Letters: The irresistible pull of cursive writing

• Aug 12, 2022

I don’t remember learning to write. I’ve just always known how.

The curved C’s, the spiked T’s, the loops of lowercase L’s flowed from my fingers at an age so young that memory doesn’t bookmark the event.

But on my first report card, a red Unsatisfactory “U” in penmanship stood out among the blue-inked Satisfactory “S’s” like a raisin in rice pudding.

My attempts at cursive always started out well. Gripping my pencil with steely resolve, my 6-year-old fingers formed with precision the first word or two in every sentence.

Then my mind raced ahead, and the result was a chain of letters degrading into a zigzag of lines more like an EKG printout than a paragraph.

I wore down a thousand rubber erasers trying to please my teachers. By the time I reached fifth grade, I had accepted that I would never write in a clear hand.

Even now, 60 years after I began tracing letters in kindergarten, I often cannot decipher my own handwriting.

My signature is a sloppy squiggle more at home on a physician’s prescription pad, and my words scatter across the page like pictures scrawled on a cave wall.

This hasn’t stopped me.

If I’m conscious, I’m writing.

I write on my iPhone, my laptop, on legal pads and on scraps of paper pulled from my purse.

Sometimes I think about my early teachers, those middle-age women who clicked their tongues and shook their heads at my poor handwriting. But usually, I don’t have time to think about them.

I’m too busy writing.

JOCELYN CHABOT

Charleston