When Did Print Take Over Cursive?

May 20, 2015

I remember being taught basic "cursive" using pencils in second grade (1967-8), and being required to use it for all writing through sixth grade (ballpoints were first allowed in fourth grade) and on into Junior High. Somewhere during those two years that requirement was simply dropped in favor of whatever we could do that was legible. Since my cursive handwriting was never very good, that came as a great relief to me at the time.

Some time in the last ten years, I looked at what I was doing and was embarrassed by it, and spent quite awhile attempting to reteach myself cursive. I was still pretty bad at it, and have since fallen into a semi-joined mixed-case hodgepodge that is quick and mostly legible. It certainly won't win any awards, though.

June 27, 2015

I learned Palmer-method cursive like everybody else in the early Sixties, but in college I started making comics, so I learned to print legibly.

It still comes in handy.

June 28, 2015

Now, this is very interesting. For my foreign ears calling the... writing detached letters by hand "printing" is really curious, since it's the very same verb used for the printing press etc. Anyhow...

As it has been said already people have been writing detached and cursive letters probably since they were invented. Even the ancient egyptians had an ultra-formal writing, the hieroglyps, mostly for stone inscriptions, and a cursive version, the demotic, for writing with ink, on papirus.

Initially alphabets were used for writing on stone. Since it's hard to make curves on stone, most letters had straight lines. It was so with the Phoenician alphabet, the many ancient Greek variations, the Etruscan one, and even the Roman one. Check for instance the Lapis Niger inscription, the oldest one in Latin.

Romans eventually wrote in little wooden tablets (tabula), covered in beeswax, using metal sticks (stilus). From "stilus", BTW, comes the use of "style" in the sense of how one writes. Thanks to people writing way too deep and marking the wood itself, we can still see how they wrote. They also wrote in other "supports", like potsherds (ostracon) and wood, using ink. In Vindolanda, a city next to Hadrian's wall, archeologists have recovered many private letters from the Roman times written like that... all very hard to read, hah.

Now, while on stone letters are written one by one, most often with a space between them, in tablets and ostracon it's usual to see letters being written with the same stroke, ligatures. Since it's speedier to write like that, it's called cursive writing, as it's like running (cursus, from curro ‘I run’).

Cursive writing is actually descended from the Roman cursive.

The letters we see in print have a double origin: the upper case (majuscules, to use the fancy name : o ) is inspired directly by the Roman writing in monuments, called Capitalis Monumentalis, specially from Trajan's Column from ~ 100 AD. It's about two thousand years old and still legible :-o ; the lower case (minuscules) comes from the Carolingian script (~800 AD), also descendent of the Roman cursive. The italic version of the alphabet comes from the Italian hand used in the Renaissance, apparently invented by Niccolò de Niccoli, from ~1400 AD.

All this was put together by the first Renaissance printers; not Gutenberg since he was printing the Bible and didn't need to innovate, but people like Aldus Manutius who started making the first editions of the Greek and Roman classical texts. The oldest manuscripts they had were Carolingian, so they thought Romans should have written like that also, but they abandoned the capital Carolingian letters (Lombardic? I don't quite remember) in favor of the monumental capitals like those in the Trajan's column. And so our roman typeface was born. The italic one was added just a few years later.

Our typefaces remain fairly unchanged since then, but the cursive script evolved from the italic one to the Spencerian one more recently. All the other cursive writing of other countries... every country had a different one... seem to have been abandoned in favor of the italic hand, and its descendent(s?) after it.

After the Spencerian script I don't know much. In the 1800s a good handwriting was needed for accounting and all the rest, but I guess it was the typewriter that killed the need of good writing. After that they started teaching an "easier" cursive writing in schools, here in Brazil at least as late as the 1990s, but its use was substantially gone. Learning to read and write at the same time is better than reading alone, so we associate the hand movements with each letter's form, and I guess that must be part of the reason for keep teaching it. I'm afraid most people don't need to write (by hand) longer texts than small notes and a shop lists nowadays.

