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Why Johnny Can't Handwrite
theodp writes "Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades. With 90 percent of Americans between the ages of 5 and 17 using computers, it's not uncommon for kids to type 20-30 WPM by the time they leave elementary school. Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
I heard something on the BBC about IM on mobile phones becoming so popular in the UK that the next generation will be using their thumbs to do things we would use our index finger for, like ringing a doorbell. I already don't write in cursive, although I did learn in school and could probably manage if I really wanted to try.
If you want kids to be able to write by hand, you just have to force them to do it in school. If you let them type everything, they will. Of course, this isn't likely to happen on a wide scale; educators don't get paid enough to care.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Perhaps we are just training more kids to be doctors these days...
...Tablet PCs. If only they were priced for the average consumer.
That's the only letter I can't remember how to write in cursive. Just like the scene in Billy Madison...
"But I can't read" (c) some Quest/Adventure game back in 1993 (somebody please enlighten me how that was called)
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
I do suffer from bad handwriting, but oddly enough, I write in cursive over printing. I find that cursive is quicker for me and that printing is cumbersome. Also, people have remarked that my printing looks like something a two-year-old would write.
SIGFAULT
I think cursive is a solution for a problem that is going away. I know cursive.. most of it. Actually, I'm not really sure what a capitla 'Q' looks like. If I had to figure it out, I'd probably go get a cursive font and type 'Q' and see what it did.
Back on topic, who cares if kids can't write in cursive? I'd far rather have a kid who can touch type and doesn't know cursive rather than the opposite.
This is people who can't take change whining that their niche is going away.
Good riddance to those pesky writing implements, I say.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I'd really be concerned if our spelling and math were slipping. Um, hold on a minute....
is still set up with a 'witness signature' line so that teh illiterate filling out the form can get away with a simple 'x'.
What once was a relic from our past is now the wave of the future.
But there are still enough things that you have to write by hand that keep people in good practice in regards to printing.
However, most people are terrible with cursive, unless they write their letters.
The only time I use cursive is to sign my signature, and when I had to write a several sentence statement declaring that I consented to blah blah blah, it took me forever.
But so what? When I can type at 80 to 100 words per minute, why the fuck would I want to write? If I had a lap-top, I'd take my notes on it (in fact, with 1GHz laptops selling under $300, I'm probably going to buy one soon).
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
Sorry, but some things should fade into antiquity, and cursive writing is one of them. Someone please explain why kids not knowing how to write cursive is a Bad Thing(tm).
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
It takes much longer than typing (I can type 70WPM, but I bet I can't write in cursive at even 15-20 WPM.) For me it's about what is more efficient. With typing I can at least know that if I hand someone a typed note they will understand it, while if I hand them a hasitly written postit I have to sit there and make sure they can understand what I wrote.
(My handwriting was terrible even before I started working on computers...)
Do you Gentoo!?
I think I a victim of this, not that I care. I hope children in the next few generations wont even need to write anything on paper. Saving millions of trees a year.
I think this is great. Come on, writing is sooo 10th Century!
There is no god
For communication purposes isn't it better if everyone can read and understand what you are saying. If a typed letter does that, then all the better.
But as far as actually writing your own notes, one should still be able to write on paper and be able to understand their own handwriting. I don't see the art of physically writing going away anytime soon.
And in related news, experts at the United States Center for Equestrian Activities have grown increasingly concerned that the automobile will cause a sharp reduction in the horse riding skills of the average American.
There doesn't really seem to be a practical use for cursive. I learned it in elementary school, and can still read it, but remembering how some of the capital letters are written is beyond me.
It seems more difficult to read handwritten papers that are written with cursive. I guess I never really saw a speed advantage in cursive, and add the fact that I can type much faster on the keyboard than I can write by hand, this hardly seems like a surprise.
I can't really say I feel my education would have been compromised if cursive had been left out.
I wasn't able to write cursive BEFORE personal computers...and it hasn't gotten better with age!
I mean they restrict people to using keyboards.
As a result, the ascii art just doesn't compare to something written on my newton.
Ive never ever used cursive. EVER. Papers are typed, or if handwritten they are printed. Letters? Typed. Cursive is useless. Am I clueless, or what exactly is the use?
Evolve or die. Im sorry your penmanship organization is now going to be useless. Continue to teach the kids to print, that won't be going away all too soon.
In fact, one of the next revolutions in comp use is handwriting recognition.
Anyways, my point is. Cursive is useless. I know no one who actually uses it, in a professional common manner. NOT writing letters, notes. Something that REQUIRES it. Or is BETTERED by it.
if tablet pc's come more into the picture they may write even better. I know I'm learning how to write better everyday. My skills were slightly lacking having typed all day long, but I have become better at writing again using my tablet pc.
Cursive is outdated anyway. The real bonus with it is the ability to write clearly, quickly... but typing is faster and more legible (and the output is almost universally more useful than paper). Let it die, I won't mounn it at all.
My handwriting, as it happens to be, really consists of printing-without-lifting-the-pencil anyway. Nobody shapes their cursive letters the same as anyone else anyway. Let it die!
Cursive is:
a) hard to learn,
b) hard to use, and
c) (usually) hard to read.
It looks nice, sure, but how many people do you see out bemoaning the loss of caligraphy? (Which looks a lot better than cursive IMO)
It's good for signatures and the occasional fancy invitation and such but that's about it.
I can't write cursive as it is, and that has nothing to do with typing. There's simply no point in it! It was a big scam when they taught it to us to begin with... aside from signing my name, I never need the thing.
Long live print! Long live typing!
...writing in cursive, and still do.
Printing - no problem... fast and even readable by others.
Mind you, for my age group - I was an early adopter of the keyboard... and could type 120 wpm in high-school...
BlackNova Traders
"Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting.""
And the telephone has ruined people's ability to write a letter, and mail it.
So fancy hand writing is a lost art, big deal. All you need is print anyways. Leave cursive up to the artsy folks and hand writing hobbyists. *Handwriting is dying.
Studies have found that kids today can't even point to a sliderule in a room, let alone use one.
Cursive isn't important, and if it died, we would be none the poorer for it.
....unless we buy all our kids PDA's!
With Graffitti and Graffitti (sp?)II we can restore the handwriting prowess of our nations's youth today!
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
to avoid the "not even able to hold a pencil", incorporate chopstick usage into the kid's diet.
If you're unfamiliar with chopsticks, one of the two sticks is held essentially the same as a pencil. Getting decent with chopsticks uses some of the same dexerity skills, and if kid's aren't writing much on paper, at least it'll keep them from being completely atrophied in this regard.
just a thought...
.
Last I checked, almost every elementary school, at least in the US, requires handwriting classes, and every school all the way up to university requires at least some handwritten homework or exams. It's not hard to learn cursive, and even harder to forget it.
That said, cursive looks nice and all, but it's a lot more difficult to read it than it is to read plain print. I still remember my cursive (for thank you notes and letters to grandparents, etc.) but when writing anything by hand I just use print -- and of course it's not as if I never need to write anything. A sticky note on my alarm clock is much more useful than a sticky note on my computer desktop. Either way, I don't think there's going to be a mass exodus away from use of the pencil anytime soon.
-- shayborg
There's nothing wrong with losing the ability to write in cursive. It is difficult to read and the only reasons later in life to use it is for taking notes, writing checks, and signing your name. I have to think for a minute when writing checks but I don't consider this a bad thing.
I can handle the none cursive thing, Maybe IM and
text messaging will keep them from talking!
Did people panic when riding horseback became a generally lost art?
Religion is the opium of the people. Evolution is the opium of scientists.
I'm 32 now, but I was required to turn in all assignments in the 4th grade in cursive. As soon as 4th grade was over, I stopped, as it took me 3-4 times longer to write in cursive than in plain text. My signature is all that remains, and I'd have to think long and hard about how to write in script using letters that aren't in my name.
It was two more years before we got the TI 99/4A at home, so they can't blame the computer for me.
"Common Sense Ain't" -Unknown
Is it that big of a deal if a child cannot write in cursive?
[n8.r0n] http://petesweb.spymac.net/
Besides, handwriting survived the introduction of the typewriter...
What concerns me is not that typing is becoming more popular, but that kids are learning to write on the Internet, to the point where kids hand in assignments with 'internet shorthand' in them, LOL. Wait, not LOL. WTF.
dinosaur comics
I'm 34 and have been using keyboards since approximately 1983. Since leaving secondary education my hand muscles have been easily tired by writing with a pen. A 2000 word essay during my Engineering degree was torture, not because of the composition, but because of the manual effort of using a pen. Meanwhile many times that many words in FORTRAN were comfortably produced and submitted electronically for my final-year project, in 1989.
I've been telling people my handwriting is bad because it hurts to use a pen, since I'm used to typing, for more than 15 years.
This is OLD news.
Chris
The only thing you need cursive for is to sign your paycheck.
TODO: Insert witty sig
In the future when the power goes off, written history will go with it.
Okay, so kids are soon not going to be able to write cursive. So what? Very few kids these days know how to use a calligraphy pen properly, yet these were mandatory while I was in grade school (1978 on, in England). And you know what, I don't care. While I can still write using my calligraphy pen (and that means using it properly, writing in a typeface suited to it), I don't. It is, for me, a dead art. There's no call for it, not for me in my day-to-day life. Same, I suspect, with cursive writing.
So yeah, maybe it will die out. But the question really is should we care?
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
From the article:
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"
I find this attitude strange. I have years of old e-mails saved. I cherish many of them, and rereading them brings back memories. I have the first e-mails I got from my girlfriend (going to be my wife soon) and they're saved in my USB keychain. (We met online, too!)
I know that's hokey, sentimental stuff, but it's true. You can have an emotional attachment to an e-mail. In the end, it's not the media, but (to coin a cliche) it's the thought that counts.
Yeah yeah yeah, cursive is dying, kids can't print.
Whatever.
I'm still looking for the Ask Slashdot "How old should my child be before I teach her Grafitti(tm)?"
--
If writing is actually not being used enough so that kids can't write, why do we need it? And cursive in the first place isn't that great of an idea. Go read someone else's printed writing. Now go try to read their cursive. Hard, isn't it? It seems to me that if cursive is needed, it will still be learned, and if it isn't needed, you'll just forget it anyway. I actually don't use cursive anymore except for my signature. I don't need it, and nobody else can read it anyway.
The same predicitions could have probably been made when telephones phones became ubiquitous and letter writing was being offset by phone calls.
You know, this is probably the first time I've really even thought much about cursive since graduating highschool, admittedly only 6 years ago.
But it's amazing how little use there is for it in the real world. I sit down and try to find a reason to use it, and it seems to be just tradition and nothing more. A relic handed down simply because those who came before us liked it.
I would ask, why is the demise of cursive even really a negative thing?
Cursive is hard to read anyway. Why should we have more than one form of written language?
I guess I represent the category this story mentions. I am 27, grew up using QWERTY more than any pen, and never learned cursive in school. I also did not learn times tables since I had a calculator by thw way. Additionally, I can't walk very far without getting tired because of cars.
And this is a bad thing why?
I started using a computer about mid high school. The same semester I took a six week typing class. I have been using the keyboard about 70 WPM ever since.
I typed everything for school that used to require handwriting. When I got into college, I did the same, but I used a computer unlike most students who used a typewriter.
Now here we are in the 21st century and I can't handwrite worth a crap. I use a Palm OS device with graffiti regularly with decent accuracy. I can sign my name. I can block-print reasonably fast.
But I haven't been able to write cursive since, say, about 1980. Do you know how much impact this has had on my life?
About zip.
We used to require people to know how to take square roots by hand, do long division, or use a slide rule. We don't require these skills anymore? Pocket calculators are everywhere, ubiqutious and disposable. (Not that I don't think it is important to get the basic concepts in grade school.) My point is that what once might have been an important skill may not be in the future.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
"it's not uncommon for kids to type 20-30 WPM by the time they leave elementary school"
Bah, I can type way faster than that. At least 40 WPM.
Kids are slow. They're probably dumb too.
Yea, and I'll bet most kids today can read or write shorthand either.
I remember going to a special remedial handwriting class when I was in elementary school. My teacher finally gave up and taught me how to type.
Particularly in 6th grade, cursive was heralded as "the Script of God" (I'm paraphrashing). All assignments in sixth grade had to be turned in in cursive to "prepare" us for junior high and high school, where, supposedly, teachers' expectations were similar. Wa-bam, we hit junior high, and I haven't used cursive since. Incidentally, I now take the very laptop I'm writing this on to school as a faster, neater method of taking notes. (high school, not college)
-insert a witty something-
When I entered the public school ranks at grade 3, I was already behind in handwriting, and was never able to catch up. I can type at a sustained 90+WPM now with no errors, while I can only write by hand at something around 15-20 WPM - much slower than I can think. Additionally, since I pretty much had to teach myself to use a pencil, I apparently use it in a bad way and get painful hand cramps after an hour of writing.
As more and more kids are learning to type and word process earlier (and as more schools insist on typed reports and/or have computers in the classroom) it seems quite apparent that handwriting skills will decline.
So, what's the problem with this? I can still write well enough to take notes for my own purposes, and if I'm writing something for someone else, I'm going to type it up (and email it, or even just write up a memo). I don't necessarily see the decline of handwriting as a horrible tragedy, simply a shift to new methods - consider, calligraphy died out years ago (except among artists) and no one shed a tear.
-T
I'm not surprised. Cursive writing was for people in a hurry. Now we have a better method. And now the so-called Master Penmen are upset that their little hobby will be archived next to the hurricane oil lamp and the carrier pidgeon. I bet the society of telegraph engineers were very upset about the telephone as well, but there's still a few out there using it.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
Its not that handwriting is becoming sloppy, its just that more people are employing complex encrytion algorithms when writing. Doctor and professors have been doing this for years.
You're worried about DRM? It's already here...
Handwriting just hasn't been the same since Quill pens were replaced. Nobody knows how to trim a quill pen anymore.
A great loss.
just wait until college and they get in a class with a professor who teaches at 5,000 words per minute.. they'll learn how to write.. i know I did.. and quickly!
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
In one hundred years when computers are starting to be increasingly controlled by brains waves, some guy in an obscure area of study will lament that people can't properly pronounce words. Such is progress.
So what? I don't know how to use a buggy whip either. Who cares?
(The answer is of course people who are stuck in the past. Nobody is stopping them from continuing to use pencils, so I'm not sure why they are complaining.)
And since when is handwriting 'a uniquely American form of expression"?
You can always send your emails using a cursive script, if you want it to look pretty.
I'm 29, and I graduated from highschool in 1991. I was taught forcibly to write cursive, because computers were not yet so pervasive as they are now.
I could never write legibly.
Frankly, I think people are just grasping for excuses. Now, we have people using computers as the reason for illegible writing. What was it before computers were so common? Laziness? Lack of talent? Why aren't those still the reasons?
I observe that the more I type, the poorer my writing gets.
I am not sure why this is such a horrible thing. Sure, we need to write things down all the time, but I typically just 'print' my notes. Even without computers, most people's handwriting is so different that it's just easier to use the less stylized printing.
I am afraid that this is just a case of 'things ain't the way they used to be' syndrome. Virtually all the old uses of cursive are gone, other than putting down your signature.
Through all of college, I never once had a professor who would even take typewritten, much less handwritten assignments. All 'official' forms (taxes, DMV, job applications, etc.) are printed anyway. Other than aesthetics, I cannot think of why it is a bad thing to lose this style...
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
This also impacts children's ability to inscribe clay and wax tablets, use quills and ink, make wood cuttings, a set movable type.
A few decades isn't soon enough. Cursive should be relegated to the history books along with Old English.
Ok, we need to know how to write, but I just don't think writing neatly is as critical a skill as it once was. I suspect hand writing is going to pretty much dissapear eventually. Between text messaging, IM, etc, there just isn't much need. Not many people write actual letters anymore, it's all email. Prescriptions are slowly being written on computer. Most every school requires papers to be types or even laser printed. And this list goes on. When was the last time you wrote more than a paragraph by hand?
I'm 29 and the idea of a school leaver not being able to write at a level beyond printing is quite worrying. In my day (oh God I feel old now) if our handwriting was not up to scratch (pun not intended) we were given extra lessons to improve it (hence my rather nice italic script as opposed to my one-time scrawl).
:(
No doubt extra lessons to teach handwriting would be seen as an abuse of Human Rights or something nowadays
Quentin and Tammy went to the zoo on Sunday.
I got hardcore into computers when I was in 6th grade. I couldn't write the whole cursive alphabet if my life depended on it. But to tell you the truth, I really don't see a problem with it. Cursive is hard to read, especially when a person changes it to fit their "personality". All forms require you to write in "Print" form. And if your writing something professional it might as well be printed off of the computer. The only place I see cursive losing is in personal letters back and forth.. But that's exactly what the point of email is, to rid ourselves of paying for stamps and having slow communication. This is not a bad thing!
Just prepend a proper tag. :)
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
Cursive is just another way of putting ideas down on paper.
It's cultural evolution -- cursive is obviously inferior for our current needs (ever try OCR'ing cursive?), and is losing its relevance.
It was originally designed as a faster form of writing by hand. We now have a faster form of writing by hand -- typing. As time goes on, just about everyone who does any form of communication will type more and write less, and the average length of hand-written messages and letters will decrease.
And for many languages (in particular those using a non-Western character set), there's no such thing as cursive anyway. Therefore, cursive can't be that important to a well-educated and literate society.
For everyday life, teaching third graders Palm Graffiti would probably be more useful than cursive.
"Computers are better," the 9-year-old says, blonde pony tail bobbing behind her. "With typing, you don't have to erase when you make a mistake. You just hit delete, so it's a lot easier."
Such attitudes are worrying to a growing number of parents, educators and historians, who fear that computers are speeding the demise of a uniquely American form of expression. Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail, instant messages and other electronic communication, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.
