I think it’s important that kids learn it, but honestly, if I had to write long hand, I wouldn’t write. I detest the drudgery of dragging a writing utensil across paper. Without a keyboard, I have no idea how I’d have gotten through life.
31 thoughts on “Cursive”
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I love it. Bought a book on Spencerian penmanship with copybooks, and everyone is happy to see my handwriting become legible. People love to receive hand-written letters.
I stopped writing in cursive in seventh grade. (I print very very fast.)
I don’t particularly care if they learn to write it, but they certainly need to learn to READ it.
So true. I gave up cursive when people kept asking what I had written. My grades in elementary school penmanship were high and my script has not deteriorated, so I suspect most people never become acquainted with cursive these days.
I found that by about the age of 10 that I could write a good cursive script for the first 2 paragraphs. After that, it went downhill fast because of pain in my hands. By the time I’d reached 2 pages of continuous cursive or printed hand-writing, I could barely hold a pencil in my hand because of the pain, and the writing was nearly illegible to me, much less to any teacher or parent. It’s worse, by now.
Some learn better if they write things down, from lecture or from text, but for me the distraction of the pain always nullified that.
Teaching kids cursive? What kind of parents are these? Isn’t there enough bad language among adults without teaching it to young kids? I am outraged!
You think that’s bad? The high school drama courses are all being taught by thespians.
In other news, I loved to write cursive when I was a kid. But then I discovered the typewriter, and became a wicked fast two-finger typist. My grandfather had been a newspaper reporter in his youth, and authored a couple of books in later life. He never learned to touch type. But I did. In high school, ca 1971, I learned to touch type on a mechanical typewriter, doing 80 words per minute with no mistakes. The typewriter was my writing tool from then until I entered the engineering workforce in 1980. Then I went back to hand writing, though by then I had lost the cursive ability. So I learned to print quickly and somewhat legibly. Around 1991, I entered the word processing age, and haven’t looked back. No one, including me, can read my handwritten notes anymore. It’s a pity, because there is beauty and utility in handwriting. I suppose I could relearn it. Maybe when I retire…
This is why they invented cursive fonts!
I’m still trying to figure out why my typing teaching in grade school had me doing the school news paper (requiring about 20# of pressure for each keystroke.) Perhaps that was the equivalent of running laps?
When the head of engineering saw me typing as a kid at Brush Wellman, he acted like I was performing magic as none of the engineers knew how to type.
Heh. As a computer geek it was pretty obvious to me that I needed to take typing classes in high school, and typing and 10-key in college.
In school they tried to teach me touch typing. But the method struck me as so unnatural that it would take YEARS of practice before I could touch type as fast as I type by my instinctive method.
Typing in HS was a no brainer, that’s where the girls were. Who knew it’d actually turn out to be useful?
Forget about cursive — I have a hard enough time reading hand-printed letters.
It is a special problem reading personal names on forms. Other things have context to fill in the ambiguity, but names out of a large pool, not so much. This is true even for first names given the many non-traditional names in use.
In high school I wrote out whole book-length space-opera stories by hand — printed. They were derivative, if not plagiaristic, but gosh darn it they were legible.
In the 5th grade (my teacher was the younger of the Blandau sisters and once held a long haired kid out the second story window to show him where the barber shop was.) I thought everything was plagiaristic if any of it were sourced. I even gave a speech in class about it rather than a report on Victor Hugo as I was assigned. In many ways I suppose I’m still that same dumb kid today?
As a dyslexic, cursive wasn’t too hard to write but its a pita to read. It is even worse now that it pops up so infrequently. Even though it looks nice, I can’t help thinking, “This is illegible.”
Print is very utilitarian and minimalist but everyone who learned cursive has some idiosyncrasies melding the two.
I’ve gone back and forth between writing in print, cursive, and typing (mostly between print and typing). Some things I can write faster and others are best to type. It all depends on what I am composing. Actual composing, I prefer to write. But the necessity of having to type something usually means I don’t want to move a stack of rocks twice.
I love to write poetry but that doesn’t always translate well to the small screen. Typing forces you to work within the box. Good/bad there.
Either typing or writing for note taking means you are going to miss some things regardless.
The real issue here isn’t typing or writing but thumbing. Tablets and phones are awesome. I can write or type faster than I can fat thumb. Anyone who thumbs really well either has a giant screen or super tiny childlike hands. It isn’t something easily done by feel. You wont be thumbing with your eyes closed.
Some devices are here, like the Samsung note, a few wacoms, and maybe the ipencil thingy, but the ability to write on your screen and then have it converted to type is very ideal. As this catches on over the next few years, things will change a lot.
