writing in Italic, I found it impossible to disagree. The result of my tinkering is an enormous improvement in my handwriting.

  Very rapid notetaking

  Sometimes my script still looks rushed, or uneven—a good sense of proportion eludes me (I do much better when writing on lined paper). And, so far, it lacks character—maybe, with time, the blandness will pass. But it’s way more readable, just as quick as my old scribble, nicer to look at, and historically interesting.

  PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE

  All the handwriting programs I investigated have merit, but no matter how easy one system may be or how legible another, no matter whether children think it’s a lark or a grind, no matter how determinedly it’s marketed, and no matter how evident it is that fast, clear handwriting leads to future success, fewer and fewer schools, unfortunately, are teaching it in any form whatsoever beyond the third grade. Because what really excites trendy, up-to-date educators is the idea that the computer ends the problem of bad handwriting—that keyboarding is what everyone needs to learn, not how to push a pen across paper.

  Why is it keyboarding? What happened to typing? The noun keyboard used as a verb dates back to 1961—the days when keypunching became a career. Keypunch operators loaded “punch cards” (almost always called “IBM cards,” though there were other manufacturers) with data by punching holes—using a keyboard—at strategic places that made sense to the early computers that would “read” the cards. Today keyboard is used more often as a participle—keyboarding—than as a direct “action verb.” There are few people who could say “Keyboard this asap!” or “I need to keyboard up my notes” with a straight face.

  Like so many words in the great bubbling stew of the English language, keyboarding is irrational—we don’t say pianoing when we pound the ivories—but the word typing wears the aura of the days when the feminist movement cautioned women not to learn to type or they’d never advance out of the steno pool. Machines of the time may have been less user-friendly, but people were, of necessity, more intimate with them: a typewriter needed paper fed into it, the carriage return lever manipulated, the platen adjusted for line spacing, the ribbon replaced as needed, the keys unstuck when they jammed. The keyboard on a computer, however, is the only part of the computer we really interact with. The computer can crash, hang, freeze, become corrupted, or perform illegal operations, but the keyboard is an entity in itself, with its own separate functioning, and it merits its own verb. Condensing typing on a keyboard to just plain keyboarding has a high-tech ring to it, a pleasantly up-to-date crispness.

  But, usage questions aside, which should children learn? To type on a keyboard or to write with a pen on paper?

  The issue brings to mind an Isaac Asimov story, “The Feeling of Power,” in which, in some future world completely controlled by machines, a lowly technician comes up with the radical idea of “computing without a computer.” He laboriously copies numbers from his super-calculator onto a piece of paper with an “artist’s stylus” and, before a puzzled, skeptical committee, multiplies them, in “an imitation of the workings of the computer.” This wacko idea—termed graphitics, “from the old European word grapho, meaning to write”—slowly catches on, and the powers-that-be begin to envision a world of limitless possibility, a world “liberated from the machine.” Asimov’s satirical point, of course, is that technology can become too powerful, at the expense of the mental activity that makes us human.10 The story is a favorite of college math teachers, one of whom writes, “Once the holy numbers pop up on the screen, it’s hard to convince people to use their brains.”

  Only the most pious Luddite could argue against the idea that learning to use a computer is an essential skill children should be taught. As far back as 1935, the Illinois Board of Education was recommending the teaching of typing in elementary school. The current thinking is that children begin serious keyboarding instruction in third grade, when they have the proper eye-hand coordination and language skills and before they’ve developed too many bad keyboard habits fooling around on the computer at home.

  Like it or not, most of those kids will probably be earning their living tapping a keyboard someday, somehow, somewhere. There aren’t many jobs that don’t require a measure of computer competence.11 Nor should the growing use of the computer for plain old fun be ignored. The Children’s Digital Media Center (CDMC), a five-university consortium based at Georgetown, studies children’s computer and Internet use and how it affects them long-term. In their most recent report (2005), the CDMC found that twelve- to fifteen-year-old California students spend more than 90 minutes a day instant messaging friends, 31.4 minutes sampling and downloading music, and 22 minutes sending and reading e-mail. Surely, these numbers will only increase, and if kids are going to sit at the computer pecking away, they should be pecking efficiently. In the words of a customer in the computer store near my house where I had my laptop overhauled, “Computers ain’t going nowheres.”12 Or, as Leigh E. Zeitz, a professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Northern Iowa, puts it, “Today’s world requires us to be efficient keyboarders to interact and communicate with others through technology.”