Yes, because we all know erasing misspellings is unique to Americans. Most people I know are too lazy to erase and end up crossing errors out, including me. Must not be one of the unique
"International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting"
Wow... there is such an organization? Oh man, I thought that I was a dork...
The last time I used cursive was taking the SATs. I had to copy the honor pledge in cursive and sign it.
I ended up just printing it and going back and connecting the letters randomly because it was so much faster and looked plausable enough anyways -- better than taking the time to try and write proper cursive.
Even my signature is *barely* cursive...only about half of the letters are real "cursive" letters, and maybe 2-3 of the connections are done properly. And I don't even have a very long name...it's 8 letters total in my signature, first AND last names.
Elementry schools don't need computers in every classroom, they can have a shared computer lab. Your supposed to learn the basic's, such as reading, writing, how to do math with your head. Then when you get into junoir high and highschool you can do more with computers. Besides that, Computers are going change so much that by the time a elementry student gets into junoirhigh and highschool the computers are going to change so much that what computer knowlegde they gained in elementry isn't going to be much of a use. yah yah don't worry kid's can keep up with computers. This may of sound like a rant or over dramatic. But it does provide a point.
a guy (and a whole association of people) that will be out of jobs (or at least no longer have some B.S. association that I'm sure someone throws some funding at). I mean comon the "International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting." What in the world does this body of people do?
Disclaimer: No, I didn't read the article, I'm just ranting.
I can't say I'm surprised such observations can be made. Nor am I upset about it. People will gain the skills they require, and if being able to write by hand legibly isn't a must we simply won't be very good at it. I expect that making words stick will be done by other methods than pencil and paper in the future, and the ability to write will be no more a requirement than it is for us to manouver a horse today.
Perhaps in a few decades writing by hand will be more of an art-form than something everyone needs to do.
At my Montessori gradeschool, we learned "D'Nealian" style handwriting. It's printing with most of the benefits of cursive. If you write it faster, it becomes cursive, more or less.
We never learned any other way. That means that even though I handwrite almost nothing, when I do pick up a pen and paper, it's legible and fast.
This dude is just upset that no one wants to join his stupid club.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Being in elementary school and typing at 20-30 WPM is somewhat sad! I'm in 7th grade and type somewhere around 100, more if I know exactly what I want to type. :(
But I can't type this fast because of those stupid slashdot time minimums
Well, thats troll protection for ya....
Hystory is littered with changes in communication methods and styles. Perhaps it is time.
;^)
I never learned to write in cursive, and didn't have a computer to distract me until after leaving High school. I wouldn't blame drops in handwriting trends entirely on computers. Crappy education systems are probably equally responsable.
Of course, I can't type worth a damn either, so I am screwed
My old sig was REALLY stoopid.
When I was a child, my handwriting was always horrible.
When I learned cursive, my examples were never chosen as good examples (you can imagine what that did to my self-esteem).
After I started using a computer on a regular basis (13 years old or so), my handwriting turned into half cursive, have printed chicken scratches.
Now I don't like writing anything. It feels too foreign to write a note by hand instead of doing it with a keyboard.
This idea that good handwriting would be threatened in the future occurred to me years ago, mostly because I'm a prime example of this phenomenon.
"It's a tarp!" -- Dyslexic Admiral Ackbar
Cursive sucks :p
Co-workers are often surprised when they come to my desk, and ask to use a pen, only to find out that I don't have one ... anywhere. Pen and ink certainly have their place (diagrams, drawings, charts, maps, brainstorming) but I can do everything I ned to do at work without resorting to handwriting. I took a note pad to a coffee shop to jot down some notes a while back, and my hand got sore after a few pages. I'm just not used to it anymore.
I'm a computer tech at an elementary school. They start the kids learning computers and typing in kindergarten (once a week). I've seen some of the 3rd graders that can easily type 40-50 wpm. So it's no surpirse that cursive could be erased with the kids so used to technology. I'm not sure how much writing they do in the classrooms, but most kids have typing twice per week starting in first grade. Personally I only use cursive for signing things, other than that I only print.
Man, I haven't even tried to write in cursive since middle school! In high-school and college I were obligated to turn in papers either printed or on disk. I graduated from just in 93 just before the interent craze but kids now are turning in papers via email. So I guess me question is: So what?!!
"There is always an easy solution to every human problem -neat, plausible, and wrong." - H. L. Mencken
I read this article (yeah, yeah, I know we're not supposed to actually read the articles here on slashdot before commenting) to see what possible reasons people were coming up with for why abadoning cursive was a tragedy. None of them really struck me as important. Sure, the ability to write things with pen/pencil and paper is important but I always use printing for that. I never write myself notes in cursive. The article goes on to say that cursive is important for beautiful handwritten letters. Bullshit. For me, reading cursive actually takes me longer than reading printed text even handwritten printed text so I prefer to receive letters and memos printed rather than in script. And if I want to hand write a letter, I always use print. If I want something beautiful, I'll use a word processor. And if it needs to be fancy, I'll use a script typeface!
As my subject line says, the important things in life will be kept and those that are useless will be discarded. It's the natural order of things. We're expecting our kids to learn more and more. I certainly wasn't required to learn computer skill stuff in third grade (don't get me started on computers in the classroom -- suffice to say that I'm not a fan). It's only natural that something is going to have to get dropped to make room for all this new stuff. Until I hear a very strong case for why abondoning cursive will have a profoundly negative effect on society, I'm not going to shed any tears over this.
GMD
watch this
How would keyboard usage cause somebody to have bad penmanship? All I could see is that we don't handwrite as much as we used to - that doesn't mean that keyboards RUIN our penmanship - it just means that we don't fully develop our handwriting skills.
Even so, in High School, most of my work is still handwritten. Sure, formal papers are typed, but that just makes the job of the student (and teacher) much easier.
As for cursive, I don't really see the importance of it. I was taught it in elementary and early middle school. After that, I was required to submit work in cursive for a while, then told to revert back to print - easier for teachers to read. If they're going to force it upon us, they may as well have been persistent.
Now, I can write however I want, but being that I have awful dexterity and coordination (on top of being left-handed), I choose to write in print.
Really, why is cursive all that important? Sure, it demonstrates refinement, etc, but it's been on the decline LONG before the internet became popular.
The article is simply drivel coming from narrow-minded teachers and over-concerned parents who fear change. Personally, I fear those who fear change.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I've found that in this "globalized" economy, clearly written English is extremely important to communicate with English-as-n > 1-language speakers. The block style eliminates confusion between letters; the letters are the same as those on a typewriter.
Suffice it to say that I think cursive is pretty useless.
And I don't mean your signature either, which is bastardized cursive, yes, but it doesn't have to be.
IRS Tax Forms, Master Business Applications, Job applications.. They all say "Please print legibly"
I can't even remember how to write in cursive.. Hell, I can't write my name is cursive in a "nice way", I just know how I sign my signature.
My two cents..
- Joel
I doubt cursive will die, just as calligraphy didn't really "die"... it will just be worth a ton of money, cause no one will be able to do it. Pretty soon, no kids will learn to do anything at school, and so even talking will probably carry a premium. :) YAY! I learned to write cursive, and it hurt my hands a lot, but after years of art training and now a degree in art, I find cursive to be quite simple. Some people will keep it alive for diplomas, etc.
stuff |
This comes down to a battle between paper and the physical vs. fonts and the digital. In every practical sense, paper should be dead. Resource costs alone, for example, should have greatly tightened the noosed about the neck of this obsolete form of communication.
The article contends that a pen is readily available and doesn't require batteries. However, a pen is not a resource of replenishable means. In other words, modern pens run out of ink, much as batteries run out of "juice". However, most batteries are rechargable. A PDA is also readily available.
Anyhow, that's my brief two cents. Death to paper.
I don't even know why we HAVE cursive. I learned it because we *had* to in the 4th grade. from 5th on - it was back to printing, and like most others eventually I sort of merged the 2 (basically, sloppy printing).
Of all the things we're losing in these last few/coming few decades... a handwriting style seems rediculous to bitch about. How about the ozone, various undiscovered plant/animal species, fair use rights, privacy rights, family time, moral values, role models, (on and on).
I'm not saying I do bitch about any of that either, but come on... pick something worthy of your time if you *have* to complain.
no comment
In school, my teacher affectionately likened my penmanship to "a drunken spider lurching across the page".
That was before I owned a computer.
"The number of Unix installations has grown to ten, with more expected." (Unix Programmer's Manual, 2nd ed.; june 1972)
Argh, I tried to write cursive writing using Ascii characters, and I encounted the lameless filter!
Reason: Please use fewer 'junk' characters.
Yeah, that's right, cursive is junk.
One could bewail how no one can cut a nib on a quill anymore, or mix ink... but they're an obsolete skills for all but calligraphers. Methods of writing change over time.
/.) we love to herald in progress, but I am a skeptic. How technologically capable are most students anyway? And if they can't type, will they forget how to write?
I wonder, however, how proficient youngsters *really* are on the keyboard. Watching university students in the US hunt and peck to enter their library searches makes me seriously doubt it.
Nor have I been terribly impressed by their inability to "program" their word processors to do esoteric tasks such as numbering pages or (gasp!) inserting footnotes. As a technophilic society (at least here on
Now, you want me to start over again and teach my son cursive??? Why?
Few people know how to write cursive anymore. Even adults have mostly forgotten and write some kind of odd mix of cursive and printed. That didn't start with computers, it started with those "please print and write one letter per box" forms.
Cursive was never designed for the modern world anyway--it combines being hard to read with being slow to write. It was designed by artists for appearance. Think of it as 19th century web design. It's completely obsolete.
Finally, I started typing as a teenager, and the instructor couldn't slow me down. I do 40+ wpm with bursts way above that. Heck, when I learned morse code it was faster than cursive! And when I learned block lettering in drafting -- fast, economical and legibile -- I stopped doing cursive except for my signature, which is still too %^$@ slow!
We should be happy that, in the near future, no child will be hamstrung and tortured by this horse-and-buggy leftover from the days of one-room schools...
...-.-
That's funny. Is the reverse true? Do people that can properly hold pencils mash cell phone keypads, pull keys off keyboards, and gnaw on joysticks?
Bah. I recall some similar, "frightening" studies involving kids being unable to tie their shoes (or learn knots in general) due to the popularity of this "Velcro" stuff on shoes.
As near as I can tell, Civilization hasn't collapsed yet. Screw handwriting.
But it is easier to read something someone has printed out after having typed it up on a keyboard rather than trying to figure out whether they make i's look like e's or l's. If I need a mathematical notation I can just add it with my wacom tablet.
I still do handwriting, though, just never for anything other than note-taking. My handwriting is done in such a way that I can understand it just fine. I use symbols here and there that nobody really knows what they mean, but let me understand what I was thinking at that time. I always rework my homework to pdf and print as often as I can.
Personally, I have a sense of apathy toward losing cursive. As long as I can sign my name that's all the cursive I'll ever do in my lifetime.
With the advent of mechanical/disposable pens, the skill required to use quills and ink wells is not tought in handwriting class anymore.
Point being, pens are tools to convey our thoughts and feelings. They are also being replaced by the personal computer.
Maybe it's just me, but who really cares if people can't handwrite? I learned handwriting in elementary school too, but I've never used it since then. I think that speaks for how useful it is. If I want something to look nice, I type it and do layout with desktop publishing programs. Other times, I just want to write fast and legibly, and I highly doubt writing my calculus or physics notes in handwriting would help with either. (Besides, how do you handwrite greek letters?). My writing is pretty much a fusion of handwriting and printing anyways (read: scribbling), hopefully with benefits of both. The only possibly useful application for handwriting I see is writing English/History/etc essays on the spot, without a word processor, but I did do fine writing these in my own style of writing, without running into time or legibility issues.
Cursive serves little to no purpose. It increases the error rates of handwritten notes, and is slower then block lettering once you get good at the later.
When people use cursive in a work setting it is unprofessional.
Computers are not going away. We are evolving. I am 39 nine years old and the only thing that I write is checks or sign my name on a document. Handwriting will go the way of drafting and shorthand.
It would definitely be a shame for people to miss out on a lot of history. A lot of works (written in English nonetheless) were written in cursive and our kids won't have any idea what they're reading. It will all be Greek to them. Granted I don't write in cursive much either, unless I'm writing a nice letter to someone, but the inability to read it would be quite detrimental.
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
buh? uniquely american? surely cursive script wasn t invented here? do other countries have cursive handwriting?
Besides, I can print much faster than I was ever able to write.
Meh.
From the article: Such attitudes are worrying to a growing number of parents, educators and historians, who fear that computers are speeding the demise of a uniquely American form of expression.
Since when was writing stuff on paper a uniquely American form of expression?
IMHO cursive is ugly. I don't like looking at it and I'm glad I hardly ever see it. I actually write things on paper. Sometimes I make it look nice, but I don't use no stinking cursive. Blech.
i don't like my old sig.
I hardly use cursive, if at all. Most assignments and written items are printed, to increase legibility.
What really bothers me, though, is the fact that kids are starting to use net speak in their school assignments. '4' instead of 'for', 'u' for 'you'... the usual sights of an AIM conversation are moving to formal, typed essays.
As opposed to changing the method of writing (cursive to typed), AIM speak is completely mutilating the language. Some argue that it's an evolution of the language; I find it stupid and lazy.
Not many students care about their essays, but using AIM speak is worse than using slang, which is also too common.
Not sure how the bank will like you typing your signature or even the value. Handwriting is becoming a lost art that should still be taught and practiced. A generation of kids who can't even legibly print their own name is pathetic. Its really that difficult?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
The former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting says keyboards, joysticks and cell phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly.
Why is "holding a pencil properly" such a sacred thing? What about holding a quill properly???
Anyway, how about we start teaching a language (like written Chinese) so that American elementary kids don't lose manual dexterity skills?
I guess most children are unable to cut letters into wood, or to write into stone. And, do you care? So why should you care when children are not able to paint letters with tink on mashed wood?
I can't write cursive anymore either, and it was required of us all through grammer school. I know how, but it's been so long that even I have trouble reading it. If it's necessary to write, I have to print everything other than my signature, which is unreadable anyway.
I don't know that this is really a problem.
IAMPETH?? Maybe I.AM.PaTHetic??
The only time I ever use cursive is for my signature. I would imagine that in many cases a cursive signature is more difficult to forge than a printed signature. Of course, with biometrics, digital identities, etc... signatures may also become a thing of the past.
Let's just hope postmen will remain capable of reading cursive... Otherwise, millions of bride-to-be will be in for a rather lonely wedding with all the wedding invites being delivered to wrong addresses.
I'm sure the groom won't mind as much. His frat brothers will make their way to the wedding regardless of the invite.
I'm 25, and I stopped using cursive back in high school. Printing is so much neater, and it can be just as personalized as cursive.
Obviously, some sort of writing-by-hand is still a necessary skill. If you're trying to take notes in class or a presentation which include diagrams, tables, complex equations, etc., I haven't found a computer interface that can match a pen and paper for speed and expressiveness. And post-it notes will always be around (how many times have you seen one stuck to a computer screen?). The teacher's point about handwritten letters being much more meaningful is a good one.
But bad handwriting isn't some new problem that has been introduced by widespread computer use. Worsened, perhaps, but I have ancient joke collection books that have the one about a doctor's prescription note being used for its intended purpose, then as a train pass for a year, and finally played on the violin.
There are plenty of people that just weren't going to have good handwriting anyway, and then there are people like my friend's father, who labels floppies using careful Medieval calligraphy (inkwell and all, IIRC). It will continue to be like that. The sort of people who send handwritten letters because they mean more will continue to do so.
Writing should and doubtless will still be taught, but I don't think it's a problem if it's slightly de-emphasized in favor of keyboarding skills, which are more relevant. When I was in elementary school, no one was typing their papers, but now almost everyone is (in this part of the U.S., anyway). The bulk of communications will probably be done via a keyboard (or some newer device) rather than handwriting. And not without reason; some of the kids' quotes in that article are dead on. Rough drafts in pencil (and rewriting twice in ink) royally sucked.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
I don't think the emphasis should be on cursive, so much as it should be on legibility. Althought cursive is very elegant and looks pretty on paper, is it really that much more effective at conveying a written message? Cursive seems to be taught at a young age, and then not reinforced. I remember learning and becoming proficient at writing cursive in the second and third grade, but after that, I was never really required to use it. Back in April, I was taking the SAT's and found that there was a portion which required each test taker to copy a written statement in cursive explaining how one would not cheat. Afterwards, many of my peers and I argued this was the hardest part of the test. Cursive seems to me to be quite formal, yet very archaic. Personally, I can read a statement written in legible print just as well as I can read one written in cursive. Is cursive something that is really worth making this big a deal over? Probably not, seeing as how it is the teachers that require papers to be turned in typed on a computer. Anyway, everything I just said is most likely biased because the thought of writing in cursive causes my hand to cramp up.
Int I = Text
if I = Pencil;
return false;
if I = Keyboard;
return true;
else die;
Ave Molech Setting
The younger sister of one of my friends is in 9th grade and it has recently become apparent to us that she doesn't even know how to write a lower-case "B". She sent her sister a hand-written letter a few weeks ago for her birthday and every letter "B" in the entire note was written as "B" and not "b"... even if it was in the middle of a word. (Example: "Ben asked aBout your Birthday...")
Scary stuff. And to think that months ago I was complaining that kids now-a-days don't even know how to use a rotary phone.
Karma: NaN
It seems like we have a lot of handwriting detractors. I wonder how many geeks/nerds write love-letters using computers; could there be a correlation btwn.... Nothing says I wanna fuck u desparately like 12-point Courier font.
Did anyone ever notice girls seem to be more likely to write in cursive?
