A couple of weeks ago, as I sat with friends in Maryland next to their Christmas tree, I heard their teenage daughter - who I shall call Julia - complain about her recent school tests. But what threw her off her stride were not the multiple choice questions or the essays. The shock came when the examiners asked her to write her name and a brief sentence in “cursive” style (or what British people call “joined-up” writing, as opposed to block print).
Never mind that Julia, 16, was supposed to have learnt cursive writing eight years before at her (excellent) school; or that cursive writing has long been the educational standard in the western world. In reality, Julia almost never uses it. Nor do her friends: an (entirely informal) survey of the American teenagers that I met during the holiday period suggests that almost all of them are now writing in a “printed” style, and struggle to do anything else.
“Nobody does cursive,” I was repeatedly told by kids and young adults, whenever I could tear them away from their mobile devices long enough to discuss the issue. Indeed, they seemed so baffled that I might as well have asked them if they wrote using a quill pen.