In this century I type and, groan, even text…but I still write longhand. My wife of 40 years can’t read my grocery lists, and my students suffered the professor’s spidery comments on their drawings or projects.

This Workbook follows one for “Manuscript Writing” for an earlier elementary school grade that taught lettering straight up and down; here the child is introduced to Cursive lettering, the script that my demographic has used throughout our lives. Not just Slanted Manuscript, which in type would be called Italic, but a continuously moving production of fluid words.

The pages of the Practice Workbook are ruled, with dotted lines between the base lines. The pupil who owns it follows models shown and writes in the book, repeating individual letters or lines until competently mastered. Here the letters in a word are slanted, joined so the pencil (or pen) is not lifted from the paper until the end of a word, and that’s when the t’s and x’s are crossed and i’s and j’s dotted. End strokes help determine the spacing of the following word. Proper posture and hand position (both illustrated) are maintained by the writing child.

There are eight ink illustrations of an airplane, a tiger in a zoo, white children, and some Native American scenes.

Revisiting this book spurred your reviewer to contemplate other communication skills, like the hand-lettering with small capital letters mastered by my architect friends. Is this essentially an act of drawing? In my university Art teaching, I emphasized the act of drawing in a sketchbook vs. photographing something for future reference, its importance in developing marketable skills. And some studies have shown students remember class content better from notes laboriously by hand.

My mother was confused that I’d take a typing class in high school—for, of course, future employers would assign me a stenographer—though it’s proven very, very useful.  When I first saw email in 1987, I thought hallelujah, I’d never have to talk into a telephone again. Now it seems most communication is typed on virtual keyboards of diminishing size, earning the coinage “texted”. Social media—arena of my words, opinions and experiences, feel as consequential as any published review or essay—so demands subtlety, for which I need my computer keyboard. Texting on a phone, I suffer the “fat finger” syndrome, plus unwanted word completion and correction.

You may have guessed, I’ve owned this book since childhood. But I never practiced in it, and it’s unblemished with any child’s writing though the pulpy paper is yellowed with age. I would have given it to a young child, except it’s a relic of growing up in another time, teaching a skill now thought irrelevant and no longer taught. Some of my students had said they’d never seen script until my notes of the back of their drawings or design projects. Like the handsaws I inherited from my father, some that were his father’s, much technologies and their required skills, become antique.