I can still write in cursive, but I haven't had a reason to use it since 7th grade. And since everyone has their own little variation of it, it's a pain in the ass to read (i.e. professors who write comments on papers, that take 15 minutes to decipher).
As long as kids can PRINT the letters, who cares if they can write cursive or not?
I was always told that writing cursive is faster than printing, which I now hear has been pretty much disproven. Most people will do a form of cursive-ish writing when printing something quickly, and it's faster because they aren't tied down by a bunch of meaningless codified rules that tell them what's fastest for them to write.
Cursive is a moronic system. I've always hated it. The sooner it's abolished from everything except the hobbiest's view, the better.
Actually, I'm not really sure what a capitla 'Q' looks like. If I had to figure it out, I'd probably go get a cursive font and type 'Q' and see what it did.
It looks, illogically enough, like a '2'.
who cares if kids can't write in cursive?
It's true that, after grade school, students pretty much adopt their own style of handwriting, which tends to be an efficient mix of print and cursive (rather like the "print cursive" mentioned in the article, I imagine, except far more improvised). I say "efficient" because, as experience has shown, neither pure print nor pure cursive is the most efficient way for writing anything longhand. People tend to write quickly; if either print or cursive were the path to rapidity, they'd be commonly used, don't you think? We do our "print cursives" because our brains have told our hands without us realizing it that this is the quickest way of getting stuff written down.
But the reason people can even read each others' impromptu scrawls (doctors excepted) is because all those "print cursives" have their basis in common foundations: regular print and the Palmer Method. We take the gold standards of penmanship and unconsciously adopt them over many years to whatever speed needs arise--but the standards had to be in place first.
The coolest voice ever.
My messy handwriting is actually an encryption method to stop people from copying my work!!
Now if I could only teach my profs to decrypt it...
I stole this Sig
Nuff said.
All this just because kids named "Johnny" have poor cursive?
And I'm not even talking about cursive. I mean ordinary printing. I type virtually everything, and have for about 15 years now - and shortly after I learned Palm Graffiti for my III in '98 or so, I found I started making my printed letters like Palm graffiti - and now, I can really barely read my own writing. Writing legibly takes TREMENDOUS effort, and it's so gawdawfully slow.
I look back at high school papers I wrote by hand, and I can barely believe how far I've fallen in 20 years. Handwriting is a long-lost art, for me.
-- http://frobnosticate.com
I just set my font to "Lucida Handwriting" and it looks great.
I don't see what the big deal is.
Next up:
Sir John Wixley, former president of the International Association of Master Solar Timepiece Craftsmen,
bemoans the shortage of Certified Sundial Readers and Calibrators at this year's IAMSTC conference.
[...] computers are speeding the demise of a uniquely American form of expression [...]
Begging your pardon ? Cursive writing is "Uniquely American" ??
Ich werde nie wieder denken
I learned how to write back in 1990, way before the onset of IM's and the internet. Result? My handwriting is terrible and anyone who comes in contact with it lets me know. Therefore, this theory doesn't hold water with me.
educators don't get paid enough to care
Should they even care? I really fail to understand how this is a bad thing. I learned cursive in school but don't use it anymore, because I can type faster and print more far legibly... the only thing that I use cursive for is my signature. And I don't miss it one bit.
Students today need cursive to succeed in society about as much as I need Morse code to listen to NPR during drive time... They are both skills that will be kept up by small numbers of enthusiasts, and society at large will have only a passing knowledge of the subject, and will be no worse off for it...
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
Before pen and paper, what did you have? Rock and...well...rock. They sure as hell didn't use cursive back then. The typewriter/computer was the next logical step for the tools used to convey thoughts into a different form, as was the pen and paper. You sure don't see many people complaining that nobody knows how to chisel, do you? Sure, there are people that do it. It's their job, their hobby, etc. But odds are, they didn't raise a stink about it. Face it, cursive was a method used in the past which worked well for what it was needed. We just don't need it anymore.
Maybe in the future we should be using those handwrite type of fonts more. Than there would those geeky people than, that can write them manualy.
Look, look, he can write it without lifting his pen !!
ROFL cUr$1v3 r1+1|\|G $ux0r$ +x+|\|g r0x0rs ttfn
Yeah, right, like the downfall of CURSIVE HANDWRITING is the biggest problem that online communication causes. I know very good, very literate people who can't even find the shift key on their keyboard to capitalise the beginnings of sentences, never mind punctuate.
Copperplate handwriting went out of style in the 1920s, but there are still people who do it as a heritage art. Don't sweat it.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
15 years later, the shoes on the other foot. I only write in block letters when I'm forced to write at all. Cursive is strictly for my illegible signature, closer to signet stamp than english text. And my middle school teacher is blind as a bat from reading children's scribbling.
OSX has finally come along to replace the Amiga.
I went to Catholic school for ten years, forced to write in script. Like eating those disgusting communion wafers and wearing an awful school uniform, the mere thought of it brings up anger tempered by the relief that nobody will ever be able to force me to do it again.
How happy to read that the world is rising up against at least one of the three.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
I'm almost 30. I've been coding and generally dinking on computers since 3rd grade... 8 years old? My handwriting is pretty terrible. I don't remember how to "properly" do cursive anymore. Part of the reason my handwriting is so messy is because I try and write as fast as possible. I find it very distracting when there are delays between the formation of a thought and its recording.
I think people should know how to handwrite, but I don't think cursive still needs to be taught. They could better spend the time subjecting kids to cursive by investing that in their math, science, art, etc education!
Evolution: love it or leave it
The only times in the last few years I've had to write anything more than notes on a piece of paper has been exams... pretty much every other lengthy work has been typed.
I do find you lose the ability to write as fast or neat without practice, and that just makes you type more. My hands ache something chronic after three hours of writing in an exam, but I could type all day...
Phil
"Cattle Prods solve most of life's little problems."
My handwriting is horrible. Sometimes I cannot even read it. See, I'm left handed. That alone is no excuse, but I went through elementry school alternating between teachers who tried to teach me to write left handed and didn't know how, and teachers who tried to force me to be right handed.
:)
Good think I learned to type or I would be stuck waiting for voice->text technology to mature before I could get anything down on paper
Finkployd
This may sound like a scary fact at present time but basic handwriting will hopefully be replaced with graffiti once pda's with CDMA/wireless are cheap enough for kids to carry around instead of cellphones with digital cameras *shudder*.
Beyond the very few times writing in cursive is required, signatures being the only one I can think of, printing is as fast or faster and typing just plain leaves both in its dust.
I seem to recall the existence of cursive came about because of the writing devices of the time, ink well + stylus, in which writing using a style that didn't lift the stylus reduced drips and smudges, looking "pretty" was a side effect.
"The only thing you need cursive for is to sign your paycheck."
Hey! A few cursives and some expletives, with a gesture or two, comes in handy when you're getting a point across.
Use Blackadder font in Word, it does wonders for my writing ;)
Seriously though, handwriting is a technology and an art, it must be practiced to be improved and maintained. I would argue however that there is still a shred of hope for improving handwriting; through the growth of handwriting recognition software on pda's and tablet pcs. Ah, just makes me wax nostalgia at my (sometimes) tortorous handwriting classes in grade school. Do they even teach handwriting in school anymore? Albeit it was an English school, as in London England. IMO the only place where handwriting has a clear edge over computers is for taking notes at university lectures. Computers still can't handle imputing raw notes containing quickly drawn graphs, charts, doodles, mindmaps, and little doodles with any of the efficiency and elegence of a pen and paper. Long live handwriting!
And good riddance, I say. Cursive serves no purpose other than obfuscation. OSHA should have banned it years ago on account of eyestrain.
Script is only useful for fancy calligraphy, which should be left where it belongs, in art classes, and on wedding invitations. For normal communication, it's far too hard to read.
I learned cursive like everyone else and believed, just like everyone else that it was faster than printing.
;-)
My cursive was also nearly illegible to anyone but myself and, by the fifth grade I found I couldn't even read a lot of what I wrote.
Liking the style I saw on blueprints, I started writing like that (block caps). It was slow at first but I stayed with it b/c of the improvements in legibility - i.e. I could actually read notes I took in class.
Today, many years later, I can write in my block caps as fast as anyone who writes cursive and I've stylized a few letters here and there so anyone who knows me *knows* it is *my* handwriting. Additionally, everyone can read my handwriting very clearly.
The only reason I've ever been given for cursive is speed. If I can easily write block caps as fast as someone else can write cursive, this argument must be bunk.
End the tyrrany of bad cursive!
Something should be done! -DT
I think the more dangerous "lost" art is being able to do simple calculations in the head or by hand... With the adundance of PDAs, cell phones and laptops comes an easy access to calculators. However, there are some very tangible benefits to being able to calculate on the go or on a piece of paper...
"Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades."
Finally we get to put these deadbeats out of business.
I'll learn to write after WW-XVIII.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Chatspeak and cursive serve the same purpose: confusing the hell out of people with barely legible gibberish. So it's really just a new standard of illegibility.
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musings on politics and technol
The protypes of these kids are people like me. I got my first computer when I was ~6, could easily touch type before I left primary school, and can probably beat 50 WPM easily, even in C - let alone English. (Not including debugging time, regrettably.)
On the other hand I can write very fast and pretty accuratly as well. It takes me under 10 minutes to fill a side of A4 (~500 words or so) with words that make sense - a skill I _had_ to develop for exams. One of my economics A level papers required about 8 sides of answers in two hours. (That seriously kills your hands folks!) I was perfectly capable of writing in cursive before leaving primary school however, spending several hours a day playing with computers didn't make me forget what I had been taught.
If these kids can't write in cursive however, because they are too stupid to learn it or remember it, what can they possibly write that will be of any use?
At least with the proliferation of computers kids are _reading_ and practicing reading - a far more useful thing than writing. After all, if you can learn to read you can find a book that tells you how to write.
What shouldn't be allowed is the continuing trivialisation of computers - the idea that they are there for nothing but entertainment. There are people in this world who don't actually realise that the black box they use every day can be hacked to make it do far more interesting and fun things, to make it do what you want better or faster. Common perception of people who do hack around is that they are doing something wrong, not something right! This IMO is far more dangerous than any slip in percieved handwriting ability in children and corrected as soon as possible..
Beep beep.
As has been pointed out in many posts here, many skills and knowledges are dying out because they have outlived thier usefulness and/or have been superceded by modern technology.
This does not mean these skills don't have their place, only that people can get along just fine without them. How many people can't cook anything that doesn't have microwave instructions on the side of the box. Does this mean we don't need chefs?
Handwriting needs to be legible, but beyond that is irrelevant for most people. We will still have professional caligraphers, engravers, and so forth who will keep the art alive.
too bad they modded you troll. You're onto something there.
Even a cursory comparison between boys' handwriting and girls' shows that us males simply can't write well at all.
Michael Sull, a 54-year-old artist in Overland Park, Kan., says today's third graders have not developed proper forearm and hand musculature, seated posture or mental discipline.
Ahh....mmm no comment.
Cursive is good for one very good reason. You can't have a typing device everywhere you go. Cursive/script is great for writing a little faster than manuscript. Especially for writing notes in class, or in meetings. Typing while in a meeting situation can be considered rude in some places, though not all.
It does not solve writing script TOO fast and making garbage of what should look like script.
It doesn't solve the problem for those who write manuscript faster than script.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Worldwide cuneriform literacy down 99.999999999%!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
-BK
Chemical Blog
Fark. What's with all the weblog inbreeding? Even Metafilter occasionally has nothing better to do than troll slashdot's waters for the lame fish that can't swim away.
I also heard that because of washers and driers that people don't know how to hand wash clothes properly. Americans are losing a valuable artform, all because of technology!
I wonder if Asian kids are losing the ability to use chopsticks and are thus going hungry as a result.
What the hell is "uniquely American" about handwriting?
Music wants to be free.
I can see the day when QWERTY keyboard makers cry en mass about people not knowing how to use their keyboards because everyone has moved on (or backwards) the the more efficient DVORAK layout. Give me a break, there is a reason people don't use cursive anymore, it is inefficent and hard to read. No one uses cursive fonts because they are difficult to quickly dissiminate. While we are at it lets get rid of serif fonts too.
I myself have been using a computer every day sence the age of 14 I am now 26 and the only thing I can manage to write in cursive is my name and even that has been reduced to a my first and last initials. But for me its not a bad thing I always hated writing anyway.
Compair how long it takes a person to write a sentence (neatly) in cursive and in block letters. Cursive takes too damn long and if it isn't written neatly, it isn't very readable. Block letters are easy to read by other people and sometimes even computers. All text that we read in books are in block letters as well. The only time I write in cursive (and I can write it quite well thank you) is when I put my signature to paper. If they really wanted to teach our kids something, teach them shorthand instead.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
I trace the downfall of humanity to the death of cuneiform skillz. All that stabbing at the clay tablet with the stylus also released pent up aggression in little Jane and Johnny.
Good grief! The main motivation for teaching cursive writing is that it allows you to write faster, especially in real-time situations, like taking notes in class, or (when you get to be an adult) at a meeting or while receiving verbal instructions from your boss. It's closer to "regular" writing than short-hand, which is for the real pros. Sure, technology may be well on the way to replacing the need for cursive writing, but there's more to that than how many WPM kids can type; it's also a matter of whether they have a keyboard device with them in class that they can use (quietly) to take notes. For me, small PDA thumb-keyboards aren't fast enough, while full-size keyboard devices are too bulky and noisy and generally obtrusive.
Cursive? LMAO! That isn't the worst of it.
In addition to the basics, what about teaching time management? Goal-setting? Critical thinking? Concentration skills? Budgeting & investing?
These are important life skills that good parents would teach their kids--however, good parents are in very short supply and schools need to help kids develop important life skills before they get programmed into teenage morons living life on auto-pilot.
Z is the funnest letter to write! You don't know what you are missing out on. ;)
This sounds to me exactly the same as those predictions that paper, or even written language altogheter, would vanish because of computers. Truth is, people now read and write even more than before because of computers, and even though more information is stored digitally, proportionally speaking, the amount of information around is much greater because of computers and I wouldn't be surprised if printed matter increased as a result.
Cursive handwritting came to be for a reason: it is faster to use. Besides its use on paper, which seems to be here to stay, it will also be used on computers, once they are able to interpret it very easily.
If Johnny is playing video games and can't think, he's playing the wrong games. Most of the puzzles (believe it or not, many of the GTA3 missions actually boil down to a puzzle, rather than just shooting anything that moves) require some thought to figure out. Most of the games that are successful are difficult and require thought to figure out how to get through them, or to develop strategies.
Granted, much that you learn in games isn't directly applicable to daily life (when was the last time you had to jump over turtles to get to a princess?). Then again neither is most of what you learn in school, and I've had plenty of schooling to figure that out. The more important lesson is figuring out HOW to learn, and I believe video games can be very effective.
In most games, you are in some fantasy space. You're not bound by the rules of real life. It takes a while to figure out how things work. You learn how to adapt to new situations and unexpected obstacles.
In any case I haven't written in cursive (except when forced) since probably 5th grade. A 6th or 7th grade teacher suggest I should write in cursive, but she soon got over it. I didn't have a computer back then, but still I found printing to be much more readable than cursive, and quicker to write.
I definitely won't miss cursive writing if its gone by the time my kids will have had to learn it.
blog
I went to grade school in the early 70's. We had just gotten down the concept of printing when they decided to force cursive on us. I never recovered, and it shows in my handwriting even today.
As others have pointed out, we no longer teach quill-and-ink skills in grade school, nor do we teach claymaking and stick sharpening, how to cure hide so you can write on it with the juice of the berries you've collected, and a host of other communication skills that are no longer necessary.
I'm fairly confident that parents lamented the fact that their children would no longer need to learn how to use an inkwell when pencils and pens came out.
Is cursive pretty when done correctly? Sure it is. So is Calligraphy, Japenese, Chinese, and a host of other written languages. Does that mean we should be forcing it down children's throats when they have no useful need of it? No.
Note that I still think children should learn at least two languages, beginning in 1st grade, but as long as you have a kanji input device, and you know how to write up the letters with a pencil, there's no need to become a master of the art.
Sigh. There's so much I want to say here, and not enough time to say it.
Karma: Food Fight (Mostly affected by Date Plate).
In other news the advent of the automobile has ruined the average persons ability to ride a horse or drive a horse drawn buggy.
Pictures^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Film at 11.
First there were symbols on a cave -- pictures that represented what the catch of the day was. Then there were heiroglyphics -- a more elaborate group of pictures that when chained together told a story. Eventually we got to handwritten language exchanged through paper and ink. Printers then took writing to the masses
After all of this, we get to modern day computers where icons on a desktop represent actual programs installed on a machine. Now we've got Tablet PC's with digital ink. If I were you, I wouldn't be as worried about not knowing cursive handwriting than the fact that I don't know how to chisel pictures onto the next generation computing devices.
I remember the first time I was REQUIRED to type a paper rather than take the 'easy way out' by writing it.
They made their bed...
The work done today, at least the work shared with others, is almost 100% electronic or printed. The amount of handwriting I've done since middleschoole (mid 80's) to now has gone down and down. Why would we be concerned about the correctness of a form of writing that no one is going to use on a regular basis? The only time I can see anyone of my peers or family writing things down by hand that would be used publicly is holiday cards, a quick note on a report/fax, etc. - none of these NEED to be clear and pretty, just legible. And in this case almost always block form, not cursive. I think this is just another shift in how things will be done in the future. Should everyone know how to read, write, spell - YES! Does it have to look like it came out of a translated Latin text - NO!
I print, rather than using cursive; I was forced to learn cursive, but I could always print faster and as far as I can tell, there's no difference in writing speed between my writing and someone who uses cursive. And other things I've read back me up on this.
