The Art of Cursive Writing
We often remember the first time that we learn to do something. It may
be the first word that came out of your mouth or the first moment that you
walked on your own two feet. Rarely do people remember the second time for
anything. For me, I remember the exact day I learned how to write the alphabet
again. In a literal sense, I was learning how to write, but from a deeper and
emotional level, I was learning how to view handwriting. I first got the feeling
that something was wrong with my writing when Ms. Field, my homeroom
teacher, took an unusually long look at my in-class-writing. She looked at my
writing and then looked at me, asking me to meet her after lunch. I was almost
certain I was in trouble.
“In junior school, we write in something called “cursive writing”,” said Ms.
Field. She then opened up the classroom cupboard and brought back a workbook
that was full of squiggly lines.
“As long as you are in school, you need to write in cursive from now on,”
she said. I blinked with confusion. Learning how to join up letters was not a
priority for someone who had just left Korea a few weeks ago and was struggling
to take classes in English. Nevertheless, I had the whole alphabet to go through
and my mum told me to always, always listen to what the teacher says.
Being forced to learn something that I considered to be meaningless was
not the only reason that I was reluctant to learn how to write in cursive; I had
also been fed many horror stories about Ms. Field in the playground. According
to my friends, Ms. Field was quick tempered and easily angered. Ms. Field was
certainly not the person that you would usually consider a kind and loving
teacher. Here I was, a few days into school and already forming the idea that Ms.
Field would not be the most pleasant person to be around for half an hour
everyday.
Getting to know Ms. Field was a different experience. During the half an
hour cursive writing sessions, Ms. Field was not the horrid person that everyone
described her to be, at least not all the time. She would kindly demonstrate how
each word was written and I would follow her guide. Being straight from Korea, I
would mostly stay quiet while Ms. Field would do most of the talking. One
particular one-way conversation that I remember was when Ms. Field talked
about how handwriting can reflect you as a person. I never quite understood
what she meant until Ms. Field showed me what it was like to write a sentence in
perfect cursive writing. A halo did not appear from behind like how it is in the
movies but I could felt that the letters were glowing on paper. Her letters were
not like the clumsy lines that I wrote. Her letters were elegantly joined up
together and perfectly organized on the white piece of paper. It was the moment
when I saw handwriting as a work of art. Looking at my own unstable lines that I
wrote in attempt to write in cursive, I knew that I would certainly need a lot of
practice to develop poise and style.
Appreciating cursive writing did not mean that all of a sudden I mastered
the elegant craft. It just made me realize that I had to practice writing even more
to reach the level of perfection that I had witnessed. The curve of the ‘g’ and ‘y’,
the dot on the ‘i’, and the length of the ‘l’ all had to be in balance. I especially
found making my ‘h’ and ‘n’ distinguishable, and often found ‘r’ to be the hardest
letter to connect with the other letters. All the flicks and the position of the dots
had to be calculated and the letters had to be cradled and cared for. Instead of
abandoning individual letters to wonder off on their own I had to join each letter
and anchor them on paper.
Learning how to write in cursive required many hours of writing with a
sweaty hand and aching fingers. Just like how Rome was not built in one day, my
letters were never consistent from the beginning. It was as if I was learning how
to tame a wild beast; it required patience and control. Finding the physical
representation of the thoughts in my head took time. To make myself feel better,
I would imagine myself to be Shakespeare writing his next great masterpiece
with a quill. Writing with a ballpoint pen in the corner of the library was far
apart from the Shakespeare that lived inside my head but at least I could feel his
writing spirit.
In the tedious process of learning how to write again, I began to
appreciate each curve and line of the letters. I began to see that instead of the
rigid lines that I first began with, my letters were now flowing out of my pen onto
paper. Cursive writing started to feel natural and felt like my own. I now had
something to call my own and began to believe that handwriting is what delivers
my words to the reader. When giving someone a handwritten piece, not only was
I passing on the content, but I was also revealing a personal side of me. My
handwriting was the face of my writing and a representation of myself. It
represented a personal journey of shaping words into mine and mine only.
So what did I learn all the writing sessions that I had with Ms. Field?
1. Ms. Fields is not an evil person like what the others had told me
2. Handwriting can be an art form of its own. It is another projection to
who you are and to find ‘character’ in one’s handwriting requires time
and practice.
I feel that as I am growing older, I rarely need to write something to
showcase my handwriting except for the odd birthday or Christmas card
each year. We tend to hide behind the standardized computer fonts of
Arial, Times New Roman, and Comic Sans. These standardized fonts,
which shout out “bland” in every word, often hides the author of the
writing. My pre-cursive self would not mind this, but learning how to
write in cursive has shown me that handwriting can show character,
personal history and most of all how much effort goes into every
handwritten word. Discovering how my writing could change through
cursive writing was more than just making my letters look squiggly and
fancy. I developed an appreciation for the art, as I became the master of
my letters. My writing became me and I became my writing.