The Importance of Writing in Cursive

Of course, like every single theme of conversation and opinion, cursive writing is of different importance to different people. For some, the fact that nowadays there is less handwriting and more typing, is a good sign because it has a meaning of technology evolving. My opinion, however, is quite the opposite. Yes, it might mean that technology is rather taking positive steps of development, but is this actually a positive fact? As I have written in a previous post, technology is becoming more and more of an addiction to the majority of our society. This is a major reason for the lack of development in the, no doubt, beautiful cursive handwriting.

Nowadays people who communicate from a distance do it electronically through social media, e.g. Skype, Facebook, e-mail, text messaging, etc. Yes, it is easier that sending direct mail and waiting for days for it to arrive, but the magic of knowing that your friend/ mother/ father/ boyfriend/ girlfriend/ son/ daughter, etc, is gone. Handwriting is one of a kind. Every single person on the planet has their own unique handwriting, even if it is not particularly cursive, there is not one duplicated type of handwriting, as opposed to standard typing which is the same and has no individuality whatsoever. Knowing that that significant other has touched the letter, handwritten it,  and not jus typed it, that gives you the feeling of closeness. It gives you a feeling of a warm connection with them. It is personal. This feeling is now mostly gone and not many people realize it. Because of type, generations are gradually losing the ability of writing in cursive.

‘The eyes are the window of the soul’. Well, I can say a similar thing about handwriting. It is the window of the emotions. Cursive writing expresses them in a way that obviously cannot be compared to type. You can almost tell of a person’s feelings, their state of mind, or even their character from when the were writing something.

Handwritten letter

To answer the question ‘is the ability to write in cursive today useful?’ – yes, for a number of reasons, it is. Learning to write in cursive develops the accuracy and precision of the hand. Let’s face it, cursive handwriting is, to my personal opinion, a kind of an art form. Let’s move on to Calligraphy. The appreciation of cursive handwriting has led to the appearance and development of this elegant and beautiful type of art. It can be from simple elegant and creative titles and illustrations, to fascinating urban calligraphy, to graffiti. Personally I admire all kinds of graffiti – characters, pictures, objects, etc. But to keep it in the topic, I will not get carried away and I will stick to talking about calligraphic graffiti, or, as some call it, calligraphiti. To many, street art is vandalism, but to others, myself included, it is a beautiful and important  art form. I think it makes our world a more beautiful, colorful, unique place.

History of Text

The beginning of literacy is a process that has developed over a great number of centuries.

hieros – sacred, glypho – inscriptions. (Greek)

Hieroglyphs are most commonly associated with Ancient Egyptians. They believed that hieroglyphics writing was a work of God. The earliest known examples of writing in Egypt are said to be around 3400 B.C. The hieroglyphic script was mainly used for illustrating on the walls of tombs and temples, monumental inscriptions.

Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Photo: http://imc.mbhs.edu

Hieratic is a more cursive form of hieroglyphs and they are both closely related. It was written by hand and its evolution is a result of a quick attempt of drawing signs in a simpler form on papyrus (papyrus is a type of paper which is thin and is made from the pith of a papyrus plant), with the use of a reed brush. Hieratic was mainly used for religious writings, literature, wisdom texts, etc. Basically, Hieratic was used for texts which contents were more important than their appearance. Same as hieroglyphs, it could be written in rows and columns, but over time, it became standardized into writing it only in rows from right to left. The fact of their development being one from another is unknown but I can say that they are both not just beautiful, but powerful and influencial as well.

Hieratic on papyrus sheet

Papyrus sheet

Demotic writing is an even more cursive type of writing that Hieratic. Its development led to it not being able to resemble visually the concept it represented. It was used in administrative context rather than religious context like Hieratic.  Demotic writing was used until about 400 AD when the Coptic alphabet replaced the use of all three scripts – Hieroglyphic, Hieratic and Demotic. It is important to be noted that through time, while the tree types were developing, none of them replaced the use of the others, because they were each used in different context.

Demotic writing

With its history going back to the Hellenistic period, The Coptic alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet and was developed from the Demotic script. It is the first alphabetic script used for the Egyptian language.

Coptic alphabet

http://www.egyptvoyager.com

http://scriptsource.org

http://en.wikipedia.org