But I don't think it's due to lack of practice. If anything, I spend more time writing now than I did in elementary school (though a good portion of what I write now I didn't encounter until later, i.e. Greek letters and mathematical symbols). The difference, as far as I've been able to tell, is time. I used to spend time trying to make a given piece of writing look better. Now I don't care. I don't have the time, amidst all the other things I have to do, to make a given piece of handwriting look good. It's just like art: a hastily scribbled sketch will not be as attractive as something the artist spends several hours on.
I don't think this is a problem. I confess, I hate handwriting stuff. Before my family had a computer, back in elementary school, I took all sorts of shortcuts, legitimate and otherwise, to minimize the amount of writing I had to because I hated it so much. It had nothing to do with the conceptual process of writing, and everything to do with the mechanical process of putting pen/pencil to paper.
Now, I type faster than I write. I can handwrite mathematics faster than I can type, so often I handwrite mathematics if I don't need them to look pretty. Everything else, I try to type, because it looks better and minimizes the effort I need to spend. I have a hobby of fiction writing; if I didn't have a computer, I would never have bothered.
So, for me, the computer and sloppy handwriting have been a liberation.
What are the real arguments for continuing to try to enforce the old order? Penmanship as art? Sure, I can accept that, if we view it as a choice like playing a musical instrument.
Ed Boell's sarcasm about e-mail in the article is unwarranted; in truth, third graders don't say deep things too often (I didn't, when I was in third grade). Now, I do have a library of e-mails that I would be upset to lose, because my friends have said insightful and interesting things in them. And I'll be damned if I've retained a single personal hardcopy letter, ever.
Michael Sull's discussion about musculature et al. is crap. There's no reason someone can't learn good typing skills and how to hold a pencil.
So, for people who are interested in pretty handwriting, I encourage you to study it. But don't force everyone else have your passion for it. Aren't there are enough real deficiencies in what's taught in American schools that chasing down red herrings like the demise of cursive?
OMG! The children have never learned to chisel words onto stone tablets either! This is truely a dark age we live in!
/sarcasm off
I can't wait to see my fountain pen in a history museum.
MUCH less efficient, I really don't see the loss. Can anyone think of a good reason why we should mourn the loss of this...
Kind of like crying because 'Olde English' has gone the way of the dodo...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
There weren't really any home computers until I was in high school. By then I had already taken a bunch of penmanship classes. If learning to use a keyboard ruins people's ability to hold a pencil, does learning to use a pencil ruin people's ability to type? I wonder if I can sue my former gradeschools for the fact that I only do 60 WPM whereas I'd be able to type much more quickly if they hadn't ruined me as a typist. That's a lost job skill, no?
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
The coolest voice ever.
"... says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
...?
What the hell is an "engrosser"
-kgj
Do none of you write checks anymore? You know, for like the small asian grciery store that won't take plastic? Bills and such. I was always under the impression that cursive was what you were supposed to use for the written amount. Since it's a little harder to forge than block print.
When I was younger I always wanted to write in cursive, I'm not sure why. I tried to make my own "cursive" in first grade. In third grade, we were finally taught how to write it. No one liked it (except me). The teacher made us write everything in cursive; she told us that we would be using it for the rest of our lives. Points were deducted if we didn't write in cursive.
Then came fourth grade. All of a sudden the teacher told us that either print or cursive was acceptable. All the other students went back to print, because they found cursive harder to write in. I found it more efficient, so I've stuck with it over the years. Now I'm the only student I've ever seen at my high school who writes in cursive all the time.
I think the reason cursive is dying is that the teachers don't enforce it. In third grade, it was an uphill struggle trying to get the students to learn, and then they completely stopped teaching it as well as encouraging the use. Communication is about efficiency too. If you can't read what I've written, or I can't write it in a reasonable amount of time, then we don't have good communication. My cursive writing is mostly illegible to anyone but me, because it's evolved for maximum speed. As a result, teachers often can't read my handwriting, and other students don't even remember enough cursive from 8 years ago to decipher it. If the school system would stick with teaching something, then maybe we'd have more widespread usage of cursive. It's really not that much worse or slower than typing, just a different form of expression.
I suppose it's too much to expect the teachers to focus on cursive though, since here in Arizona they have to prepare students for the wonderful AIMS test.
Soon, my friends, soon... all is going according to plan. The stage is set. Now I can enslave the world with CUNEIFORM!
I caught one anonymous post that its about time. The coward is absolutely correct. Writing by hand takes time and patience. But we have become a society comepletely lacking in it.
We as a generation have now force ourselves to squeeze more into our 24 hour days in order to meet someone else's expectations. Except for sleeping, we now do twice as much or more, to match up to Mr. Jones who owns a big house and dresses lavishly. Mr. Jones has made use feel guilty for not following his standards. He makes us feel guilty for not being individuals.
So we take shortcuts to save time here and there. Use a PDA or Voice Mail to communicate. Every tool has its place and none should complete replace the other. When we choose to take our time and no let our lives be dictated by the Jone's and CEO's of the world, then we can live in a more beautiful place.
Be content.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
Kids today have no idea how to use a whale-oil lamp, or a buggy whip.
After all the time I wasted practicing penmanship, I'm glad to see that a new generation of kids won't have to bother.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I, 23 years old 17 days ago have had a computer around me for as long as I can remember. My first computers were a TI99/4A (with speech synthesizer!) and a IBM PCjr. I also happen to suffer from a fine motor deficency in my hands. You heard it right: If I'm ever your neuro surgeon, you had better find someone else. That's why I type. I can type fast enough to get me through everything. I turned in typewritten assignments in Display Write, and Clerics Works. I played wolf3d, half life, all the quakes, duke nukem and duke nukem 3d, and gobs of RPGs, all the baldur's gates, neverwinter nights, chrono trigger, secret of mana, and one cannot forget adventure on my TI99/4A. My handwriting is chicken scratch, if someone forged my signature on a check the bank wouldn't know because my signature changes every time I write it. I havn't written cursive since elementary school/jr high, and I don't want to. I can't read my own handwriting, so I grafiti everything in to a handspring (now palm) visor prism with minstrel modem. And I'm crippled how?
da w00t. mtfnpy?
Horse riding experts fear that the wild popularity of bicycles, particularly among kids, could erase horse usage within a few decades. With 90% of Americans betwwen the ages of 5 and 17 using bicycles, it's not uncommon for kids to ride along at 10-15 mph by the time they leave elementary school. Shift levers, brake levers, and water bottles have ruined kids' ability to hold reins properly, let alone ride safely, says the former president of the International Association of Master Riders, Cowboys, and Soldiers of Cavalry.
What makes cursive so important? Doctors could certainly do without it.
Infuriate left and right
Then in fifty years there can be a nostalgia movement to learn and use cursive, much as calligraphy died out and returned when enough time had passed that it became 'fashionable'.
We could call the new art form 'Recursive'.
I'd have said you were trolling if what you wrote wasn't so true.
While not required, cursive is the standard for a signature.
My handwriting sucks, always has, always will, but after a stint with an Architectural firm, my print is neater than ever.
The important thing here, I believe, is not if you can print or do cursive, but can you get your message across?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I'm currently 27, and I never learned cursive. When I was going through grade school, they started promoting 'italics' instead of cursive. (Italics seems to have died out; it was basically 'cursive lite', keeping the curves, keeping the connected letters, but doing away with big loopy letters that don't look like the manuscript versions of the same letter.)
To this day, I can't write a cursive z, and have problems reading cursive, even though I can read all but the most illegible printed handwriting.
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
Keyboards are my personal revenge to the dumbass elementary school teachers that couldn't teach me to write left handed correctly.
You've condemned me to a life time of smearing ink/pencil stuff all over my pinky finger.
Good-riddance.
For me printing has always been faster - even when I write legibly (admittedly less often than not). All the curlicues and squiggles just to have your writing look like the Declaration of Independence? There's exactly zero (0) point to it.
sulli
RTFJ.
be better for, is hand writing analysis. And I know a lot of people who consider that to be garbage as well.
I have used pens, brushes, penciles, and even quils to write with. Some can be used to create more beautiful and expressive writing than others, in the hands of someone competent. On the other hand, with a good typesetting program, or even a good collection of fonts and Word, I can create works that are nearly as beautiful. At the same time, the work I turn out will be much more consistent and therefore much more ledgible.
I have not been required to write in cursive since something like the 6th grade, when my dad (who made a living using handwriting skills) printed (not wrote) a note to my teacher explaining that he did not fee that my ability to handwrite in cursive would improve my stature in life, and that he was not going to assist them in deriding my penmenship if I was providing a ledgible answer to the problems being posed.
If pressed, I may be able to type as high as 50 wpm. I would say that it is safe to assume that I can not write, or even print at even a quarter of that speed.
I do print from time to time. Writing poetry, and rough drafts of stories are actually easier on paper. Because I can take a notebook of paper nealry anywhere, and not be bothered. When I transfer what I have written on paper to my computer, I am far more likely to catch really obvious errors than I am if I rough draft on the computer and edit there.
But that's just me, and my opinion. I reserve the right to believe you are wrong. Whether you agree with me or not.
-Rusty
You never know...
personally i dont see the bad side to this, i mean aslong as kids still get taught to write, even if it is illegibly, atleast they can. The only reason that being able to type better than you can write could be considered a problem is because all old people in the world dont do things that way. I can always remember my physics teacher complaining about how science has been held back on numurous occasions by people reluctant to addopt new ways, to quote him "science never progresses, old people die". im quite sure when our children have their own, that they'll hate the new telepathic keyboard for destroying the dexterity of their youths hands.
When I was in second grade back in 81, before computers were really as big a thing as they are now, my mom was concerned about my poor handwriting skills. The 2nd grade teacher told her that I'd just learn to type.
Today, I can print, and I can type, and I can sign my name, but handwriting beyond that can only be done with intense concentration. Overall, I don't need it, so no big loss.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
I can speak from my own personal experience as context here. I basically abandoned cursive handwriting when I was 14, because my handwriting sucked and my block-letter printing looked a lot better than my handwriting (I even took a year of architecture classes in high school and nearly took it as my college major, because my lettering and drawing were so precise).
Twenty-three years later, my handwriting still looks like an 8th grader. I've made two attempts in the past to recover and improve my handwriting skills, but with little progress to show for it. As an adult, I just did not have the patience to drill myself day after day with the kinds of handwriting exercises necessary to make progress. So I still hand-print everything, even my checks. The only thing I handwrite now is my signature. I'm not proud of it.
I'm not a parent yet, but I hope to make sure my children don't follow the bad habits I fell into when I was young (and no, I'm not blaming my parents, either -- I consider it my fault alone). I think there's a good reason our teachers taught us handwriting early in school, but I took it a bit for granted.
"Folks just call him Buckethead." -- Les Claypool
Does "in-class essay" mean anything anymore?
There's no way to use a computer on those things.
And then the AP tests -- those HAVE to be handwritten.
In AP US we were reading Xeroxes of past year's essays -- the ones that were harder to read were the ones in cursive, simply because of the damn loops.
I've noticed the loss of cursive, however. In taking the SAT some months ago, when asked to copy the honor phrase ("I certify that this is my test" stuff), with the explicit order "DO NOT PRINT" in the box, the whole room broke out in a self-concious laughter, as we had to think carefully on how to write in cursive, as opposed to printing.
And, because I hate to do it on the computer, all my MATH homework is done by hand. (equations are still icky to set up. Much nicer just to draw the damn integral)
The upshoot of it all?
Handwriting is a huge facet in the lives of high school students. It will stay that way.
Do I bemoan the loss of cursive? No.
Do I fear a loss of handwriting? No.
Is there a problem here? No.
Case closed.
(and who in the world liked that D'Nealian or whatever that my grade school taught before cursive? *shudder*)
I consider the ability to write and read cursive script a basic part of English literacy. Then again, I expect an educated person to be able to multiply small integers without the aid of a calculator.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If you make a mistake writing, you have to erase or cross out...if you type it, you can arrow over and edit/delete. Then there is the whole copy/paste thing.... Typing...is like...easy and more efficient.
oh yeah...AND spell check.
I don't think it's all surprising. We used to draw pictures, but then we moved on to letters. It's a much more efficient way of communicating than cursive. When was the last time you purchased an entirely handwritten book? Probably not since the Guttenberg days...
is the convenient solution to this little problem of our civilization. We'll just have to change the graffiti program so that it does read normal English writing instead of 'modified English writing'. ;)
-N
The Cycle of Violence is to be seen as the invisible hand that maintains the balance of Man and Nature on earth.--M
Not sure why this was modded the way it was (initially funny, then troll), but anyway...
You make a very good point, the media today is garbage. If only we could propose bills that would ban media based on intelligence level instead of how badly it would offend parents and sponsors. Maybe a Mensa channel perhaps? Just a thought. While the lose of cursive might be one that we can all absorb, the lose of legible hand writing is one that we can't. We need to move away from teaching cursive at and early age and then acting suprised when, ten years of zero reinforcement later, students can't write it, and move towards accurate, efficient, legible handwriting techniques.
Don't forget that writing history papers is not the only application for physical handwriting on a piece of paper. As far as I'm aware, there still aren't good computer-based solutions for all the diagrams and symbols used for math and science. Yes, I know that there are hundreds of equation editors and plotters and publishing tools so forth, but that's just not suitable for scratch work, for just sitting down and figuring stuff out. Can you imagine taking notes for math class using LaTeX? I know that my ability to study math and science would have been seriously impaired if I had not been proficient in writing with a physical pencil on physical paper.
Cursive was invented to speed up writing by not requiring the pen to be lifted from the page as often.. Can you say "conspiracy by the ink makers!!!"?
Next thing you know they'll outlaw the use of other manufacturers ink in their line of pens!
...good...
I've been using a PC since I was 5, and I've been typing well over 60wpm since I was in the 5th grade, and I can still write in cursive and hold a pencil properly. But how often do -anyone- actually use cursive? It's difficult to read, so why bother? I can always read what I type, regardless of how my fingers are positioned on the keyboard. It's not that handwriting is not important, but if cursive were to fall off the face of the earth, it would not have a huge impact on society.
Being 20 years of age, I still can still remember what it was to like to be in second or third grade (unlike some of you :D). My teachers used to complain that she had a very hard time reading a lot of our stuff. When we began cursive writing (3rd grade) I learned that sure the speed at which I wrote was nice, however, my neatness went down the drain. As many of us, throughout the years, we become lazy and write 2/3 or 1/2 of the actual letter while trying to jot something down (such as in a lecture).
IMO, cursive writing was created so that we could write faster and computer typing is simply the next step. By the time I entered 8th grade I was easily able to type faster then I wrote and from that point on, I enjoyed typing my papers because I could write them faster, correct my mistakes without rewriting the entire paper (I like were forced to do in grammar school). Typing everything I could was great. I always had a copy around so whenever I lost my initial copy I always had one on the computer.
Typing things out instead of jotting them down on paper is the next step in our evolution. What I don't understand is why do people cry about technology progressing our culture? If we go back 100 years and look at farmers from then era, we would see that they would love to use the machines of today. It makes life easier and they could have also also been more productive. This is just part of our evolution as mankind. I see nothing wrong with kids not being able to write in cursive.
A few years ago, it seemed that everyone emphasized children learning computers at a young age. What happened to all this? Do these people actually want to retard our future generations by forcing them to use out-dated techniques?
I think these guys are just scared that they'll be out of a job soon
----
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says"
----
That's pretty funny because I do not often have a need to write things down on paper. The majority of my personal notes are taken on my ipaq. Once you learn writing on a handheld you can really fly with few to no mistakes. The rest of my notes are given by my professors which post it on their websites and let students download them.
I can't honestly believe someone would complain about this subject. One day sloppy handwriting will be replaced by neat computer font, the dog ate my homework just won't cut it anymore, and we as a society will be more efficient. Obviously, something these anti-technology guys fear.
This is obviously going against the grain of the response but I've found that writing things out by hand has some real benefits for thoughtful composition (no that's not a tangential joke about slashdot first posts).
I can type far faster than I can write, so it is definitely more efficient, but I've found that when typing, the quality of my writing drops and more importantly, the quality of my arguments drops as well. I think it has to do with the time taken to write things out. Difficult arguments take time to think through, and as they become more complex, they take time to explain to the reader (the point of the exercise). It depends of what is being written.
Case in point, the first draft of my master's thesis in art history (yes, the humanities) began entirely typed then I started writing things out (mainly because I couldn't get an available plug at the library). When revising for draft two, I found that the arguments in the handwritten passages were far better constructed and required less revision, while the typed portions were kind of sloppy.
Your input method (writing, typing, speaking) should correspond to the speed with which you can generate the content (if possible, coding or rapping are two examples where this doesn't work). So if you're writing a quick email trying to make arrangements for a party, typing is great. If you're belabouring some convoluted French theorist, you might benefit from handwriting.
The other aspect that should be considered is that of permanence. Typing (on an electronic box of some sort) is completely impermanent. You can erase anything you do, and in most cases you can redo anything you erase (unless you're posting to slashdot). This lead me to spew all kinds of random thoughts out because the energy required was nominal and it wouldn't leave any trace if it was so bad that it could be embarrassing ;) Writing (or old fashion hammer-bashing ribbon typing) is there forever (give or take).
Writing also allows for doodling or drawing charts, maps, graphs, whatever. These doodles are completely inaccurate but easy fast, and get the point across. On computers, graphs, charts, and maps are a pain in the arse but are really really accurate. Which is better? Depends on how far you are into the process. If you need to get ideas down, I think the pen and paper route.
Computers have almost done away with those, too! They really *are* plotting to take over the world!
Consider that a right-handed person sees what they've written, but a left-handed person only sees the last few letters. Also, the fresh ink is easily smudged, even from ball-points (don't even ask about markers or fountain pens, or pencils). The words tend to slant the "wrong way" so lefties have to compensate by holding their hands in an unnatural position to get the words to sland "right".
