It was April 1945. The Second World War was just days from ending in Europe. My father’s medical battalion had received a few days’ leave in the then Allied-occupied German city of Düsseldorf.
There, Alex and his comrades enjoyed hot meals, hot showers, and billets with beds and clean sheets. Somewhere in the chaos, somehow in the uncertainty, my father found a place and some time to sit down and compose a letter.
“Dear Koula,” he wrote to a pen pal in New York City. “We have known each other so long, yet I never saw you very often after I finished school.”
The words spoke to me deeply because Dad was expressing emotion in a war zone that allowed little room for feelings. He was admitting frailty – delinquency for not writing often enough. And his words flowed because they were written cursively.The penmanship wasn’t perfect, but his intentions rang true. “I remember many mornings when we met on our way to school. Weren’t those the good old days?”
It’s been about a year since the Ministry of Education re-introduced cursive writing instruction at the Grade 3 level to Ontario elementary school classes. The then education minister suggested the initiative would “create a very talented generation of young people.”
But in fact, the move to teach students how so-called “joined-up” penmanship with letters flowing into one another, was prompted by the Ontario Human Rights Commission report (published in 2022), accusing the Ford government of failing to meet the needs of students with reading and writing disabilities.
For some context, I did a bit of online research and found the work of the University of Calgary’s Dr. Hetty Roessingh, an expert in early childhood education, literacy, language and handwriting. Her recent study examined some 245 Grade 4 students, noting that fewer than half of them could express their ideas on paper.
“For young learners,” she wrote in a National Post story, “handwriting is a complex, demanding skill … (but is) an important cognitive tool.” By that she meant that physical note-taking – employing cursive style – improves students’ ability to retrieve and remember information, and “it gives students a processing advantage.”
I don’t have the scientific knowledge to prove Dr. Roessingh’s findings, but anecdotally I can remember countless examples as a journalist and broadcaster when writing things down with pen and paper left a deeper impression than trying to remember what a source had just told me.
Now, my cursive writing leaves a lot to be desired, but most of the time when I return to my chicken scratch cursive notes, I find a pretty accurate record of what I saw or heard. I mean how many times have you gone to the supermarket trying to remember a shopping list, when a simple cursively written note in-hand would solve the problem?
For a long time, handwriting has been marginalized by other forms of written recording. I remember back in 1963 taking typewriting classes in Grade 9; once I got over my mechanical shortcomings, I thought typing was the greatest thing since sliced bread (I didn’t have to deal with broken fountain pens or smudged class notes anymore).
I guess it was the same when I moved from manual typewriters to an IBM Selectric to word processors and beyond; the convenience of not having to physically write things down seemed a godsend. I do admit, however, that tapping on a keyboard never guaranteed I’d remember anything. Writing things down cursively or otherwise with that pen and paper almost always ensured perfect recall.
When cursive writing instruction returned to Ontario classrooms last year, a teaching and learning professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) noted, “Cursive (writing) should never have been taken out of the curriculum.” We’ll soon see if its return makes a difference.
By the way, in April 1945 when my father, Tech/Sgt Alex Barris completed his handwritten letter to his high school pen pal Koula Kontozoglus back home in New York, he finished by saying, “If you write to me again, and bring me up to date, I’ll promise to answer and keep doing so whenever you write. Fair enough?”
They both lived up to the promise. Dad returned to North American aboard a Liberty ship in December 1945. Three years later, Koula and Alex were married and moved to Canada where Dad got a reporting job at the Globe and Mail.
I guess his cursive writing skill not only helped him find the work he loved, but also the woman he loved.