If You Ask Me / By Martha Knight

Lots of topics came up in conversations—f2f and Fb and landline and cell and emails and snailers, this past week, as in other weeks.

Jargon, for instance, as illustrated in graf one, er, the first paragraph. It creeps into our speech, and our writing, and then is recognized officially as slang or vernacular, and eventually is fully adopted into the language.

Computer-related technology and its manifold uses have been major contributors to language change. But other changes in our world, our government, our lives generally have brought change.

Abbreviations have been important in written language at least since the time of the Roman Empire, for we see them used on ancient buildings and in the writings of authors from the time. In our time we see them turned into the official names of companies: PPG, AIG, AT&T.

Abbreviations have become ubiquitous online, and increasingly in print media and speech. A few years ago the letters OMG as a unit did not seem like an exclamation of surprise. When I lived in Portville I would have thought of that combination of capital letters as one of the two medical groups in the area, Olean Medical Group.

Now when I see their sign at their outpost downtown I still think of that group practice—but I also think of it as text-talk for “Oh my gosh!” Speaking, we might say “Omagosh!” as quickly, but two thumbs will use any shortcuts available.

As QWERTY keyboards have invaded the business world, and then written communications of all sorts, the question has arisen in various forms and at many junctures: Do we still need to learn to write?

OK (or Okay), we need a handy way to label things in a hurry. And pens are much easier to carry around than even the slimmest smartphones. They don’t need batteries. At least a scrap of paper is necessary, but tuck it or a little notebook in your pocket. You don’t have to worry about batteries getting low. I carry pens on a lanyard around my neck, and some paper in my pocket.

So probably kids need to learn to print, pencil on paper. Seeing some of their work on display in the elementary school, I notice that very early on they print their names on their artwork, and soon they print words and sentences.

Ah, but do they have to learn cursive? Is handwriting necessary? Apparently many of us decided that it wasn’t, for they print (use manuscript, rather than cursive) as a matter of course. If asked, they might give a variety of reasons.

“My writing is terrible, so I need to print so you can read it.” Thanks; I appreciate that.

“I do so much lettering in my work,” an engineer or architect may say. Yes, there are styles of lettering used in those professions, and even now not everything is done by AutoCad.

“I just never learned to write because they stopped teaching that when I was in school. Now they are teaching it again!” someone told me recently.

There was, and there may still be, a movement away from teaching cursive writing, penmanship, in elementary school. No doubt there are other ways for children to develop fine motor control—but that happens to be a good one. Come kids can’t master it as early as others, though, just as some can’t carry a tune until years later than others because fine control of the larynx takes longer for them. The main point is learning the concepts, mastering the content, and being able to do written language somehow, right?

Still, I notice with interest that many highly accomplished people who communicate well have highly legible handwriting, or at least printing. Maybe there’s a subliminal message there—‘This person is interested in communicating clearly with me/us.’

A wonderful book I hope to review for you, soon, consists of dozens of letters a mother wrote to her son while he was away, working in California, for two years. The originals were preserved, and transcribed into text, typeset and printed and bound for publication as a book. But there are some reproductions of the mother’s handwriting—clear and uniform and full of her character. A careless scrawl would have given her darling boy a far different impression, it seems to me. She was a hard-working, busy woman, running a household and helping care for others in a time when there were few conveniences. She probably wrote quickly, but had written so long and so much, her “hand” was uniform and highly legible. And she took pains to show her son he was worth the effort.

Years ago a surveyor/geologist/poet/engineer friendchallenged me to a race in getting down on paper a well known quotation. He printed; I used cursive. Mine was faster, using reasonably good Palmer.

Then it dawned on my friend that cursive is inherently faster because we “writers” spend far less time picking up the pen and setting it back down. “Cursive” refers to running or flowing. Printing is more like marching or hopping.

Then just to bedevil my friend I proposed another quotation, and this one I wrote in the “ABC shorthand” or notehand I use when capturing what is said at meetings. “2 b r n 2 b, tt s e q.” I bet you can figure it out.

My mother had learned stenography, using a Stenotype machine at Meeker’s Business Institute in Elmira, N.Y. She also learned “pencil stenotypy,” a handwritten version using the abbreviations employed in machine stenography. Her notetaking was almost as fast as normal speech, but unlike shorthand notes, hers never got “cold.” I can still read my adapted notehand taken decades ago.

We who remember learning Palmer are getting on in years. It was a laborious process, but good Palmer is beautiful, highly legible, with a uniform slant. Peterson came along  in the 1960s or so, then a hybrid Palmer-Peterson, and Zaner-Bloser, D’Nealian and some others, none as elegant as Spencerian, but none very hard to learn.

So my vote is for teaching handwriting in school, and maybe notehand too. For one thing, the new phones and tablets can handle handwriting, and with the right apps, they can turn it into print (text)!

Peace.