Word: writes
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...remember how to write a capital Z in cursive. The rest of my letters are shaky and stiff, my words slanted in all directions. It's not for lack of trying. In grade school I was one of those insufferable girls who used pink pencils and dotted their i's with little circles. I experimented with different scripts, and for a brief period I even took the time to make two-story a's, with the fancy overhang used in most fonts (including this magazine's). But everything I wrote, I wrote in print. I am a member...
...childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says. (See pictures of the college dorm's evolution...
Cursive started to lose its clout back in the 1920s, when educators theorized that because children learned to read by looking at books printed in manuscript rather than cursive, they should learn to write the same way. By World War II, manuscript, or print writing, was in standard use across the U.S. Today schoolchildren typically learn print in kindergarten, cursive in third grade. But they don't master either one. Over the decades, daily handwriting lessons have decreased from an average of 30 minutes...
...that such a bad thing? Except for physicians - whose illegible handwriting on charts and prescription pads causes thousands of deaths a year - penmanship has almost no bearing on job performance. And aside from the occasional grocery list or Post-it note, most adults write very little by hand. The Emily Post Institute recommends sending a handwritten thank-you but says it doesn't matter whether the note is in cursive or print, as long as it looks tidy. But with the declining emphasis in schools, neatness is becoming a rarity...
...even if this is second-tier Pynchon, it's still entertainment of a high order. It was only a matter of time before he would write a private-eye novel. Each of his books has been built around a character - or two or 12 - on a quest into the heart of a mystery that is never quite solved. The difference here is that Pynchon finally makes one of those characters a licensed gumshoe, albeit one with an incongruous hippie backstory. "Doc" Sportello is an ambling longhair with links to the surfer world and an appetite for controlled substances that would...