> Where is cursive writing going? Do any of you still use cursive? Everyone now is taught cursive mandatorily, but do you think that soon it will become an elective, like Spanish or Art class?
>

In elementary school, cursive was a symbol of being "grown up." A kid in my kindergarten class who had learned the cursive alphabet from his older brother was seen as having superior knowledge by the rest of us who were barely learning to print.

By fourth grade, it was getting a little tiresome. Teachers started to make us write in cursive all the time so we'd get used to it: "In fifth grade, teachers won't accept assignments unless they're written in cursive." In fifth grade we heard the same thing. "Writing in cursive now is good practice for sixth grade, when the teachers will only let you write in cursive." Of course, the sixth grade teachers didn't care how we wrote, as long as it was legible. Now that I'm in tenth grade, almost everybody prints. My English teacher writes in cursive, and the class hates it because nobody can read what she has written on the board or on our papers.

For a while, I hung on to my cursive. thinking it made my writing look more distinguished. Eventually I decided I didn't like my handwriting looking exactly the way the teachers taught it to everybody in the third grade. (This must have been during my small-scale preteen rebellion, around the time I read "The Catcher in the Rye.") I started writing in a mix of cursive and print, running letters together when it was convenient and separating them otherwise. I was happy to eliminate letters like the cursive "b" and "z", which in my opinion don't look anything like the letters they supposedly represent.

My handwriting is constantly evolving. Lately people who read it have complained that "I" looks like a "9" and "J" like a deformed "Z." But it's generally neat enough to be read without much effort, and it's my own individual style.

Gatsby's Girl