The Palmer Method of Business Writing and the future of cursive

The Palmer Method of Business Writing can be downloaded here, for free. No, it’s not an illegal pirated copy. The linked-to version of the book was published in 1915, so it’s free from copyright.

I would highly recommend this book if, like me, they taught you how to write in cursive in the third grade, but it never stuck, and now that you are an adult you feel that maybe you ought to re-learn what you should have learned in elementary school. The capital letters that the book teaches are slightly more old-fashioned than what you may have been taught in elementary school if they taught you the Zaner-Bloser method, but I sort of like that. Palmer also recommends a strange-looking lower-case ‘r’, but I stuck with practicing the more usual ‘r’ because the Palmer ‘r’ never caught on.

The very title of the book is interesting. A hundred or more years ago, handwriting was necessary for conducting business! This was especially true in the 1800s before commercial production of typewriters. Before typewriters, all writing was done by hand. If you were a lawyer filing a motion with the court, you would file a hand-written document. Imagine that! Today the court would throw that out and tell you not to come back until you learn how to use a word processor and a laser printer.

The next question worth answering is why a cursive form of writing and not manuscript lettering? The best answer is simply that cursive was how educated adults wrote in the nineteenth century and before.

So the importance of handwriting for business and the cultural value placed on good cursive penmanship made teaching this sort of cursive writing an essential part of the school curriculum.

And what about the typewriter? According to a Wikipedia article, commercial production of typewriters began in 1873. Adoption was slow. Very slow. Typing was seen as a specialized skill for women and not something that real business executives would do. In the TV series Mad Men, which takes place in the 1960s, you don’t see a typewriter in Don Draper’s office. If he needs to send a letter or a memo, he dictates it to his secretary, or he writes it down with pen and paper.

No doubt, part of the reason why universal typing was so slow to be adopted was because the schools were so slow to teach that skill. When I was in elementary school in the 1970s, a century after commercial production of typewriters, we learned manuscript in the first grade, cursive in the third grade, and there was one class in typing in the sixth grade, on manual typewriters (even though electric typewriters were the norm by that time), and after that we were never expected to type anything again. Even though typing was an afterthought for the school system, it was the most valuable skill I learned in the sixth grade, a hundred times more useful than “shop” class.

Let’s jump forward to the year 2014 (almost 2015). Today, no one at all uses handwriting in a business setting. I haven’t seen a single handwritten letter or other document in the last two decades. There’s one oddball who likes to mark up documents by hand instead of using comments in Word like everybody else, and it’s annoying because handwriting is harder to read than comments on a computer screen.

That’s right, no one wants to read handwritten text, and especially not cursive handwritten text, because it’s hard to read. Even the examples in Palmer’s book are a lot harder and slower to read than properly typeset text, and Palmer is an expert on handwriting and penmanship. Imagine having to reading a regular person’s handwriting! That surely must be the worst part of being a school teacher.

There are many obvious flaws in the cursive alphabet taught by Palmer. A carelessly written ‘c’ can look like an ‘e’ or an undotted ‘i’. ‘e’ and ‘a’ can easily look like each other, as can ‘a’ and ‘o’ or ‘b’ and ‘f’. If you don’t close your ‘s’ it can look like an ‘r’. There are also certain tricky letter combinations, of which ‘wr’ and ‘wi’ are the worst.

Despite arguments that cursive is superior than unjoined manuscript because it’s supposed to be faster, the illegibility of the cursive writing of a person with poor penmanship cancels out any speed advantage, if there really is any. There is little evidence that Palmer or Zaner-Bloser cursive is really any faster than printing. For people who are used to writing in manuscript, it’s faster than cursive. For people who are used to writing in cursive, it’s faster than manuscript. Traditional cursive was not scientifically designed for either legibility or speed. If anything, the difficulty of writing legible cursive may have been seen as a benefit from the perspective of the scrivener’s guild!

Other arguments for the need to teach cursive are specious. I’ve read over and over again that children would not be able to read the original Declaration of Independence or read a letter from grandma. If these are the best arguments in favor of teaching cursive, then there isn’t much reason to teach it. Good luck getting people to even read the typewritten versions of historical documents. Even twenty years ago before cursive was dropped, no one read the original handwritten version of the Declaration. As far as grandma goes, if she knows her grandkids can’t read her cursive, she should write in manuscript or even send them an email.

In the twenty-first century, school systems have finally started dropping cursive from the curriculum. The reason sometimes given for this is that schools are too busy prepping kids to take multiple-choice tests to have time to teach cursive, which is the same reason given for everything that’s dropped from the curriculum, but in the case of cursive it no longer serves any broad social benefit to teach this to everybody. Typing is a much more useful skill to teach children. Typing would prepare children for the real jobs they will have as adults.

Does this mean you don’t want your own children to learn cursive? The answer to that might be a negative. Writing in cursive is still seen as more upper class than writing in manuscript. I saw this at a comment written in the NY Times:

One observation from someone who has taught at a major public university and grades a national exam with written components: cursive is increasingly becoming a sign of class status. Students who write in cursive are academically successful and, based on my anecdotal evidence, come from more affluent backgrounds and the best secondary schools. Cursive is not going anywhere. The writing form is simply becoming a marker of status as we give up on the masses ability to master it. Our schools should do more than produce mindless worker bees to sit before computers.

I first noticed this class distinction when I taught a small class of twelve students. During discussion, I have always written students’ important observations on the board in cursive. Two weeks into the class, two students (who came from a poorer part of the state) raised their hands. They informed me that they could not read cursive and that “I might as well be writing Arabic on the board.” I enquired and found students from more affluent school systems in the class had received cursive instruction and had no difficulty reading my handwriting.

So cursive is good for your own children even though there’s no societal benefit from it.