What ever happened to cursive? Even with all the technology we have been privileged to communicate with since the evolution of typewriters and eventually computers, what happened to the “R’s” written like tables and the loop-to-loop “F’s?”

I’ll tell you what happened.

All the knowledge and practice of cursive is hoarded by fourth grade teachers. The ones who scared me into thinking print writing would no longer be socially acceptable after the sixth grade by marking off one point for every quiz answer I wrote in print.

This was a big disruption in the learning process of my class.

Take for example those girls — the ones who would waltz to their “Clean Sweep” organized desks with the trendiest new Lisa Frank folders and two tightly pleated braids down the back of their heads — who always received gold stars for their excellence in color-coded handwriting. Unfortunately, they stopped receiving those extra credit points when the necessity of writing in cursive eliminated the opportunity to draw that extra curve over the tops of their “A’s.” I do not even want to think about the amount of therapy it took to fix that.

I was in a whole different category of girls — the ones who traded in student store points for the latest in neon erasers and arrived to our classrooms in the morning to investigate the state of the Elmer’s glue left to congeal in those oval pencil crevices in our desks. We would color them and trade them. (Was that only a California thing?)

I had not even comprehended the whole printing thing when presented with the idea of writing an entire word without once lifting the pencil.

I partially blame my father who led me at an early age to believe it is professional to have a signature which consists of the first letter of your name followed by a squiggly line. If that was professional, I thought why not apply that concept with the rest of my handwriting?

My teachers didn’t agree.

Cursive was originally invented and practiced as a skill in the early seventeenth century. Children were not routinely meant to learn it because its value as a skill was valued about as highly as we value learning to play violin in an orchestra or mastering football. Most of America’s founding documents, like The Declaration of Independence and The Gettysburg Address, were written in cursive as a means of assuring everyone could read it.

Nevertheless, no one seems to use cursive anymore, and thus as a circular pattern, no one can read cursive anymore because they never see it. The whole phenomenon is quite enigmatic.

You often hear people claim their handwriting as a mixture between print and cursive (I confess to being one of them). However, it’s necessary to admit the slight differences created by everyone developing their own hybrid forms of writing undermine the original efficiency of cursive. As a criticism, because most people rely on various forms of technology to make decisions and think for them, the original purpose of cursive is thus outdated because it takes the average person longer to actually form ideas than even worry about writing them on paper.

Languages that do not use the English alphabet are often written in a script or other non-print manner. “Print” was labeled as such because it was only unified as a style when created by a printing press for distribution purposes.

Take Hebrew for example. All ancient documents, especially prayer, are written in block letters, while modern Hebrew is most commonly communicated in script perhaps because of its time-saving characteristics.

Noticing the handwriting patterns of my peers (not that I really observe a large portion of their actual handwriting compared to the amount of typed IMs and Facebook messages I read), the way of printing seems to have taken a turn down the pragmatic and highly utilized road.

I would like to go back and tell my fourth grade teacher her efforts were a waste of time. Yet I’m afraid if she had not invested those check-minus handwriting grades in me, then I would still be writing essays and papers full of squiggles.

Yael Maxwell is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.