It’s interesting to read the various perspectives of a fellow dyslexic. Mine is mild, mostly, but increases in intensity as the pressure to read increases. I had a job recently that required reading – for comprehension – large volumes of unfamiliar material. It was awful.
Though it isn’t cursive, the Chik-fil-A logo is at least stylized. When I look at it, I see it as “Chik-A-fil.” It takes me a good minute or two to unsee that. I am flummoxed by other peoples’ cursive.
BTW, I hope you will help out our cause by donating to that most worthy of activist groups, DAM.*
*Mothers Against Dyslexia
The only C’s of my life were in 3rd grade penmanship; I always hated it. I took typing in high school as soon as I was eligible (10th grade, learned on a manual typewriter with blank key caps), and gave up writing in cursive about the same time.
But I still find it valuable to take notes or work out ideas by hand, so there is certainly a lot of value in being able to write quickly and legibly. There’s a push in some quarters to teach a sort of italic printing that eliminates a lot of the extraneous strokes and loops from cursive while still enabling connected letters with fewer tip lifts than typical printing. The examples I’ve seen are much more readable than most cursive too.
Many years ago I spent some hours drinking and talking with the SF writer Larry Niven, and somehow the conversation got on the topic of handwritten manuscripts vs typed manuscripts. He said that he felt typing got both sides of his brain involved due to both hands working, and that he could tell the stylistic difference between his work done typing vs handwriting. Of course, he may have been bullshitting me, we were both kind of drunk…
I’ve never understood the notion that lifts slow you down. I can print as fast as I can write cursive (faster, now that I’ve mostly forgotten how to do the latter) and much more legibly (but still terrible).
When I write, usually for study notes, it is almost always cursive, yet I don’t see myself forgetting how to print.
A problem I have is nerve damage making me lose the use of my ring and little fingers, moreso in my right hand, and I am right-handed.
This hasn’t stopped me from either writing or typing, but I’ve had to adapt my typing and 10-keying, usually by shifting my middle fingers.
The legibility of my cursive has dropped, but not to the point where I’ve ever looked at my work and thought “this is not my writing.”
Lifts don’t slow me down either; the constant reversal of direction in cursive writing does. But I’ve never tried the half-italic-half-printing style either; but we’ve considered it (and not yet tried it) for one of our kids who has simply atrocious printing and can’t write cursive either.
I’m working with computers and still taking hand written notes. Lots of less than full sentence jots. But for anything of length, especially for consumption by others, it’s typed on a computer.
Cursive these days has one significant purpose: signatures. Go to electronic signatures and even that will be gone. Good riddance! We need to teach cursive writing itself about as much as we need to teach quill pens and cuneiform.
My signature has little to nothing to do with cursive. It’s completely illegible, but the purpose of a signature isn’t to be legible, but to be unforgeable.
I’ve read of people who deliberately come up with a weird symbol for their signature to make it distinctive. OTOH, my spouse’s signature is a readable capital letter followed by a wavy line.
A girl I went to grade school with was named Teddy Bear. Guess what her signature looked like!
Arabic only has cursive, and it has no capital letters (So they don’t capitalize “Allah” or “Muhammad”). Not coincidentally, Hebrew has no lower case letters.
The reason goes back to the Tower of Babel and a rabbi named Gomer Platzenfinkle.
The midrash Rabbah relates “God has no right to choose the upper world for Himself, and to leave the lower world to us; therefore we will build us a tower, with an idol on the top holding a sword, so that it may appear as if it intended to war with God”
Rabbi Platzenfinkle confused the word “world” with “case”, and after several more confusing mistakes due to language being in flux, he ended up stealing all the upper case letters for Hebrew, leaving only the lower case letters for the Arabs. This of course means Arabs can’t properly use proper nouns, and from that all else followed, including the whole Middle East situation, which can be understood as a war between ALL CAPS and lower case cursive.
I actually do try to make my signature resemble what my name would look like in cursive, but the proliferation of signature touchscreens — especially those where you use your fingertip instead of a stylus — is making me consider the squiggly line option.
The finger-on-touchscreens thing has completely obliterated the notion of a readable signature.
Finger on touchscreen is nothing. Try drawing a signature with a mouse.
I have.
A friend told me of his Army days that his signature quickly became an earthworm track scrawl: “Cap. Mck—___” and that no one cared as long as your rank and the first 2-to-3 letters of your last name were legible…
I wonder if we are going to end up with e-dongles like those stampers that the Japanese use?