As I grow older now I’ve begun practicing again my cursive penmanship in order to bring myself back almost to the level at which I left off in 8th Grade—when I was all of 13-14 years of age. I remember letting go of the practice and use of penmanship for the sake of a “note-taking” shorthand-style that rapidly degraded into a form of print-manship that even I had difficulty reading afterwards. My adolescent rationalization was that I could print faster and in smaller combined spaces on limited paper in small notebooks—my goal was to be able to write as fast as someone might normally speak. It was a goal well achieved by my graduate years, after years of classroom lectures and seminars, but by the time of fieldwork only realized with a word-processing keyboard on a laptop computer. With regular practice for short periods—a couple of sentences here a page or half a page there, I soon came to notice a couple of interesting coincidences.
I have been regularly keeping my own notebooks for decades but all in note-taking, print-manship style. But my hand writing sucked to being mostly illegible even by me. As I consistently practiced my cursive in a small notebook, at first I noticed that a part of me that had been closed of, apparently in a cognitive sense, reopened with a new kind of “old memory” and sense of greater “hand-writing” capacity that was essentially illegible to anyone but myself. Secondly, I also noticed that as my cursive improved to levels left off in 8th Grade, so too did my printing style and lettering improve substantially with better line, fluidity, evenness, form of lettering, etc. Now I consider the practice psychologically and behaviorally pleasing to do, especially when done well, and I believe it is remediating perhaps of something important in the integration of my aging mind. A part of myself long since turned of, with many early memory associations, turned back on.
I believe penmanship, rather than print-manship, has become something all but lost in the brave new world among a younger generation, a lost skill if not art form, like English spelling, long division and complex multiplication. Now I am not one to publish calls to the return to the good old days of horses and buggies as a mode of transportation in order to prevent major automobile accidents and perhaps much air pollution. But I must critically question the advantages and relative disadvantages of the trade-off between intimate long-hand letters and finally formed, well written documents in actual words, and the speed and thrift of text-messaging, the economy of memes, and the noise and information overload of YouTube.
My family calls me a hoarder, especially of old books collecting dust and mildew. I wrote by typewriter and now by word-processor lengthy manuscripts that few have ever read. I refrain to my critically observant family members that I am not a book hoarder, but a bibliophile, and proudly so self-proclaimed. Yet I know I will have no Viking send-off on a small boat in which the majority of my books and manuscripts will be burned with my body. Instead, I can imagine most of my books ending up at the local dump or recycling back through another time the local “Friends of the Library.”
Then we must reckon with the passing of each generation to the next one descending, the loss of basic knowledges and skills and abilities possessed and often prized by those of the past. We of the passing generation are not the ones to gainsay the wisdom and values in a rapidly changing world of those who will inherit our books and our texts and other words, and who are now being raised within a technologically different world. Maybe not learning good penmanship is not a bad thing after all, but makes room for a brand new way way of communicating through digital texts in virtual, mostly immaterial, media rather than actual paper. Perhaps the new “old way” of paper print and penmanship was when compared to new technology just a downright inefficient means of literacy development. Perhaps everything will be OK in the future of the world, but somehow I still have doubts, and will not miss the way the world is becoming as much as I miss how it used to be with manual/electrical typewriters, land-line telephones, real books on a small bookshelf, and nice paper, pens and ink.
Then I also think and am glad that perhaps our youth are of a much smarter world than we grew up with, and thus will become much more intelligent about that world than we had been otherwise. At least they may not share my own sets of extremes that I have known too well in the course of my life and that served most often just as the limiting factors of my book-bound world and paper-biased worldview. Youth always has the potential of overcoming unprecedented challenges and rising to new levels of achievement far far away better than what we have ever previously known or even imagined. At least I hope so.