The technological advances we’ve experienced over the last few decades have brought changes to every part of our society, including education. Reading and writing cursive, for example, used to be a significant part of the public school curriculum but is now considered obsolete in many states due to the widespread use of computers.

The argument goes that it’s more important for students to learn proper keyboarding skills than proper penmanship. Most writing today is, after all, done on computers, and a person doesn’t necessarily need to know how to sign their name in cursive now that we can sign documents electronically and conduct our banking online.

I believe, however, that such an argument misses the point. In addition to being a means of communication, cursive is an art form in its own right. Once you’ve learned how to write the lowercase and uppercase alphabets, you can adapt the cursive letters to create your own individualized style of writing. As long as your writing is legible, there’s room for all sorts of variety.

The same can’t necessarily be said for computer fonts. Sure, there are any number of different fonts available, but if you have two people type the same word using the same font, you won’t be able to tell who typed which word.

Printing by hand creates more of a distinction and writing in cursive even more so.

Cursive was the dominant style of writing just a few decades ago, and we find ourselves in an odd place where some people continue to use it as their main form of writing (generally older people) and some have trouble even reading it (generally younger people). It opens the door for a lot of confusion.

Consider this example. In recent years, we had a letter mistakenly delivered to our house. The house number, town, state, and zip code were the same as ours, but the street name and the name of the recipient weren’t even close.

Chalking it up to a simple error, we put the letter back in our mailbox for the mail carrier to pick up so that it could be delivered to the right person.

Lo and behold, that same letter was re-delivered to us a few days later.

We were dumbfounded. Our last name and street address are clearly labeled on our mailbox, so why had this letter been wrongly delivered to us – not once but twice?

And then we realized: the envelope was addressed in cursive. If the people handling the sorting were on the younger side and weren’t taught how to read and write cursive in school, they may very well have had difficulty deciphering it.

This time, instead of leaving it in the mailbox to be picked up, Mom took the letter down to the post office to explain the situation in person and, if need be, translate the address so they knew where to deliver it. Someone put a lot of time and thought into writing that letter, and we wanted to make sure it reached its intended recipient.

The gentleman at the counter, fortunately, was able to read cursive. He apologized for the confusion and said he would take care of it. Seeing as we didn’t receive the letter a third time, the issue seems to have been resolved.

Since that incident, I’ve been careful to print the address on anything I mail. As more and more young people enter the workforce, there’s no guarantee that my letter or package will be handled by someone who can read cursive.

Further confusion can ensue when looking through the various papers and pictures that constitute our family and personal histories. Your grandmother’s photo album, for example, is filled with pictures of relatives who lived before your time, but their names have been lovingly recorded on the back of each photo – in your grandmother’s cursive script.

Or perhaps it’s the family gingerbread recipe that’s been passed down from your great-grandmother and that you’ve been wanting to learn to make. It’s right there in her recipe book – which is handwritten in cursive.

Diaries, correspondence, love letters – anything of that nature that was handwritten by previous generations is likely to be in cursive. Future generations may find themselves with less knowledge of who they are and where they came from if they’re unable to read cursive.

Learning to read and write cursive isn’t a matter of wasting class time on a subject that’s outdated and irrelevant. It’s about encouraging creativity and individuality and making it possible for us to be connected to the past so that we can better understand our present and our future. It’s a combination of art and history.

Knowing cursive also gives us an opportunity to add to our personal and family histories in a more aesthetic fashion. No matter how many texts you might send to your loved ones, unless you’re planning on passing down your smartphone or your cloud login information, those messages will eventually become inaccessible.

A beautifully handwritten letter, on the other hand, can easily be cherished by generations to come.

Tete-a-tete is published monthly. Teresa Santoski can be reached at tsantoski@gmail.com or via www.teresasantoski.com.

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