I resort to awkward jokes about being a drug dealer to excuse my use of the burner phone, when everybody knows I have never inhaled anything stronger than icing sugar, and then only by mistake. (Yes, I am in denial about my cigarette smoking years.)
I still enjoy reading actual newspapers and books rather than online substitutions. I appreciate much about the internet but have no desire to be drawn into the melee of social media. Emoticons are a foreign language.
So, both of my regular readers might be surprised I am lukewarm about bringing back cursive writing.
The possibility of this hit the headlines earlier this month when it was mentioned in the initial report of the ministerial advisory group on redesigning English, mathematics and statistics learning areas in the refreshed curriculum for pupils in years 0 to 10.
While there is much in the report about teaching handwriting in the years 0 to 3, there is only one reference to cursive writing. It comes in a practice guide for literacy list and says "Teaching handwriting (including cursive) in Years 4-6".
Perhaps I missed something in the document, but the rationale for teaching cursive writing in particular is absent.
I can understand the need to be able to handwrite something legible with a pen, and the view expressed in the report that if the technical basics of writing, such as letter formation, have not been practised until they are automatic they are likely to occupy working memory and prevent a student from expressing their ideas.
The best I could say for the cursive style is it might be faster because the letters are joined.
Insisting on handwritten assignments completed in class could help avoid plagiarism in the Artificial Intelligence age, but any legible style would do, surely.
Will teachers, who may not know cursive themselves, be expected to learn and teach it? When and why?
Debate on the issue is flourishing overseas. Some jurisdictions have always taught cursive writing, some are reintroducing it, and countries such as Switzerland and Finland only teach basic script.
It is not clear to me when cursive writing was last uniformly formally taught here. My recollection, at 69, is we started learning it in primary school, but later were taught something called print script, which was basically italics. Maybe we were eventually supposed to join that up but that point was lost on me.
When I got to secondary school, we were expected to use cursive writing. I developed something passable but stopped using it in the early ’70s. Then, most writing was done on my trusty Olivetti portable typewriter.
My handwriting has descended into inconsistent messy printing, liable to lapse into Teeline shorthand (learned more than 50 years ago) if I am not careful.
An example of my cursive attempt survives in my old fifth form history exercise book (1970). In ink, it shows a neatness which I doubt lasted much after that.
My mother, in a letter to my grandmother, written during her university student days in Christchurch in 1947, demonstrates a uniform and neat style almost too good to be real. As well as writing enthusiastically about her studies, she raved about some new silk stockings, moaning that another pair had laddered from top to toe — "perhaps my legs are too fat for them!" Oh dear.
My father’s writing was a sprawling affair. Maybe he was always in a hurry. Often the crosses to the t’s or the dots to the i’s appeared on the next word.
Still, I can decipher most of what he said in a letter home to his folks when he was briefly studying agriculture at Massey College in Palmerston North in 1945.
He was not an attentive student, seeing how quickly he could get his pencil to balance on its end on the desk (four seconds), doing sketches of the veterinary tutor and coming up with ditties about the female horticultural students who were "all spectacles and garden rakes or pruning shears as the season dictates".
The less said about his references to their pickaxe handle dimensions in the wrong place the better.
Would I treasure such old letters less if they were printed or even typed? I doubt it.
P.S. Thanks to the Dunedin City Council, which says it will adjust the light timer in the women’s loo in the Railway Station to allow for a longer session before darkness descends (although it could not tell me what time the existing set-up allows).
It will also consider what it calls my "feedback", which was my question, should there be a way of alerting people to the risk of darkness?
I am the only person who has complained, apparently.
Possibly, others were too embarrassed. Shameless, that’s me.
- Elspeth McLean is a Dunedin writer.
