Judy, the Dictator, and My Search for the Dotted Midline

With all that’s going on in our world today, one crisis that gets too little attention is the demise of cursive handwriting. More on that later, but the dying of cursive was preceded by the end of shorthand. Perhaps for sexist reasons, it was the late 60s after all, I did not take a shorthand class in high school. In my liberal self-defense, however, I did take typing, at which I became proficient. Typing turned out to be a skill I needed in my work life.

My first shirt-and-tie job, barely past 20, I was the Traffic Coordinator for a manufacturing firm in the Halloween Capital of the world, Anoka, MN. My boss was the Traffic Manager, barely into what we call middle management these days. He was high enough in management to have a secretary, Judy. 

These were the days when Secretary Day was just getting underway, and no one held the title "Administrative Assistant". Despite my vaunted title, Judy and I were basically at the same level of the corporate hierarchy. We worked in a cubicle farm. The boss had a generously sized cubicle with a credenza, filing cabinet, a nice-sized desk, and two guest chairs. He had a lot of visitors. Judy and I worked at the perimeter of the central cubicle farm, right along the busy walkway that separated us from the tall-walled cubicles the true middle managers occupied.

Judy was, as custom required, an accomplished writer and reader of shorthand. The boss, who did create a lot of correspondence, was an accomplished dictator. Not the supreme leader type (although sometimes he seemed to think so), but all of his letters and memos were dictated to Judy, who sat with her steno pad in one of the guest chairs in his “office” taking down every pronouncement.

As my tenure lengthened and responsibilities increased, I needed correspondence. The boss said, “Just dictate those to Judy,” as if that was an efficient way to get it done. I was suspicious.  

God love us, Judy and I tried that a few times. But my largely undeveloped sense of self made it almost impossible to think out loud while Judy waited patiently to get it down. As it turned out, I’ve never been able to dictate anything. 

Since my rank on the pay grade scale wouldn’t allow me to have a typewriter, Judy and I devised a plan in which I would write my letters on a legal pad, and she’d transcribe them and post them for me.  

I wrote those letters of long ago using the other communication skill my public school education imparted, cursive handwriting. Judy and I easily pumped out all the letters we needed each day; she with the typewriter, transcribing my cursive, which was quite near-perfect. Not once did she question a word.

Now, my 72-year-old body, with its shakes and shimmies, is incapable of writing anything legibly, in cursive. My once bold signature is a shadow of its former self. In my ignorant bliss these days, I was unaware of the changes in education since our kids were in school. I didn’t know that not only shorthand, but cursive itself, wasn’t even being taught to our young people.

I try to avoid conspiracy theories, but it appears killing off cursive wasn’t just an accident from neglect. It can be traced to an actual policy shift. The phantom THEY did it, with Common Core State Standards, compiled publicly by The National Governors Association and

The Council of Chief State School Officers. The standards, introduced in 2010, completely omitted cursive writing from the national K-12 curriculum. An entire generation grew up without touching the dotted midline of primary handwriting paper.

I well remember that paper. It felt like newsprint. It had a form of lines meant to give us young’uns the awareness of proper letter proportions. It had a baseline that every letter, capital and lowercase, rested upon. Next line up was a dotted line that marked the highest elevation for lowercase letters. The topline is where the upper half of capital letters was to reside, and capital letters only.

The cursive curriculum was tedious, as I recall. But the delight on the teacher’s face when we moved from drawing inside the lines to “beautiful penmanship” made it worthwhile. I’m still quite proficient with my high school-learned use of the QWERTY keyboard, but my penmanship now is anything but beautiful. 

Whenever handwriting is necessary, I can only convey a message with printing. Judy may have been able to decipher my printing; she was brilliant after all. But the printing in my notebooks is really legible only to me. 

As they used to say back in the day, “Write on, dude.”