We face enough discrimination with right-handed scissors, entry/exit doors, can-openers, baseball mitts, fridge/microwave doors, bowling balls (yes, bolwing balls - the finger-hole pattern for lefties is different than for righties), screws, light bulbs, bottle caps, even old record-players are all designed for right-handed people.
So cursive is disappearing? Good! That it makes the CBS News? Must be a slow news day.
When I started work about 15 years ago, we had to give a handwritten spec to a typist who would enter it into a word processor, print it, return it and I would proof read it and then return it with corrections. She would then photocopy it and distribute it to everyone on the list.
Making an amendment was a similar process. Now, I can change the spec myself and circulate it by email.
I think I spent longer proofreading than it takes me to make the changes now.
theodp writes "Sex experts fear that the wild popularity of masturbation and internet porn, particularly among Slashdot readers, could erase heterosexual copulation within a few decades. With 99.99 percent of Slashdot readers between the ages of 5 and 97 jacking off to gay porn on their computers, it's not uncommon for kids to jack off 20-30 times a day by the time they leave elementary school. Anal beads, cock rings and butt plugs have ruined kids' ability to insert a penis properly into a vagina, let alone socialize with females, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penises and Teachers of Sex."
I'm 29 years old.. and my handwriting has always been of the messy type. All through school, I was the messy handwriter. Now, it wasn't that I had some dysfunction.. I mean I could write, I have superb hand eye coordination.. but anything involving drawing, I have trouble doing neatly.
My current "handwriting" If you want to call it that, like most people, is an individual style, developed as a mix between what I can read again later, and what's most comfortable to write. It would certainly flunk me out of any penmanship class.. but most people could read it without too much difficulty, especially if I intend it to be for them.
I never write a capital E properly.. it looks more like a backwards 3 with a little leading curl on top... my capital D has no proper slanted lines.. just curves. And so on... Many of the letters don't fall into any known official writing system, but I guarantee you would recognize them anyway.
I guess what I'm saying is, in the end, there are two types of handwriters in our society: those who write for the sake of reading it back later, who invariably develop their own style, and those who adhere to an official writing standard.
For instance, a while back I took it upon myself to improve my handwriting. It's going okay, it just takes lots of practice. I picked up a Spencerian Handwriting tutorial.. now Spencerian is not the Italic or Cursive or whatever we were taught in school. it's what our grandfathers and great grandfathers were taught in school. And you know what? It's NOT hard! Yes, I struggle with it, but that's due to my aforementioned difficulties with pen and paper... It's extremely logical, and it's a system.. where every letter is composed of more or less seven basic skills (curves, lines, etc). It becomes easy to remember the logical way to make any letter, and the eye can tell if it actually looks right when written. If you havent' seen it, properly written spencerian is both easy to read and very pleasing to the eye. It's also designed for a fountain pen with a spencerian nib.. but I actaully find it easier to write with a fountain pen than a ballpoint, I just like the way it actually lets me feel the texture of the paper, I think.
So it got me thinking: From what I recall of learning to handwrite at an early age, it was boring. They didn't tell us anything about different styles, or that there was more than one way to write, or that in the future it woudln't even matter.. they just went ahead and showed us one thing. Now.. why don't we get back and take penmahship seriously? When you start teaching handwriting, pick something like spencerian. Teach them to write beautifully, not just to write. Or at least put people through a mandatory course in highschool, even just a couple days a week, on penmanship. Let them pick what style they want, but make them study it.
And then I think, does it matter? I do 90% of my work on computers, the only writing I do is a note to myself throughout the day on a notepad, or a quick post-it to someone else. And I type around 100wpm.... so writing serves no real practical purpose, other than as a hobby, I guess.
Now, my writing still sucks, but it's getting there.
to keep the left-handed man down! Don't listen to this handwriting propaganda. Typing sets you free!
I cross my 7's, my Z's. I put a slash through it if it's a zero. It's generally very neat, consistently universal. It is not however perfectly suited to graph paper like his. Mine is adapted well to legal pads, which I became a fiend of in business school. He was a mechanical engineer.
I learned cursive but abandoned it in favor of block print. Our cursie was "Daneelean??" and very suited to being a 3rd grader, but I didn't feel it was...professional.
Hell, I remember learning cursive... I believe it was in 4th grade. Most of us were just starting to PRINT legibly, but they required that everything we do be in cursive, up through the 8th grade.
I also remember having teachers discouraging cursive in high school because it was too hard to read quickly.
Who doesn't like free music?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If they want more people to write in cursive, they shouldn't make it so damn hard. I use print letters because I have vienna sausages for fingers not because of email.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Lost Sheep to Shepard, you got your ears on?
Slashdot is great about bringing us the articles of all those Luddites out there. This latest proposition states that computers are crippling our childrens fingers, hands and forearms. Parents, who pride themselves in penmanship (of all things) can't read the notes of their children. We can no longer carry on this uniquely American custom.
.. it's education.
/that/ bad that we can't get our kids to effectively print abc's? How can this be? I picked up sign language in college. can this form of communication be that different... maybe we should wait till their older? Say in 10th grade maybe?
Phoey(or maybe it's Phewy? or Fooy?)!
As I was reading this, I was waiting for the sentence that goes, "If our children can't write in cursive, then the terrorists have already won!" The problem here is not email, computers, or keyboards,
Is our educational system
Quite frankly I know that we ask our teachers to do too much, and too little at the same time. Teachers are required to instill morality. They have to check for contraband, and make sure the kids do not have drugs. They have to be a juvenile police force. And on top of that they have educate the brightest, and the slowest all in the same classroom.
I suggest if you want to save cursive, hire some more teachers, and allow them to actually teach. Email is not the problem, bandwidth is. Cut the fat from our educational system.
</flame>
If only teachers had allowed us to pass notes to eachother. Maybe then we would have developed great handwriting skills. But instead, if little Johnny wants to find out if Susan, sitting two rows over, "like likes" him or just "likes" him, he'll have to bust out his cell phone and type the question with T9, then text message her.
At least T9 forces proper spelling.
"Such attitudes are worrying to a growing number of parents, educators and historians, who fear that computers are speeding the demise of a uniquely American form of expression" What is "uniquely American" about writing?
And they won't be able to use slide rules either!
First we lose calligraphy, now this. Next thing you know, we'll be tossing Martha Stewart in jail!
By the time I'd reached high school I had given up writing in cursive. Too many loops, too messy, too hard to read. I didn't see the point. I don't think I was old enough that I was signing things yet.
At some point when I had to start signing things, I would just sign printed. It was fine for a while, btu at some point someone told me I had to write it in cursive. I said, "but then its not my signature." They disagreed and said it legally had to be in cursive. I said, "well that's stupid," then proceeded to labor through trying to write my name in cursive (just for kicks, I asked the person to show me how to write a capital G so I could make a legal signature).
After that my signature diminished to my first and last initials with little squiggly lines after each. You know, like celebrities sign autographs...
Last year when I was signing papers to buy my house, I signed the first page and the notary almost had a fit. She said I couldn't sign that way or it wouldn't be legal. I protested for a bit, but she wouldn't budge, and she was the one with the stamp, so i reluctantly labored through it again for a few pages, then slowly reverted back to my regular signature (so many pages!).
Signatures are supposed to be personal, like fingerprints. The way I sign my name is supposed to be unique to me. If Joe Dumbass Lawyer can't read my signature, that shouldn't matter. If someone were to hold up a page with my alleged signature, and I can't identify it as mine (or it doesn't match my signature on other documents), it shouldn't be legally binding. For someone to instruct me that I have to use proper penmanship for it to be legal is ridiculous.
But i digress.
blog
I must have had a very different experience with cursive than everyone else.
At my private school, cursive was taught and enforced from Kindergarten through 8th grade. Typing Class began in 3rd grade. Both were taught, and both have an important place in life. Most kids hanging around in here wouldn't be caught dead with out some form personal digital data entry device, but analog writing methods are called for in certain occasions. Most people would seem to default to printing, I never learned printing, of course it's possible, but I have to write something down, it ends up being cursive.
Cursive was emphasized for "speed", not that it's any faster, but you only pick up your pen in between words (duh). Some people in here hell bent on spewing ignorance want to abolish writing. Being the incredible nerd I am, that would be t0t4lly 1337, but please...not even close to feasible.
Cursive just makes for pretty words; calligraphy does the same. It's sad to see that once literacy is spread amongst the masses, the once beautiful art of writing is just as soon taken for granted.
-tyfighter
Well, of course all this keyboarding has taken a toll on handwriting skills. After typing all day, I have trouble filling in a check and signing my name. Online bill paying is just so much easier!
My handwriting isn't the worst in the world, but one regret I have about my childhood school years is not developing good penmanship. I've always envied people with beautiful handwriting. It's a very valuable skill to have, and being able to do it would be very satisfying. I guess I could take some calligraphy classes...
ok, my handwriting is twice as bad if i dont use normal script, why the hell should i care to ever use cursive (sp?) again who the h3ll cares!
This is Slashdot. Of course we will have people coming out of the woodwork saying they see no need for cursive writing or even most handwriting at all. Just look at how much we type everything.
On the other hand, the same argument could be made for learning to tie a necktie or similar skills. You CAN get away without them, but I think you are missing a classic skill that isn't all that difficult to learn, and worth the effort. You can type most things, but not all things. Handwriting will never go completely away (signatures, notepads, etc.), and your impression on other people WILL be influenced by how you write.
Just my $0.02
it's my fault.
i hold pens "like a lefty" but in my right hand, sort of "upside-down"
makes for a ink/lead-stained hand after a notes-intensive class.
my fingertips ALL touch the pen as i write.
i didn't start typing until well after developing this
and didn't start touch-typing for another ~5 years.
i hate it when i fall into these (assumption) boats...
besides, i can't remember the last time i could acutally read a (non-english) teacher's handwriting.
the world would be a lot better off if everybody handwrote in print rather than script.
for those who think there is personalization, etc from script, guess what?
as the world starts typing everything,
handwritten messages will take that position regardless of print vs script.
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
My handwriting totally sucks anyway. Chicken scratch/doctor style. I've had people I've handwritten letters to write me back and request that I do it in typing from then on.
:)
Fine with me, as I can type a hell of a lot faster than I write...I am probably capable of 90-100wpm.
As far as notes and such, I just use standard block characters, as it's already been established that nobody can read my handwriting. Most people can read those.
Taking all this into account, I fail to see why it's a big deal that cursive is a dying art. As it becomes more and more impractical, that's what you would expect should happen. The same teachers complaining about the disapperance of cursive writing are probably the same ones that insist that only typed book reports be turned in.
-R
Wasn't this the goal? Having all schoolchildren able to type?
I guess we should revive the time-honored tradition of carving runes on stone tablets, so our children don't miss... um.. something... What are they missing?
Maybe I just feel triumphant since I consistently got C's and below on handwriting throughout grade school. Seriously, somehow all my report cards were saved by my mom. Man, I was bad at math too.
Once, I was asking a third-grade teacher why in the heck she taught the students cursive? I learned it but I never used it after the sixth grade.
Her response was that students don't learn it because its useful or because they NEED to know it. It's taught in order to help develop kids' motor skills and hand-eye coordination.
From my experience, there is still a very useful place for hand-writing, but not necessarily for cursive. However, if writing in cursive is helpful in developing motor skills in children, I'm all for it. There's a distinct difference in motor skill difficulty between typing and writing. Writing certainly aids much more than typing in the motor skill development, as it requires quite a bit more concentration and hand-stability.
Teaching cursive writing is all about appearance over substance. I remember how unfair it was
that teachers (in the early years of schooling) would mark stories down in English
classes for poor cursive writing.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
... because handwriting experts will be out of jobs? Correct me if I'm wrong, but we don't chisel glyphs into stone anymore either. Who cares... in fact, good. Kids can still print, and the majority of their writing will be on a keyboard of sorts. Oh well. I call it evolution.
It's sans serif fonts you want to get rid of.
I have been involved in drafting since I was a little little kid. I was given an engineering text book by my grandfather when I was young, that same book turned out to be my text book in High School drafting classes.
By the time I had gotten to high school I had drawn every last thing in that book many many times.
During all this time - learning drafting - I perfected manually writing at 1/8" text.
I haven't been able to write in cursive since grade or middle school. I can ONLY write in block text.
I can actually write each individual letter in cursive still - although I just am terrible at getting them to connect well.
so its not just computers and such, but more how you actually practice writing for the forative years that will have impact.
In other news, a disturbing decline in piano tuners outpaces the actual decline in the use of pianos.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
The most frustrating thing about pen-writing is the lack of an easy erase function. (OK, there is white-out). Most of my errors are in the initial writing where I want to fix the spelling of the word I just wrote.
and because most of you guys suck at it does not make it any less important...
;-)??
I have friends that had their children start using computers very early on (2 years or so)....
Anyhow, at age 3-4 it started becoming apparent that these kids had strongly under-devloped fine motor skills. Of couse they could read, write and spell good...but they were much worse at painting and other 'hand' activities in their age group.
And before anybody comes up with this 'in 30 years everybody will use computers for everything' responses, consider one thing: Would you like your Doctor or Dentist be one of those kids
What's easier, writing on a napkin or booting up your laptop?
Neither. Use a Palm. It's specifically designed to do this kind of stuff quickly and easily. Scribble on the memo pad. Keep all your notes in one place instead of on 1,000 napkins. Even easier, just record a voice memo.
Doesn't always happen, but sometimes a technology will come around that actually makes life easier. Yes, people will always need to jot things down. But why is it absurd to believe that people will use technology instead of a "napkin", considering the rapidly dropping prices of PDAs recently (Pricegrabber shows a new Zire for $77.98 including shipping and tax)?
-- Kircle
Well, evolution is really a different thing, let's call it human development.
It's not as if handwriting is some holy information entering method from God. It's a means to an end, we do it because we need to commit information to a transportable, transmittable, and archivable form. With the coming of the digital age, it turns out we really want information to be digital most of the times, for a large number of reasons.
So it's only reasonable to gradually phase out (or down-scope) handwriting in favor of keyboard input. Also, keyboard input seems to be much more speed efficient than handwriting. So I don't think this is a bad thing or in any way unnatural if in the future keyboards/input devices replace pens completely.
Some more general wise cracking: Don't be shocked by it, the world will change in some pretty significant ways in our lifetime. If we manage to remain open minded and critical at the same time, there'll be a lot of good things for us in store.
Cursive can become a "nearly-lost" artform, like its overly-ornate cousin: calligraphy. The world will still turn, the stars will hold their place in the sky, and dogs and cats will still express their differences openly as they ever have. It just means that fewer and fewer people will have the ability to torture others with horrible penmenship in "cursive" form (trying to read handwritten notes from my boss have definitely made my vocabulary "cursive").
Oh, and as to the question of whether a letter is more beautiful because it is handwritten over typed (thereby ignoring the CONTENT of the letter itself), are we not emphasizing to the adults of tomorrow that FORM is more important than SUBSTANCE?
After all, its not how you say something, its WHAT you say that really counts.
Oh No! Because of Calculators and Computers, most engineering students can't use a Sliderule.
My writing looks like shit. I can not even read my own writing. Writing takes too ling so I rush it and it looks bad. I am in my late 20s and never touched a computer as a kid. Worse thing is I can't type either, but I pluck fast.
... a piece of paper, a bottle, a cork, and a fountain pen.
But wait, I can't use the pen 'cause I can't write cursive.
Why, why, why, did I skip out on my penmanship class? Who would have known that some day, my life would depend on being able to write with a fountain pen?
(Guess I'll just have to send a message from my laptop via WiFi to Slashdot, and pray someone gets it and comes to rescue me.)
In England they use regular letters and join them together. No cursive, no print. Maybe they're smarter than y'all, eh?
...the International Federation of Saddle Makers has decried the popularity of automobiles. "The level of horsemanship displayed by the average twelve year old in North America has declined dramatically since 1903" claims IFSM spkoesperson John Q. Luddite. "Hardly any of them even know how to mount a horse nowadays. What are we going to do?"
A couple of decades ago, I discovered that I had forgotten how to write a "q" (lower case "Q"). I had to recreate it from the printed typeface. I'd just never had occasion to use it...and it disappeared.
This seems to me to indicate that if kids don't have a reason to use cursive, it *will* be forgotten. Even if you coerce them into using it in school, it won't be remembered unless there is a real use. My penmanship, never great, has been degenerating year by year... *I* can still read it, but it's no longer generally intelligible. I don't use it for communication, so it's no longer fit for use in that function. (OTOH, I can print reasonably well, if I'm seated with a good surface, etc.)
I am more worried about the degradation of math skills. If you don't have a feel for math, then you don't notice how absurd some stories are. Stories that are presented as fact. Lying with statistics, nothing! Frequently people lie with basic arithmetic...unless the people writing the story are themselves innumerate, and just don't notice that fallacies and contradictions.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Let's just say that I *was* taught cursive in school. The largest advantage it gives me now-a-days is that *I* can enterprit it, but no-one else can ;0).
tsia
I guess I'm one of those kids- I started playing on dad's 286 when I was 2 years old and haven't stopped using computers since. My handwriting is awful but I can do 80 WPM on a keyboard. Go figure.
im in my early 30s, canadian, and my experience seems to differ from everyone elses here? where i live we used cursive for everything in school all the way up until highschool graduation! printing stuff would get you looked at funny. anyone else? is this a canadian thing?
Aside from my signiture, I have never in my life known of a single use for writing cursive.
Question
http://www.ironfroggy.com/
How many people actually write in cursive anymore? Honestly, the only things I have ever used it for outside of school are signing my name and trying to read old documents written in cursive, which was still pretty much a lost cause because styles vary so much by writers and across time.
Perhaps cursive is something that *should* be lost, because in the long run, all it does is slow down a child's education with a style of writing that is essentially unecessary.
Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
In related news, electronic devices which were once geeky are now cool, and writing instruments are the new trademarks of nerds. Wonder if he has a pocket protector.