Now the trend is very curious... we are imitating the printing typefaces, which is like going back a thousand steps in the development of our writing. Not that cursive is better because it came later, but it is certainly quicker to write... it was perfected for that. But now many people write in uppercase only (somewhat like in the Vergilius Vaticanus, ~400 AD), and new ligatures are being created on the way, which I find a very interesting thing to notice.

So, all that to say we are making a shift for the "print" writing that is actually a huge comeback : ).

Edited June 28, 2015 by Parjanya

June 28, 2015

As far as I am concerned, GOOD printing is always easier to read than good cursive.
The catch is it has to be GOOD printing, not a rushed distorted printing.

That quote in Allen's post is oh so true.
I was taught when studying for a license exam to PRINT CLEARLY, to make it easier for the graders to read my answers.
Having been a teaching assistant in college, I really understand that side of the issue, as I had to grade papers with REALLY BAD handwriting. It got so bad that, if the handwriting was BAD, I would give the paper a little extra effort to decypher, then if I could not find the answer, they got a 0 for that question. I gave up trying to decypher their handwriting. I told the kids, "welcome to the real world."

The problem with cursive is that it can be so individualized or stylized, that it becomes difficult to read. I've seen beautiful writing, that I struggled to read.

I think this is the primary reason. Printing tends to be less individualized, so on average it's easier to read.

June 28, 2015

As a kid back in the 70's I never could read my mothers cursive, but I could read street sign and most other public signage. So I refused to learn cursive in school because I thought it was pointless to learn something that I felt could not be easily read.

Fast forward to middle and high school years, I knew by then I wanted to be a draftsman and back then drafting was still being done manualy on a board with pencil and paper. We had to constantly print rows of letters until we got consistently good lettering. That's what they called lettering.

Fast forward to today, even tho the lousy computers have taken over the drafting I still print my letters in all capital with the first letter just larger than the rest of them.

June 30, 2015

I could read and write (a little) before I went to school. My mother encouraged me to copy her examples. She was an engineering draftsman, so my 'maguscule' has always been proficient and legible. My mother was also a calligrapher and throughout my school years my teachers had to suffer a surfeit of experimentation as I 'expressed myself' through cursive handwriting. It's something that still happens today. My cursive evolves, picking up quirks and twitches, variations large and small, that I think more satisfying. It looks quite nice, in an extravagant kind of way, but it's almost completely illegible to anyone but me. This is a victory for my own determination that handwriting is part of my free expression over the many harassed and hardworking teachers who begged me to stop.

July 1, 2015

Several replies have already pointed out that "printing" (probably more properly "book hand" or "formal writing") and cursive writing have developed in parallel since ancient Rome, at least. The concept of the two being quite separate is relatively new.

By the 19th Century, the prevailing scripts taught to children were derivative of cursive italic which, as has been mentioned, is usually traced back to Niccolo Niccoli who developed a cursive version of the humanist book hand which Poggio Bracciolini developed from Carolingian script, thinking it was more ancient Roman writing. However one feels about so-called English Roundhand or "Business writing," it was quite legible and was similar to scripts used throughout Europe, except for Germany, and the new world.

In 1902 (as I recall), the London County Council decided that children should be taught "stick writing" first, then cursive a few years later. This lamentable decision spread to North American, at least. This was, to my knowledge, the first time that a form of "printing" that had little or no organic relationship to cursive script, was taught. A generation later, the proponents of italic handwriting, notably Alfred Fairbank, pointed out what a big and unnecessary problem this curriculum change had created for children. The virtue of italic writing is that, as proficiency develops and demands for speed increase, it naturally evolves into a cursive hand.

Where the current situation - decreased teaching of and proficiency in cursive writing - will go is hard to say. If the historical pattern of the past 2500 years holds, cursive script will re-emerge spontaneously and, at some point, will be re-standardized. It wouldn't surprise me if this were presented as a great new "discovery."

David

Edited July 1, 2015 by dms525

July 1, 2015

Thanks for the details, David. Now I have the names to fill the blanks in this story.

People around me seem to think that a good cursive hand is beyond mere mortals, and that it's at once pretty and a bit useless. As soon as I write anything in Spencerian script people say I should make wedding invitation cards and things like that. It's a very curious situation in that most people read and write more than ever before... but not on paper. On paper many people I know really struggle.