  Zeitz has taught students at all levels, from elementary school to graduate school, and has been involved in the field of education technology for twenty-eight years. It’s his opinion that what he calls “the world of word processing” is changing the way we think about writing. For him, the most important computer-era change in student writing is that much of it is produced for publication. Students in the classroom are sitting at k
eyboards creating books, anthologies, blogs, wikis. Their work is not written on paper, submitted to a teacher, graded, and put away somewhere. It is going to be seen—or at least can be seen—not only by a teacher but by whoever chooses to look at it: parents, friends, peers, and, increasingly, anyone with Internet access. For these students, it’s not just their grades but their reputations that are on the line. “This adds to the perceived value of the writing,” Zeitz says. “It gets into their blood and makes them want to be better writers.”

  He admits that his own handwriting is wretched; he learned to type in tenth grade, and is far more comfortable on the keyboard than behind the pen, which he associates with “drudgery and fear.” He especially loves the ease of revision on a computer. “When I don’t have to worry about mistakes,” he told me, “the ideas flow out of my fingers.” In an amusing reversal of the usual process, Zeitz once composed a love letter to his wife on the keyboard, revised it to his satisfaction, then carefully copied it by hand onto paper. “Students can’t handwrite now because they don’t handwrite,” he says, “and they don’t because they don’t want to.” Instead, they become keyboarding whiz-kids.

  His opinion is borne out by—of all people—Nabeel Khaliq, the Canadian sixth-grader who won first prize in his age category in the 2002 World Handwriting Contest, sponsored by the Handwriting for Humanity club. In interviews, Nabeel said that he loves handwriting and is proud of his glorious script (he comes from a family of accomplished cursive writers), but for his extensive correspondence with his cousins in Pakistan, he admitted: “I’d rather do it on the computer.”

  But everyone doesn’t feel that way—not only middle-aged pen nuts but students themselves. Teachers who do teach cursive routinely talk about the pride their students take in perfecting it, and many students who are deeply into keyboarding retain a preference for the act of handwriting. Even Leigh Zeitz the keyboarding maven respects what handwriting can offer, and doesn’t think it should be taken out of the curriculum.

  I discussed all this with Kate Olson, a teacher at Longfellow Middle School in La Crosse, Wisconsin, which houses a charter school called School of Technology and the Arts (SOTA). As one tool for engaging her students, Olson has set up a blog where they can practice writing and reading skills incorporating twenty-first-century technology. The blog is open for comments from anyone. When Olson used this forum to ask her SOTA sixth-graders, who were being introduced to keyboarding, whether they preferred typing or handwriting, some noted that once their skills improve they might start to prefer typing, but, by about four to one, they would rather handwrite. The reasons they gave ranged from “When you’re writing, your hands aren’t all over the place like when you’re typing” and “You don’t type a thank you letter, I don’t know if it is more sincere but you just don’t,” to what lies nearer the heart of the matter: “I think that writing is actually more important. It is really hard to believe how many people don’t have computers at home.” Kate Olson expanded on this: several of her students, she told me, don’t have easy access to computers outside of school, and “a lot of them” have access restricted by their parents for various reasons.

  The truth is that millions of children are sent out into the world armed with lousy handwriting, great keyboarding skills—and no computer. The admirable nonprofit organization called One Laptop per Child (OLPC) aims to provide children in developing countries with an innovative cheap, child-size laptop called the XO, to help them become better educated and, in the process, lift themselves out of poverty. There is as yet no comparable American program. In a study conducted for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in 2005, Dr. Robert W. Fairlie of the University of California at Santa Cruz reported that only half of black and Latino households are likely to have a computer on the premises, compared with about 75 percent of whites. More than twenty million American children (26 percent) have no computer access at home.

  These figures will no doubt change as computers become as ubiquitous as once-exotic items like phones and televisions—although, as Fairlie notes in a subsequent study (2007), “The ‘digital divide’ is large and does not appear to be disappearing soon.” Furthermore, as Kate Gladstone puts it, “Until someone makes a computer that needs no batteries or electricity; that works after being stepped on, chewed, or dropped in a toilet; and that’s cheap enough to sell in packs or give in multiples to school children, the humble pen and pencil—and the need for legible handwriting—will remain alive.” She points out that, post-Katrina, some parts of the affected area were without electricity for long periods of time, and local hospitals, in addition to lighting operating rooms with flashlights, had to resort to actual pens and paper for keeping records—records that ended up being largely unreadable. She also told me an amusing (sort of) story about checking into a hotel in an area suffering under a prolonged power outage. The staff suddenly had to hand-write the names of guests, addresses, credit card numbers—and the only employee with handwriting anyone could read was a man on the verge of retirement. If it had happened a few months later, there would have been no one left who could write a decent hand.