Did cavemen freak out when mankind started written instead of drawing?
Historically speaking most of these issues through time have been settled by war and assimilation.
We don't seem to bemoan the fact that we don't know how to light a fire with a cinder, or even say, light a fire by rubbing two pieces of wood together, or the fact that most Americans don't know how to ride a horse, or most of us don't know how to drive a carriage, etc etc.
The only possible threat I see to this tech-dependence is the possible threat of massive power failures. But honestly, we don't even need to be literate to have fun in life, and I doubt those power failures would last long anyhow. At least the kids will continue to draw. No technology will take away that interest from them, nor any current or near-future fansy new input devices can replace paper and pen yet (yeah, there's the Wacom tablets, but it's not the same, most importantly, the fashion of art doesn't necessarily evolve that way).
-N
The Cycle of Violence is to be seen as the invisible hand that maintains the balance of Man and Nature on earth.--M
...Here
How many diagnoses of ADD (or ADHD or whatever) are we seeing nowadays? Our problem as a nation is that we don't know when the fuck to say when, whether it's with food, or TV, or computers. I'll admit I was pushing the troll button with the "ban Doom" comment, because I still chuckle when I see these talking heads on TV using that as their strawman for society's ills, but the reason why Johnny can't handwrite is because society could care less about Johnny unless he's a consumer.
Learning for its own sake is frowned upon in this country, as is picking up an Asimov novel or respecting your neighbor. Thinking for oneself has gone out the fucking window because there's no money or self-gratification in it. Our American idols are cookie-cutter pop singers. Our schoolbooks are being revised to be gender/race/creed neutral, and to hell with history. We're so uptight about Johnny forgetting cursive when the phrase "Founding Fathers" is being redacted.
Our next generation is going to be (in aggregate, there are of course a few bright bulbs) our stupidest ever. Mark my words. A diet of intellectual sugar is just as damaging in the long run as swilling soft drinks and cramming super-sized fast food daily. In moderation it's all good, but there's no money in moderation.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I went to public school before personal computers existed. My handwriting was simply terrible, partly due, i believe now, to a muscle ailment. I literally couldn't hold a pen for more than a few minutes, or I'd suffer horrible cramps. Still do today.
I was told that I would never be able to succeed in business or college because my handwriting was just so awful. Technology allowed me to avoid that, and in fact, refute that.
I became a profound typist just to "survive". When I hit college, little portable, thermal typewriters were quiet and affordable, even if notebooks weren't. So I looked like a freak typing away in lecture hall...
I submitted all of my papers, typed out on a C64, printed out on an MX80 dot matrix. I came to realize that doing that was good for an extra grade - a B paper turned into an A every time (don't ask, but I did an objective "study" and found it to be true). And of course, there was the added benefit of tweaking spacing, pitch and trimming margins to turn a 4 page paper into a required 5 pager.
Today, my fast accurate typing is considered a major asset. I think that I hold a pen no more than a dozen times a year now.
Shed no tears for handwriting - it is a fossil, a relic, and to be discarded. For those that can still do it, well, it is nice to have mastered a quaint artform.
jonathan
I'm not the only one who can't write or hold a pencil worth a damn.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
OK, you're a modern school kid, you spend your evernings typing out emails on one of those evil keyboard things.
Now you're a school kid of twenty years ago, spending your evenings kicking about a football, watching TV and doing whatever else it is that young men do alone in their bedrooms at night.
At what point are you doing less writing by hand? Kids never spent their evenings writing long volumes by hand. Save for a few who had pretentions towards being authors or poets, most simply did other things. They simply never did it.
It's like complaining that kids using email means they never learn to fly helecopters.
I learned cursive writing in the regular Canadian school system. Back in my grade 4-6 days I was always getting bad marks on cursive writing so my parents requested that the school give me extra exercises on that subject. As a result, I developed very legible, artful cursive writing. It's many years later now and I'm in university (Engineering), but if I pick up a nice Sanford Uni-Ball Vision Micro pen, I can still do it.
I am also a serious user of typing. As a side effect of learning the alphabet through computer games (thanks to a techie dad), I learned to type before I learned to do regular printing in grade 1. Another side effect was that early on, I could type the alphabet but not know how to pronounce any of the letters. Even as I was learning to write cursively, I could type much more rapidly and accurately than people twice my age: 30 wpm by age 6, 50 wpm by age 12, now 100+ wpm in university (assuming I'm in the groove where I can think at 100 wpm.)
Why I prefer Cursive:
Cursive writing is more of an artform to me as well as a tool to enforce certain frames of mind. If I am in a class that requires right brain thought (typically anything that requires critical thought in relation to someone else's non-technical writing) I will use the cursive. It helps keep me in the right-brained frame of mind. My thoughts flow onto the page. When I write something in cursive, it's flowing onto a piece of paper from my pen. It's written there in stone and you can't erase it. (No, white-out does not count.) What I have written there is a reflection of myself that is expressed through words and the physical characteristics of what I have put down onto the paper. Because cursive is like art, a lot more thought goes into what I stroke down onto the paper. It makes me think at a higher level and use my brain more effectively.
And Now The Case For Typing:
Typing is incredibly useful to me because of its utility and flexibility. As the girl in the article mentioned, you can easily fix mistakes with a backspace ( or ^H ;-). The main benefit of typing is that whatever you create is infinitely replicable. If your dog eats your homework, you print off another copy. It can be instantly formatted, transmitted, stored, replicated, processed and so on. The difference between handwriting and typing is like the difference between a Band's Live Performance and the CD. You can't perfectly duplicate that piece of paper with your personal pen strokes on it. But you can copy that OpenOffice file to a web server. (And yes, I do use OO.org.)
The main thing that you lose with typing is the separation of personal effort from the results of that effort. You don't see the emotion and streaks of ink on your word processor. It's the difference between sending a "Blue Mountain E-Card" where you personally wrote the greeting for someone's birthday, and sending a Personally Written Hallmark Card with the same greeting. The effort and thoughtfulness comes through with physical card but not the e-card.
The Moral of the Story. (According To Me, Anyway.)
I say that the typing separates emotion/effort from content but with the added value of making something highly utilitarian. You can't replicate the paper, but that makes it all the more precious.
I say that the purposes for writing and typing do not entirely overlap, and thus neither will cancel out the other any time soon.
The professor teaching my cognitive science class was trying to make a point about visual perception. He said, "Picture a pumpkin." My brain produces an image of a jack-o-lantern, or maybe a pie. "Now," he said, "picture the WORD pumpkin."
My knee-jerk, instantaneous reaction was: "what font?"
"There is no night so forlorn, no mood so bleak, that it cannot be infused with pleasure by tender meat..." - R.W. Apple
While it may not be the most efficient means of communication, a handwritten letter often has a higher emotional impact than email.
Eventually (hopefully) their handwriting will be so poor they'll have to use computers! Thats one way to get rid of the ancient use of paper.
... Which reminds me I need to figure out how these three seashells work.
Hmm
Stealing souls since '666
I'll say this: in much of Asia handwriting skills are still important.
This is especially true in China and Japan, where both languages uses thousands of unique characters for the written language. Because of this situation, these two languages are not easily adopted for computer use, though the Japanese have tried with special keyboards and the JIS, Shift-JIS and EUC character sets. Is it small wonder why low-coast fax machines first took off in popularity in Asia, because it was in many ways faster to write up a handwritten note in Japanese and fax it to another location than to use a Japanese language keyboard to create the characters and then send the message electronically?
Besides, writing Chinese and Japanese characters is still considered a revered art form in Asia. That's why a lot of art exhibitions in China and Japan show the masterful art of calligraphy, especially writing characters with brushes.
Most adults don't know how to make fire using two sticks; they don't know how to ride a horse; and how many people know how to operate a typewriter properly?
Useless skills will be forgotten -- that's simply the way of things.
All this talk just reminded me of an epsoid in outter limits where people communicate via a direct brain wave interface digitally except 1 guy who had to learn how to read and write manually. In the show, if people want complete works of a book they can just dl it and all they see is 1, 0 digital info, no longer look like words. I don't remember what the epsoid was called or most of the details, but I remember eventually the computer that controls communication goes nuts and the guy ended up found a way to shut down the computer. At the end of the show, the guy had to teach everyone in the city how to read and write all over again.
Moral of the story? We should treat technology as a tool, not way of life. Being able to type 50/60/70 WPM is fine (being doing 65 WPM since high school on my apple iie), but ultimatly we still need to retain some basic skills such as how to writ something by hand. I found that if I need to take notes or draw diagrams, nothing beats pen/pencial that cost a dime and a notebook that cost half dollar. I don't need to drag a 4lb notebook around that cost a couple of hundred bucks and had to find a plug every 2hr or so.
I think its odd that all the people posting here loving this idea are bad at cursive to begin with; what have they got to lose? Suddenly they'll be on par with everybody else who can't write.
For people who can write:
Cursive is fast, its pretty, its CHEAP, and great for taking notes.
Printing isn't fast, isn't pretty, but is also cheap.
IM is fast, not pretty, and not cheap.
Not everybody thinks carrying a laptop, PDA or cellphone everywhere is a status symbol. It really just marks you as a slave.
I suppose if cursive were really useless, who would care, but its not. I still use it. I don't care if nobody else does use it, since its still useful to me. Its just as useful as your PDA and much more convenient. I wouldn't read books on a PDA either, with having to recharge the batteries every 3 hours or so, yet some people do, and soon we'll be worrying about the death of paperbacks.
My wife learned about denelian writing when she did her student teaching this past spring. It is almost cursive writing but the letters aren't connected. The letters slant as well. Just trying to make it easier for the kids to learn cursive I guess..
Geek author with a penchant for dropping nerdy innuendos or coincidence?
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
Not having to hand write is a great blessing for many of us. I have a slight muscular dis-ability that impairs my ablilty to write, especially hand writing (no, the disability is not spelled 'MD'). Though I always was an A student growing up, I always was getting F's in mandatory handwriting classes throughout elementary school, which I found very frustrating and stigmatizing, especially since there was little I could do to improve the situation. The advent of key boards, PDA's etc has been a great blessing for me in that I rarely need to write anymore. Handwriting is an arcahaic method of communuication that depends upon motor skills that not everyone has, it should and will be deprecated. If kids come out of school not knowing handwriting, but able to type 30+ words a minute, I would call this progress and a very positive development. MM
Hell, most of them can't read past a sixth grade level. Don't get me started about their grammar.
They're just pissed that nobody cares and they'll be out of a job. Good riddance to cursive, it was always too individualized and too sloppy to read anyway.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
When I was in grade school it was feared that I had a sever learning disability that would make it near impossible for me to excel in school. I was examined and it was discovered that I had a near genius intelligence (not to brag) but had an extreme problem with hand writing. Hence I my ability to answer the teachers question and my failing grades. Anyway my parents bought me a C64 and ever since then my work has been the level it should be. Without computers/PDAs/etc. I would be unable to pursue the educational goals I now have (go Engineering go!)
100% Crunchier
My cursive has been going downhill for almost 20 years now, and I often find myself printing when writing by hand. I don't see a particular need for cursive --- it may be pretty when done well, but its purpose is to write faster mainly, beauty is secondary. And when you're writing a note, speed isn't that important. Further, if you want it readable, very few people's handwriting beats a printer.
Personally, I was taught to write in cursive before I was taught the "standard" letters. That makes writing in cursive easier and faster for me. Compared to how long it takes others to take notes in class, I'd say it does make a positive difference in speed over printing letters. That said, I can't counteract the "ugly" argument...when taking notes in classes with professors that use powerpoint and dont post them on the web (wtf?), I end up having to write too fast and parts of it are difficult for me to read back myself (although at least I do get them, while a lot of people end up with incomplete notes)
That said...the loss of this ability may cause us to finally see innovations in a system that hasn't changed in a very long time. I would love to have, for example, an "electronic notepad". As many people have mentioned before in other articles, taking notes with a laptop makes it difficult when you have to enter equations and drawings...it'd also be too heavy for what I have in mind. I'd like something that would completely replace the notebook--making it easy for me to enter my notes, and having them in electronic format. That would provide benefits such as a keyword search feature to help finding that elusive thing you know you jotted down, but just can't find it anywhere in your notes.
I know that something like that would never happen while there is an alternative cheap solution such as bringing pen to paper. But if the next generation does not become proficient in it, I may have a chance of seeing it in my lifetime.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
there are not that many people left that can write on clay tablets either. nor are there many people around that can memorize entire books. when something stops being useful it will disappear quickly.
Apparently, you can't spell "teh" correctly, either!
Nothing sets my heart racing like a note from a girl written in neat cursive. Does that make me old or weird?
for, um.. ok maybe signatures.
I learned cursive in first and second grade, decided it was useless, and promptly forgot it.
Somewhere along the line I forgot how to write readable print as well. The only time I find myself printing anything is when I'm writing and signing a check. I cant read my handwriting at all, its useless.
Maybe the acceptance of tablet computers will make writing nescessary again.
TallGreen CMS hosting
Hey, as a teen (17) I can say that the reason of me completely forgetting to write in cursive is due to the fact that after they taught to me, they never made me use it again! I simply forgot about it. So the IM scapegoat is out for me.
It is sad that there is probably an entire industry revolving around those rubber triangles teachers forced kids to put on their pencil so they learned the "proper" way to hold it.
Exactly. Damn cursive handwriting. I sucked at it in elementary school, and my mom would make me spend all this time outside of class practicing it. Who really gives a damn? I've been in the job world for over 10 years now, and never ONCE have I seen a cursive letter sent by ANYONE.
So cursive goes the way of the microfiche? Good riddance. I'll be happy the day they take it out of schools, and start using that time to teach kids something useful with it instead. (I mean, not like they will, but there's always hope, right?) Typing is faster, easier to read, and takes far less time to learn.
Good luck finding new jobs, all ye who work at the Society for Cursive Writing.
Netjak.com independent reviews of domestic & import video ga
When my kindergardener brought home his first writing exercises I thought something was wrong with him. The letters were disjointed but with curved tails on each one. It turns out that they now teach a printed-cursive hybrid thing to kids in my small town. Its difficult for me to read this stuff...poor kids.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
The rest of the worlds handwriting will be as bad as my doctors!!
I got a D in handwriting in the 3rd grade. Not that I was a more competent touch typist. I just was too bored to write page after page of loops, lines, and whorls.
Eventually, I learned to type (on a manual typewriter). Now I can type much faster than I can write with a pen.
As I grew up, my handwriting was always a mess, although architecture school taught me to letter legibly (yes, before CAD).
I never cared about my illegible handwriting until I broke my collar bone. Now my illegible writting is puncuated with spastic jerky lines.
Many decades ago I attended Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, an all boys, public high school with an engineering curriculum. We had many years of mechanical drawing and were required to print everything as a way to improve our technique. Despite the course, all assignments had to be printed. As a consequence, I loss the ability to write cursive. As I went on to college, grad school, and several careers I regretted that loss. Trying to take notes in school, in business or technical meetings proved impossible and my printing suffered too as I tried to keep up with the flow. I do think cursive writing is important because of the problems I had without it. Despite all the advances in technology over these decades, there are so substitutes for a fast mind and a fast pen.
I think I speak for all of us, when I say, with all heartfelt feeling, "Who the hell cares?"
Oh no! Little Johnny can't write cursive!
Will cursive help you get a job? No.
Will cursive improve your life? Unlikely.
Will cursive help you find a mate? Possible, but unlikely.
Will anyone except an anal english teacher care that you can't write cursive? No.
Honestly, the ability to type rapidly, with few mistakes, is far more valuable today than it ever has been before. Gone are the days when your executive assistant was the only one who needed to know how to type. Now EVERYONE has to know. So the sooner they start learning, the better.
Most of you are like me, terrible at cursive. I actually have (comparatively) good handwriting for a computer geek, legacy of my flirtation with the liberal arts. Does it help me? No. Do I ever use it? No. So, I say again, who cares?
I may type with only 5 or 6 fingers at a time, but I type FAST. The hammering of the keys on my old-fashioned finger-buster keyboard blends into a hyper-staccato clicking symphony! I am a product of the modern age! A self-taught keyboard prodigy!
And nobody cares that I can't write cursive.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
My family moved to another school district that taught regular print, and I was suddenly failing my handwriting classes because I was writing my letters with curly-cues!! So, I suddenly had to re-learn how to write in print. I never really learned cursive very well, because I was still struggling with printing! Thankfully, once I reached Junior High, I was allowed to bring in typed papers instead of writing them in cursive. I've been typing since I was 5, and we were always one of the few families who actually had a computer growing up.
When we had to do essays in class, I was screwed. I was marked down all the time for my handwriting up through high school. I haven't used cursive since. For quite a while, I even printed my name instead of signing in cursive. My print is STILL horrible by most people's standards.
So damn you, Mr. Denelian!!
i'm the jedidiahmarkfoster your parents warned you about
Try writing a few coherent paragraphs within 30 minutes, and see how much your hand hurts with printing.
Printing requires that you lift the pen/pencil off the page for each letter. That gets really annoying and hard on your hands real fast. Cursive gives you a fluent motion to write all the letters and only lift the pen between words (and dotting i's and crossing t's). That's the whole purpose of it.
I'm quite surprised you never noticed that, or perhaps you just haven't ever written by hand any significant amount of words. If you had you'd notice that cursive really is that much more efficient and easier on the hands than printing.
Now it's a whole other story whether in today's world with palmtops and laptops whether it's useful to still have cursive. But when you claim cursive has no advantags over printing, either you have some bizarre way of writing or just haven't done that much of it.
make world, not war
(the text messagers out there should get it at least)
"I'm a leaf on the wind. Watch how I soar."
-Hoban Washburn
OK, would someone please DEFEND cursive? All the top-ranking posts here are DOWN with cursive. Might as well be burning crosses, here.
