Cursive! Foiled again!

In proof that even DC reporters get tired of reporting wars and sex scandals all the time, the Washington Post ran an article yesterday on the demise of cursive handwriting in America.

The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

(Note, by the way, that they made a stab at greatness with that first sentence, and they should be commended for the attempt, even if their effort didn't quite make it. In the struggle to produce great opening sentences, as in the Olympics, the honor is in taking part. But I digress.)

Eighty-five percent of 1.5 million students wrote their answers in block letters? I wouldn't be surprised to learn that they'd used the sort of cursive/print hybrid that most people gravitate toward once they leave school. But . . . block letters? Seriously? What were they doing--racing against Algernon the mouse?

Meanwhile, in a productivity hint that seems somehow to miss the point, the folks at lifehacker.com have recommended a web-based application that lets you create True Type fonts from your own handwriting (such as it is). They list some uses:

Type "hand-written" notes, keep a record of your kid's handwriting or personalize a digital scrapbook, web page or journal with your custom font.

I suppose the online digital possibilities might be worth considering, although it's not clear how many readers would prefer to read your hand writing (or mine) as opposed to, say, Arial, Verduna, TRB, or Comic Sans. But to go to the meticulous trouble of creating and tweaking your own handwriting as a font . . . so that you can then print documents that look like you wrote them very neatly . . . that one's just not working for me.

But, depending on how you feel about your handwriting, it could be just the ticket for you.