  As a writer, I am heavily dependent on the notebook I carry in my pocket when I leave for my daily walk. I wish I could say that the ideas that come to me as I cover my three miles are permanently stored in my memory, but alas—brilliant though they may be, if I don’t jot them down, they’re gone. My friend Bill Stanton is a New York City photographer whose books often involve his rambling around town taking preliminary notes. At home, he’s a Photoshop whiz and general computer master—in the field, he’s obsessively dependent on his notebooks:13

  (image credits 5.27)

  Travelers on the move, scientists in the field, birdwatchers recording the details on wing bars and beaks, hikers inspired to write a poem on a mountaintop, Peace Corps volunteers, workers in deserts, jungles, rainforests, inner cities, disaster areas—many of them will not have access to computers.

  There are less exotic computer-free zones. In the small country town where until recently I spent summers, I was called as a witness at a hearing at the local courthouse. The judge, the D.A., the clerk, and all the lawyers took notes by hand—not a computer in sight.

  As time goes by, our dwindling natural resources may force us to depend on computers less, rather than more. According to a report from the U.S. Government’s Energy Information Administration, the demand for electricity to power home electronics (especially color TVs and computer equipment) is expected to grow significantly over the next two decades: “EIA projects electricity consumption to grow 3.5 percent annually for color TVs and computer equipment through 2025, to more than double the level of consumption in 2003.” As fossil fuels (which some power plants use to generate electricity) become scarcer and more costly, it seems inevitable that, even leaving aside apocalyptic worst-case scenarios, unless we become committed to generating power from solar panels and wind turbines, electricity may have to be rationed. California came close to this during their electricity crisis of 2000–2001 with its rolling blackouts—and we in the Northeast have vivid memories of the 2003 blackout, caused by a glitch in an Ohio branch of the country’s vast (and often archaic) electrical grid system. Computer manufacturers are reportedly “working on” the problem of becoming greener but, in general, energy use isn’t something keyboard enthusiasts talk much about.14

  If we lived in an ideal world, no one would write illegibly, and no one would have to hunt and peck when faced with a keyboard, either. The dual skills of handwriting and typing are both ways of putting words on paper—of setting down our thoughts and ideas, of communicating with others. Both methods have value. The important element is fluency, whether on the keyboard or with the pen. Either way, the act of writing needs to become automatic, freeing up our brains for what they’re best at: thinking.

  Why can’t the keyboard and the pen lie down together like the lion and the lamb and live in harmony? This is not a rhetorical question. I sincerely wish some inf
luential educator, or a politician looking for the mom-and-pop vote, or PTA groups who really care about their children’s futures, would face up to the importance of handwriting and find a way for our overstressed schools to teach their over-tested students to be literate citizens of the twenty-first century who can wield both a pencil and a mouse with ease, with skill, with pride—and with pleasure.

  1 I’d like to know, too, what kind of cursive it was, and what the scorers would have to say about differences between true cursive, true printing, and the fusion that works for many of us.

  2 There are more than two million home-schooled children in the United States.

  3 One of its stubborn proponents was Alonzo Reed in his Word Lessons (1884). Reed was also one of the inventors of sentence diagramming.

  4 The legendary Tom Gourdie died in 1995 at age ninety-one. In the hospital during his last illness, disturbed by the sloppiness of the name-label attached to his bed, he reportedly began instructing the nurses in the proper way to hold a pen.

  5 Actually, Jobs dropped out of Reed after six months, but he hung around for another year or so taking courses that appealed to him.

  6 One of whom coined the word “loopectomy” to describe what their course did to his writing.

  7 Her PowerPoint presentation begins with a pen dripping blood and the caption, “The most deadly medical instrument.” As she says, “It gets their attention.”

  8 The Florida Healthcare Coalition distributes bumper stickers and buttons with the slogan I WON’T ACCEPT A PRESCRIPTION IF I CAN’T READ THE WRITING.

  9 Reasonably coherent abecedarian sentences using all twenty-six letters of the alphabet. The most common is The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.