Then, please, someone mod up the defence.
Not that I'm defending cursive. No way. No how. Good riddance, I say. I just want to hear an argument in favor of it.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Being left handed, I have a more difficult time legibly writing cursive (and even print) than right handers. I for one am glad that typing is now an option because now people can actually read what I have to say. If any future professor of mine wants to preserve my handwriting abilities by requiring handwritten assignments, okay, you can try to read it on your own time. Cursive, by the way, isn't any faster to write for me. My printing has (d)evolved into a quick, connected mess that works well for quick notetaking and is mostly legible for me at least.
On vit, on code et puis on meurt.
I don't know if it's due to being on the computer since I was five, but over the years my handwriting has gone from normal, to quickly scribbled upper-case letters.
It might just be personal preference. For some reason I've never enjoyed writing lower-case letters.
I too had calassesso that i could leaersn to ype relaly fast.
I'ts great becasue you cantype long letters really faset.
my sig
so how come the sales of writing instruments (pen, pencils etc) is increasing steadily? According to WIMA, the sales have increased every year from 1995-2000 (all of the years for which the site has data).
Even in dollar terms, the sales have mostly increased steadily (only one year shows downward trend).
...is signing my own name.
Or rather, I did once, when I first started signing things. My signature has been about the same since about 1994 -- a vaguely readable mash of letters that, several generations of signatures earlier, was my name in cursive. (The only reason I can still write a cursive capital F is because my last name starts with one.)
Which raises the question: how will the cursive-deprived kids of tomorrow sign their names? Printing? An arbitrary but consistent scribble? L33t-5p33k? Or will we have computerized authentication for everything by that time?
I was born and raised in Virginia, and cursive was taught to me from an early age. And, do you know what? it's a lot faster. People complain about how slow cursive is, because many students never take the time to actually get good at it. I mean, listen to how many people on here say that they never used it except when they had to, and stopped immediately after 3rd or 4th grade. Small wonder they never got to any reasonable speed with it! That's like expecting somebody who hates computers, and never uses them except when forced by their work, to type at a faster speed than they can write. Cursive was made to look decent, sure, but its primary intended goal was speed, plain and simple. And while there are some unneccesary things, cursive is faster by virtue of the fact that there are substantially less strokes of the pen involved; you can write entire words without lifting it once. You can write the word 'write', for example with one stroke plus one more for the dot and line, instead of the 6 it woujld otherwise take. When your pen never leaves the word, you can continue writing without looking at the paper since you don't have to re-orient the tip.
And on top of all that, being able to write decently in cursive has many analogs in other applications. Take drawing, for example. Do you think so many people would complain about being unable to draw if they'd spend all of their grade school and middle school years forced to write in neat loops of an identical height? Or soldering. My ability to hold an iron steady, and do fine manipulations, would be way worse if I hadn't had all that practice in precision with a pen (or pencil, crayon, what have you).
It really bothers me when people slam cursive just because they never motivated their lazy asses to use it beyond when they were forced to, and compare their lack of proficiency in one to something they've been using their whole lives instead.
---- I'll take you in a Hunt deathmatch any day.
It always felt to me like a handwritten letter carried more sentimental value than anything over email. When I handwrite a letter, it feels like I'm mulling over each word a bit longer.
Oh, and does anyone else notice how most posts here start with dick size comparisons -- people bragging about their typing skill? For example, people seem to be writing, "When I was 6, I already had a computer, and could type 1 billion words per minute! Even in C!"
The upcoming generation's ability to handle an ox-cart, shoe a horse, shoot a bow and arrow to hunt food for susitenence, and speak in ancient Sumerian in serious jeopardy as well.
So once we get these critical skills back into school cirriculum, and have THAT crisis handled, I'll worry about the cursive bit.
My two year old hasn't yet figured out how to use the computer printer to write all over the freshly-painted walls of my house!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Pencil is a tool, a tool like a keyboard.
who cares if child can't handwrite anymore.
Actually it embarrasses me a bit too. I look at how my cursive writing is now if I attempt to do it and it honestly looks like a child's handwriting. Truly awful. When I was at school I always had trouble with cursive (any other left handers out there who found it difficult to deal with?) and my writing was terrible and after a while I gave up and just used to print everything. Even worse I printed (and still do print) everything as different sized capitals.
And then I got to use a Sinclair ZX81 (marketted as a Timex in the US I believe). Eight years old and my handwriting was a writeoff. It didn't hit me then but when I got the BBC Micro and a dot matrix a while later it did: no more handwriting pain for me!
I'm now in my 30s and my handwriting still makes me squirm when I have to do it. It still looks like an 8 year olds and I'm sorry to break it to some people here, but there are times in the real world when you just need to be able to write using a pen or pencil and trying to disguise crappy handwriting doesn't really cut it.
The point I'm getting to in a very roundabout way here is, I don't think people should be quite as glib as many are being here about good riddance to cursive or the 'get with the 21st century' type comments. Cursive is where we came from and to an extent where we still are. If you're without your desktop, laptop or PDA, what are you going to rely on? That shouldn't be forgotten so lightly or willingly.
How old are you?
Poor comparison - you're talking about different transmission methods and the loss of a tangible object (the card).
Better comparison - a Personally Written Hallmark Card with a greeting vs. a Personally Designed/Clip-Arted and Typed Card, printed out on nice card-stock. Then, the only difference is that one is handwritten and the other is typed - but both are cards that the person can save and cherish.
Add in the fact that you could even sign the card by hand - signatures are not going away, and this article doesn't even hint at that.
Now, which is more personal and likely to be cherished? A Hallmark card with a handwritten note, or a (even an e-Hallmark card) with a typed note, printed out on card stock, and signed?
When you get to a comparison like that - probably both equally. As always, it's the thought that counts, and there's a signifigantly less amount of thought and effort put into choosing an e-card than a real card... add that effort and thought back in with a personalized and printed card, and they're equal once more.
-T
Is there a good reference somewhere on the web for diagramming sentences? I learned how long ago, but can't remember the finer details.
I gave cursive writing a good try, but decided I didn't like it. So as soon as they stopped requiring it, I stopped. I print everything now that I have to write. (Which isn't much. The most complicated things I write more than once a month are checks and rebate forms.)
The only thing I write in cursive now is my signature.
So, what I'm saying is that cursive is already dead :)
I am left handed & was forced to write in cursive with my right hand when I was young - god knows why! - but as far as I can remember I have preferred typing, I have even been known to feed post-it notes through the printer at work. Most people can type significantly faster than they can scrawl onto paper. I don't have a problem with the dissapearance of cursive - it's difficult to write and near impossible to read sometimes. And have you tried to OCR someones coursework when it's in cursive! It's not like we are loosing our ability to write - we are simply catching up with our lifestyles. As long as we raise the next generations not to rely too heavily on the spellcheck button, then there's no harm in sacrificing cursive for a nice .txt file.
I'm the same age, and my handwriting sucked as well. Why?
a) I'm lazy, and didn't care
b) I don't have a natural aptitude for it
c) They didn't teach it in a way that interested me.
Now, they can just blame it on computers.
A year ago I started studying penmanship. I can sit down and slowly write some half decent spencerian. It takes effort and concentration, and some hand muscles and movements I'm not used to.. but it looks great. And it shows up in my normal writing now, too.
So really, if you want kids to write well, teach them to write well. Pretty simple.
School needs to be more integrated. We had classes where the teachers demanded handwritten assignments, not typewritten. THe idea is that in one class, you practice skills from another.
It's dumb for, say, math class to give you problems to solve that relate to nonsensical things like "If a blue star is 5000 degrees C, and a red star is 3000 degrees C, how many degree is 3 blue stars and 4 red stars?". Sure, anyone can derive a forumla out of it.. bu tother than the pure math, the question is nonsense.. you don't add up temperatrues like that, it has no meaning in the real world. Why not ask a question about somethign MEANINGFUL, related to chemistry, or physics.. even if you haven't taught the concepts yet. School needs to tie together more closely, handwriting included.
I've been working with computers and keyboards since I was about six. I only knew how to write about a year or two before I knew how to type. I spend hours per day mudding, and communicate online more than any other medium. I'm also fortunate to have one of the cell phones with AOL Instant Messenger enabled for free, and almost spend as much time on AIM as I do actually talking.
At this point, my average typing speed hovers around 70-80, peaking around 125. (This is mostly a result of years of mudding.)
I knew how to type about 5-6 years before I learned cursive.
I have no problem writing cursive whatsoever.
Typing on a keyboard for hours daily, many multiples of the amount of time I spend writing cursive, has not degraded in the slightest my ability to write legible cursive.
While I can't honestly claim that I've been using a cell phone since I was nine, I'd like to know how many nine year olds have cell phones? Either way, use of my cellphone in recent years, as well as my keyboard for my entire life, hasn't ruined my ability to hold a pencil properly.
Even if you can only type, you can still write in cursive - these guys will sell you the fonts!
Looking at that picture of 'cursive' writing in the article, I don't think I've ever seen anyone write like that, though. I guess it is a uniquely American way or something. Who cares what handwriting looks like anyway?
is an excuse for imbeciles to persecute truly dysgraphic geeks and nerds.
I learned cursive in third grade.
By seventh grade, my teachers were telling me to stop turning papers in that were written in cursive, as "every form and everything in the real world says PLEASE PRINT CLEARLY"
Is writing in cursive outdated? I know I haven't written anything in cursive in about 10 years, and I'm not sure if I could "flow" in cursive...
Is this about whether people can write by hand in a aesthetically appealing (or at least clear) way, or about whether they can write at all?
If it's the former, then frankly who the crap cares? Really. I can't read Latin. I was taught it in school, but I've fogotten it now. My father and grandfathers could read it pretty well.
I can't make boats out of tree bark either, nor can I cure my own bacon.
What the hell does it matter if I can feed and clothe myself by other means?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Someone should just write the source of the linux kernel in "proper" handwriting!
...it was because it can, should there be any use for cursive then it should survive, if there is no use for it, it will die. People should not be worried about it dying, we will get around the problem, and probably become more efficient at the same time
.sigs are for losers
omfg!!1 ur teh nerdz!!! wtf no1 carez about yuor cursing writing.lolololol. everywon ims on teh cells wirting is to slow!!!!@
cu l8r
Why even bother posting this on Slashdot? Being that everyone who reads /. is a wanna-be-techie or a true-to-life-techie, the only responses that we're going to see are of the obvious "Good ridance" type.
So, when do we see a movement to ditch the old-fashioned QWERTY keyboard and move to something better there, too?
Man, am I really that much older than most other slashdotters (I'm 27)? Didn't you guys have to answer essay questions and the like for your exams in history or English (or other) class?
Try writing any amount of text in 30 minutes. If you print it you have to lift your pen off the paper for each letter. it looks nice but is a pain and takes long to make it look nice. Cursive was specifically invented to allow people to write entire words without lifting the pen off the page. You have nice fluid motion that really is much nicer on your wrist and hands. And it's much faster to boot. This fact should be readily apparent to most people that have hand-written any significantly-sized composition.
As for term papers and the like, of course those will be written on computers. But for things like tests and other cases you aren't near a computer, you don't have a computer with you (at least wherever I've been). Regarding palmtops, what's faster? Cursive or writing in grafiti/ink?
Evolve or die.
Of course there's evolution. The fact that there is significantly less handwriting right now doesn't mean it still doesn't have it's use or place. But that's a whole different issue. Cursive DOES have a purpose, and that is to provide an easier way to write than 'printing'. It is FASTER and MORE FLUID than printing is.
Anyways, my point is. Cursive is useless. I know no one who actually uses it, in a professional common manner.
And my whole point is those two statements are apples and oranges. Cursive is (or at least was) not useless. But you are correct that it is being used less and less today.
Eventually as palmtops become more ubiquitous, and if the companies can get past their IP bullshit to settle on a superior standard for handwriting technology beyond grafiti/ink (sacrifice money for betterment of society? Unlikely, but I can still dream), then perhaps that new method for representing the letters will be taught in the gradeschools.
But there are (at least for me) many many cases where I still handwrite. I am currently in the process of buying a house with my girlfriend, and when we meet with real-estate agents and sellers we need to jot notes down quickly. Cursive really is much faster than printing. Same when I take notes at the physics seminars here at my university, cursive note-taking is really much much faster than printing. and much easier on my hands.
make world, not war
Normally when you write a Q you start at the bottom of the circle and draw it clockwise, stopping again at the bottom. Then you draw the tail.
Two of the main rules of cursive are: make a continuous line and be artsy.
So, what you do is start your circle about halfway up the left side. Start with a little curly-loop just like you do on all capital letters. And make sure you don't pick up your pen when you finish the circle and draw the tail.
See, now it looks like a 2.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Cursive is only good for my signature.
Regardless of the fact I've always hated writing in cursive, it is a completely impractical writing style in this day and age. Few people ever get good at it, and I'm utterly sick of trying to decipher seemingly encrypted sloppy cursive Chirstmas cards and thank-you notes.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
is replaced with word selection, thought, and more consistent interaction. Handwriting requires the transmission of a physical object, sometimes over large distances. What one author exclaims as the nostalgia of receiving a handwritten message from a friend overseas seems trivial considering the sender could have died before the letter was received.
What typing really does is place the burden on the sender, not the recipient. If the sender wants a message to contain emotion, he or she must deliberately embed it either through word choice or punctuation forms.
Furthermore, language is expressed more clearly. The content of a communication is limited to word choice, sentence structure, etc. rather than the recipient straining to draw meaning from pen strokes or through coffee stains.
I was surprised to learn that my nieces and nephews in New Zealand are not learning cursive writing in school. The teachers felt it's unneccessary. What a shame, IMO.
What you've been told is a bunch of bullshit. For one thing, it's illegal to discriminate against someone just because they're illiterate. Hence, signing 'X' on a contract is perfectly legal, if that's how you sign your name.
:)
People that force you to use cursive to write your signature are just so unhappy with their lives that they need to exert what little power they have in order to get through their day.
(This coming from someone who signs only the first initial of his first name. Hey, I signed something like 500 letters a day for several years, and it's a hard habit to break
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I never liked cursive writing. I never knew why they were so concerned that we learn to use it in school. Reading other people's cursive is almost as difficult as reading my own. The solution? Write the regular way, the way they tought you in kindergarten.
I never knew that Americans are the sole users of handwriting.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
At last the world will fall into my hands. My evil plots no longer will need to be protected by PGP encryption, or one-way hashes, or anything that the NSA has already cracked wide-open.
No, all I need do is write my accursed plans down in cursive, and no one in the world will be able to read a word of it! At last the planet is mine! Ahahahahahahaha!!!!!
The very discussion of this thread on /. is bound to be biased. This is a community, after all, that prides itself on geekiness. Find some artsies, and ask them what they think .. ;)
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"
His emotional attachment to letters is dependent on their physical medium AND the style in which they were written?
Michael Sull, a 54-year-old artist in Overland Park, Kan., says today's third graders have not developed proper forearm and hand musculature, seated posture or mental discipline.
Sit down any good joystick jockey and this guy in a First Person Shooter and we'll see who doesn't have muscular control and mental discipline. Its comparing apples and oranges either way.
"If you need to relay information immediately and have just a half-second to grab anything, maybe just a napkin, penmanship is so valuable," Sull says. "It doesn't rely on batteries or power. It's like breathing - it's always with you."
He must have a pencil built into his finger if he's never in a position where he can't write anything down. I'd also like to see him carry the amount of paper it would take to store the equivalent amount of data as a Palm Pilot carries or even better a laptop. Fax machines are also not as widespread as email so its not likely he could quickly send his handwritten document to anyone he wanted in a very small period of time, his whole argument here is void.
I haven't been able to write in cursive for about 10 years, except for my signature -- and that is nothing more than literally a horizontal line with a couple of waves in it.
I'm a 27 year old Computer Scientist, and I have lately noticed that my handwriting skills are deteriorating. The very few times I have to write something with a pen and paper I feel wierd because I notice that I'm writing slower and worse than I think I did a few years ago.
Sindri Traustason.
I never really did understand why people feel that spell checkers are a danger. I have actually become a better speller since I have been using computers. This has become even more true since various word processors started underlining misspelled words. I really can't stand to have those underlines all over the place, so I check the spelling. After seeing the correct spelling for a word when I am actually paying attention to the spelling helps me to spell the word correctly from that point on. Now that online dictionaries are so easily available, if I don't have a spell checker available and I think that I have spelled a word wrong, I will do a quick search on an online dictionary. This is so much easier and more conveniant than getting out a physical dictionary and looking the word up.
Of course, I really do agree with the above poster that made the statement regarding IM being a danger to grammer, sentance structure, and spelling. I think that being a good writer (grammer, spelling, and sentance structure along with the whole process of puting thoughts down on paper) is very important in the technological age, and is a skill that I need much improvement on.
To get back on topic, people who argue that putting such an emphasas on typing is bad because of penmanship seem to be afraid that the skills that they are good at (writing beautifully in cursive) will become obsolete. Now don't get me wrong, penmanship isn't bad or unneeded. Penmanship is an artform, and just like any other artform it is something that is good for athetics (right brained stuff), but that doesn't mean that we should shun typing.
...interesting if true.
I personally can't wait until Cursive writing is gone. For a really good article on the subject check out this web site: http://www.agt.net/public/rali/RALI_VOL1_No2_PART3 .html (scroll down a bit).
Here's an excerpt:
1. IT'S FASTER
No, it isn't. Anything we practise for many years naturally becomes faster. This is not to say that practice always makes perfect. Practice makes permanent. Slow illegible cursive writing becomes fast illegible cursive writing. Research shows that printing is as fast as cursive writing; there is economy of movement - no retracing. And, as regards legibility, there is no contest. Why else does every form we fill out say: Please Print. Imagine the speed, to say nothing of the legibility, if we constantly practised printing for twelve years instead of just the first two.
