now I know why she got angry at me

"like a speaker's accent, handwriting was used to pinpoint a writer's social status."

pg. 58 WM Baron

I remember when I started to learn cursive handwriting in second grade. Every week, for months and months, we would have to complete these enourmous notebooks of cursive worksheets. I also remember that, although I was in the gifted program, I was sent to remedial cursive class, which really just meant extra worksheets. My mother would stand over my shoulder as I was completing them at home, yelling at me for picking up my pencil or making loops too big. To this day, she has made me write thank you cards over again because I printed. I just didn't understand why we had to learn cursive; printing was so much easier and (I thought) legible.

But I think I understand now. Cursive handwriting is a mark of high class for many. We've all probably read atrocious handwriting and pictured the writer: dirty, ripped jeans, uneducated (in short, a bum).  Maybe there is a link between handwriting and how we judge a person's character. It also took discipline, and I guess that if I couldn't master this simple task, my teacher and mother thought that I wouldn't have discipline later on in life, when tasks got harder and went beyond differentiating between a cursive capital "t" and "f". I guess that my mother and my teacher wanted me to grow up sophisticated and college-bound, hoping that my handwriting would reflect my intelligence and social class. Good penmanship has been instilled in our minds by society as a mark of high class.  My question to you is this: since we now live in the digital age, most of us write with a keyboard instead of a pencil/pen. Do you still think that good penmanship is as important?


(my handwriting is still awful, by the way)