2. YOU CAN'T PRINT YOUR SIGNATURE
Yes, you can. In fact, handwriting experts say a printed signature is more difficult to forge than a handwritten one.
3. IT'S MORE ADULT
Really? This sounds like a mature rationale: Let's learn handwriting because it's more grown-up.
4. CURSIVE WRITING ENABLES A UNIQUENESS OF STYLE TO BE DEVELOPED
Certainly everyone adds flourishes and embellishments - often the source of illegibility - to their writing style to establish its uniqueness (contrary to what is recommended in the curriculum guide) and this would occur - though to a far lesser extent - with manuscript. But the essential point is that the separation of the letters in printing would ensure legibility is retained. Printing styles would vary no more than prints fonts vary in word processors. e.g. Monaco, Times, Helvetica...
5. THE CONTINUOUS FLOW OF HANDWRITING ALLOWS MORE PEN CONTROL FOR THOSE STUDENTS WITH POOR FINE MOTOR COORDINATION
I doubt this is the case. Raising the pen momentarily allows for a re-positioning and re-alignment of the next letter in a sequence - a corrective feedback process. Once tracking is skewed with handwriting, the misalignment continues to be accentuated.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
My boyfriend was cross eyed as a child and no one realized that he had larger vision problems. Although I have neat handwriting, he can't read it. His own handwriting looks like it was written by Homer Simpson. Because he couldn't see, he never learned to write all that well, nor recognize it. So handwriting disappearing is not necessarily a bad thing...no one uses cuniform any more :-)
I find plenty of (older) people at work, that can't write worth a damn. I however, even after typing A LOT and very fast, am still able to write both printing and cursive very legibly and quickly.
I had horrible handwriting back in 1961. Being a computer jock hasn't helped, either.
Someone you trust is one of us.
... and ask, "Who cares?" Like everyone else it seems, my educational career involved about 2 years of mandatory cursive (around grades 2 and 3) after which teachers didn't care. If I was presented with a feather and a little cup of ink I would have all sorts of trouble, but it doesn't seem to hurt me much in my college education which is paid for and in which I have a 4.0. The ability to type everything (be it formal papers, personal letters, or virtual post-its) on a computer is an advancement in technology. Like many other people here I'm sure, I can type ~110 words per minute. I don't see how that would be humanly possible writing cursive with a pen and paper, so what's so wrong with it?
Cursive writing was invented, to the best of my knowledge, in order to speed up the ordeal of getting things on paper; for most people, writing out each letter is tediously slow. "Lettering" (such as that found in fancy documents, ala The Declaration of Independence) was relegated to more formal tasks, while today's "text" was for labeling things, ease of use understanding, and every-day use (such as on signs and notes on the washboard for Mom).
Now, with a nearly universal advent of computers, there's little need for 'cursive', as you can type many, many times faster and more legibly than you can write in cursive. Cursive is an anachronism.
Personally, I'm glad cursive is on its way out. In grade school, I always hated it - I could write faster with my handwriting (which was more of a script anyway, but it wasn't "cursive"), and would cramp my hand like a mofo. As soon as they stopped forcing us to use it, I was done and through with it. Now I use it for is my name, relegating any handwriting to either palm grafiti (on paper, yes - at least something closely approximating it) for my own personal scribblings, or simple engineer's lettering (those of you that don't know what that is, it's basically blocky, all-capital letters).
If you need something fancy, that's what laserjets are for. Sure, there's still room for things like caligraphy, but that sure as hell isn't cursive.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
I haven't written in cursive since middle school. I can't even write my name in cursive very well. I just do the first letter and then squiggle.
"a uniquely American form of expression"...
hmmm...I don't recall handwriting being a uniquely American thing. I'm fairly sure that billions use handwriting every day as a means of expression.
Woot.
Many colleges will, if asked ahead of time, permit you to take a test at a computer if you show that you're having a physical problem with writing out the answers. It's not something that it would be all that hard to get a doctor's note regarding.
Why do they think it'll take a couple of decades? I'd say give it a few more months and no one under the age of 18 will even know what cursive means!
Yeah, and when I was going through school we no longer knew how to use slide rules, and I remember how the old fogeys used to lament that. And we no longer remember how to chisel on stone tablets either. This doesn't bother me one bit. What matters is the language comprehension, not the tool used to write. I think the advent of computers increases literacy by giving kids and incentive to practice reading.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Wow, it looks like people on /. hate cursive more than SCO and Microsoft! Every bitch rant gets modded up, unlike many anti-M$ rants.
Now I will post the phone number and address of my 3rd grade teacher...
Patent: from Latin patere, to be open
The original article is such fluff and (obviously?) with the audience of /. it's sure to raise a million "who cares?" responses and little/any counterargument.
5
Simoniker, how about sticking with tech news that matter? See http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/06/02/20320
Anyways, cursive will go the way of calligraphy and illustrated manuscripts...It will be an art, not a skill. No loss, I say.
Additionally, it's much better for people with wrist problems, since ideally the wrist is held straight and all the movement comes from the elbow and upper arm.
Or at least that's what my grandfather learned from his schoolmaster, who used to whack his arm with a ruler whenever he bent his wrist. I only use cursive for my signature, and that's mostly illegible.
Absolutely the same for me - I married my wife about two years ago, and before that we'd known each other for something like ten years. I have every note, letter, email, etc. that I ever sent her, because it's all electronic. Heck, I can even go back and look at the revisions and laugh at some of the stupid crap I thought about saying. It's an interesting archive of my thought processes at the time. 14+ years of back documents, 10+ years of back emails, etc. All neatly stored, and all still accessible (for the email, thank you Eudora for being able to handle my 2+Gb mail data directory.)
The few messages between us on paper have mostly now deteriorated from acidic paper and age. The paper is brittle, the ink is faded, and in some cases poor storage conditions has led to varmits thinking they were food items and eating the corners.
As for cursive, it's still marginally useful for some things. Signing your name. Yup, that's the only example I can come up with. My handwriting was always horrid, mainly because I saw no reason to improve it. It's legible by most people, but I don't inflict them with it - almost everything I put out is typed. I don't even use it for notes to myself - my back-of-napkin design scribblings are typically printed, because it's faster and easier for me to read later.
Personally, I wish the schools would spend more time on using grammar and how to clearly, precisely, and concisely express a thought. I'm not terribly great at it, and I wish they'd put the wasted handwriting time into those subjects instead.
As a side note, I'm an engineer, and I still enjoy the art of hand-drawn schematics, but unfortunately what used to be my neat block printing has gone to hell as well.
I seem to be in the minority here. I find cursive to be much faster than block lettering. As a matter of fact, I've lost my lowercase character set when block printing, and I have to "render" them as "graphics" (in other words, I have to think about how they are written, rather than it just being automatic). If I have to do a lot of handwriting, I find that I get cramps faster when block printing, than using cursive.
What I find more disturbing is that I occasionally find myself using Graffiti symbols instead of the actual block letters.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
While backspace is useful, it has a reasonably fast counterpart in handwriting: erasing. When I write without a computer, and even sometimes when I speak, I find that what I miss are ctrl+left, ctrl+shift+right, and sometimes clipboard commands. I don't think up sentences linearly enough to be able to write them without using ctrl+left (etc) several times per sentence. (Some people wonder why most of my typos in AIM are missing or extra words rather than misspelled words...)
The shareholder is always right.
Really now, where do some of you get off saying that nobody handwrites anything any more? I can understand not writing in printed cursive like you learned in 1st grade, but "running writing" is still an important part of my life.
I work in a group of 9 artists and we turn out something like 500-1000 hand-drawn images per week between us. When we do a rough design sketch, nothing is quicker for us than handwriting the description under the image. It's somebody else's job to scan and type what we've written into our design database.
How the heck does "all school students" suddenly become "all tech workers"??
Back to drawin' plush dogs...
I cant write at all (as a matter of fact I have a clinical diagonoses from a psyhcologist something called dysgraphia?) , any ways I can say for sure that I can type much faster than most of my peers can write. Why should typing be a bad thing? If I can input information faster into a computer rather than writting out on deadtree materail then that is a good thing.
As a high schooler, I can tell you that the popularity of cursive handwriting is definently slim. I'd estimate that only 10% of my school (which has even made it onto those top high school lists in various magazines) could write out a-z, A-Z in cursive. Cursive simply isn't taught properly. I received only a month of cursive instruction in elementary school, and while I may have learned the alphabet at the time I wasn't comfortable enough to casually write with it.
Personally, cursive has scorned me. In first grade my school taught a trasitional form of writing, it was a mix of cursive and printing. It was supposed to ease us into cursive. My school abandoned the concept the next year, and to this day my handwriting is terrible because of this educational experiment.
Cursive just isn't practical. In the right hands is it faster? Sure. Does it look more dignified? Sure. However the major downfall is that it's hard for people to interpret the cursive of others. The majority of my teachers grade assignments in cursive, and it may take my entire lunch table to help me decrypt what on earth was written. Printing on the other hand, has a much more unified form that can quickly be assimilated in the brain.
Well, I suppose that it's not very surprising that "kids these days" don't know how (or don't want) to write in cursive. It's also not surprising that most of the posts to this topic are poorly-written. I found more grammatical errors than posts in my brief survey. As engineering-oriented people, we're famous for reducing the number of keystrokes required to issue a command, and we love brevity and compact code. Most engineers cannot write a complete sentence, or even spell the words correctly, let alone write in cursive script. The same is true for most doctors and scientists, so at least the company is good, right? Having worked in law for awhile, I found that nearly every lawyer I worked with (male or female) had great penmanship, if they lowered themselves to going without the dictaphone for a day. It's odd, but the right-brain/left-brain thing may account for this.
... so totally undecipherable that he often can't read it, himself ... forced me to put in ten pages of handwriting practice every week -- all through grade school. While my hand has become timeworn and ragged, I can still pen off a REAL LIVE LETTER to anyone I want and have it be legible. I hated handwriting practice, but it did make me a much faster writer than a typist, and I think more while I write than I do while I type.
I do find the decline of cursive a bit troubling. I learned it like everyone else: over a few years in primary school. My writing has decended into a mish-mash of printing and cursive, but it is much more legible than anyone I work with, or anyone I'm related to. My dad, whose handwriting is totally inscrutable
Pleased to be in the minority on this one, but handwriting is a valuable skill, and it really should be taught. How else can someone attempt to decipher the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution?
-- R
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Right now, people in Japan are complaining about how computers are ruining kid's abilities at writing.
Except it's worse, because while there's not much difference in content between a written sentence and a typed one in English, there is in Japanese. The children aren't learning the more difficult kanji, instead spelling things out in kana--which removes a layer of meaning.
Typing is a more efficient method of communication; it should be embraced (it would be regressive to do otherwise). Naturally, handwriting will become less common - but this also became true of horseback riding after automotive transportation was invented.
People have even started using txt shorthand for school essays, as shown by this case from England earlier this year.
My problem with modern education is the way they start teaching version A of a topic, then they reach a point and switch to version B which is completely different from the original. Math, English, and handwriting are just examples of this.
I think what the real problem is that the culture has changed so radically in ten years that the things that the people in the article value (pretty handwriting, a thank you letter, the hand written Xmas family update) are no longer culturally relevant and they are scared.
the entire paragraph above is a single run on sentence. No, I am not a Perl programmer.
I found my inner child, then I got caught abusing it...
I like the rest of my third grade clas in '87 were forcably converted to cursive. It was the requires standard through 8th grade. I had (and still have) good ledgable printing skills but my handwriting is attrocious and it's not for lack of trying. By the time I got to Highschool most of my teachers were willing to let me print or type so they could read things. My grades went up, but it took a lot of effort to un-learn cursive.
I think teaching cursave is a great thing for those who have the ability to use it, but in todays age of computers, any thing long enough to require cursive is going to be typed. For students whom cursive is a hinderance to ledigibility, I say let them type or stick to printing. Most forms require that anyway right?
JFMILLER
Strive to make your client happy, not necessarly give them what they ask for
It is nice to have machines do your bidding.
Spend enough time moving on out to higher abstractions and labor intensive practices like penmanship become worthless.
Spend enough time moving on out to higher abstractions and you begin to know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Dude. When I was in elementary school, there was this thing called penmanship. It was enforced throughout everything we did. We had to handwrite everything. (Some students did have computers (it wasn't that long ago) but everything was done with pencils, pens and papers. You could type things if you were doing a fancy project and wanted to make an impact, but that was about it.) More importantly, teachers made sure that you actually wrote legibly. If you wrote an "O" that wasn't closed properly, they made you fix it. If you turned in something that wasn't legible, with proper spaces between letters and words, they made you redo it. If your math homework didn't have the numbers lined up properly, you got busted.
By the time I finished high school, computers started to become more widespread in schools and some teachers required essays to be typed. Now, I hear that teachers are requiring pretty much everything to be typed, which I think is an outrage. They're doing it because peoples' handwriting is so terrible that they don't want to try to read it... so they're compounding the problem by requiring people to do the very same thing that caused the problem in the first place.
The only way to solve this problem is to require everything in K-12 to be handwritten neatly. If the letters aren't all the same size; if the spaces between letters or words isn't right; if it isn't to the teacher's satisfaction, the paper should be returned to the student for rewriting... and the student loses points. People will HAVE to practice writing with pencils and paper.
Because you know what? This will cause the muscles in people's hands to develop for doing other tasks, and it will prevent all kinds of wrist problems. Not to mention that I firmly believe that the keyboard is on its way to the history books. Soon, you will NOT have to type at a keyboard to get shit done, and there will be other methods for doing work on a computer, even if it involves writing a lot. This isn't the 1800's, this is almost the year 2000. It's about time these friggen keyboards disappeared.
Guinness. Because friends don't let friends drink Bud Light.
Sometimes we have to write small segments of code for algorithms on paper. I never figured out how to properly print '{' or '}' For sets in in math writing I have the same problem. '&' is tricky for me to along with half of those greek letters (zeta gives me problems)
if this is true then in twenety years with the demise of cursive, where are all the new fonts gonna come from? are we doomed to live in a society dominated by 'times new roman'? dear lord someone think of the children!
where's the foot? how am I supposed to know this is a joke?
Where's that confounded Waterman?
This
That said, it would be off-topic, yet somewhat funny (worthy of perhaps a 'funny' mod) if you meant "cuneiform" or the ancient sumerian written language involving near-heiroglyphs on clay. This said because at any given time, no more than a handful of people in the world can read/translate cuneiform.
Now my attempt at humorous sarcasm: Everyone loves a joke of questionable merit or humor that is technically botched to the point that someone has to use heuristics to guess/explain why the reader should smirk/snort.
My writing was so bad they gave me a frickin computer to use in the third grade (coincidence?). I have my suspicions it was for a few different reasons, one of which was the fact I'm a lefty and the techniques they use to teach cursive to children was for right handed people, which would more then likely cause issues. They're essentially asking you to do all your stuff backwards, and don't think about it. Then again, my writing has as of yet to straighten out, and probably never will. My mom's a lefty, and she's got the same problem too btw.
Don't call my crazy, that's what they called me back in the home!
Frankly, I'm not sure being able to write with a pen is likely to matter too much longer. (I prefer writing over typing for making notes, but I was born before ARPAnet, much less personal computers and PDAs.)
What is disturbing is the steep decline in actual language skills. Most of my coworkers are unable to spell properly or form grammatical sentences. Many of them are unable to think clearly enough to communicate effectively even within the context of the pidgin dialect they speak. Granted, I work for a rather small and idiosyncratic company, but this was no less true when I was an Intel contractor.
Personally, it doesn't matter to me that my coworkers are semiliterate clods; it's actually an advantage for me. On the other hand, the general decline is making it harder for me to ensure that my daughter gets a decent education in the public schools, and I shudder to think that these people are voting, driving, and registering handguns.
As far as cursive is concerned, if you do plan to write with pen and paper, it's worth learning. Provided you practice enough to be good at it, you can write much faster in cursive than in regular script, which is why cursive was invented in the first place. I'm inclined to note that manual writing has a number of other advantages, but I doubt that they would appeal to anyone for whom those advantages are not self-evident.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Someone explain to me why this is a bad thing? I haven't used cursive writing since I was in second grade, and it hasn't hurt me one bit.
When I had to write by hand, I was very concise. I hated writing. If I could find a three word answer to a question, I would use it. I made every word count.
Now, I type almost all communication. I find that because of the ease and speed, I don't censor my thoughts... I just put down what I am thinking.
Multiply this effect by everyone you work with, and see what happens. Remember the idea of a "Paperless Office?" I now have to deal with easily 10x paper from before e-mail really became popular.
What do you want language to be... concise or verbose... a "brain dump," or carefully worded dialogue?
And most of us don't know how to throw a spear at a woolly mammoth either...
Some skills used to be important, but not anymore. I've read some very plausible sci-fi with advanced civilizations where most people don't know how to read or write at all, but it's not a problem.
-- the only thing we have to fear is really scary things
We read slashdot, so we did not get your joke. You'll have to explain.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
to prettify the world with curly goop. Stop them before it is too late. Viva keyboards! Death to the Loop-making Luddite arts. I wish doctors would type anyhow; their writing if F'd up even without computers.
Table-ized A.I.
Signatures can be any mark you like.. there is no requirement that it be your full name in cursive. It could be a pretty little picture of a flower... or an X. Doesn't matter, as long as it is verifiable. Look at all signatures by the same person, and they match.
As for ink well & nib.. not lifting the pen does help, but more importantly, it's less tiring on the hand. Lifting the pen all the time gets tiring... smooth writing only lifting the pen at the end of a word takes less effort, and you can write faster and longer. Now, there are naysayers who say this isn't so.. but those naysayers don't write with the proper attention to detail. If you follow the correct methods of writing, you can write fast and long, comfortably for hours.
"Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly"
This is rediculous bullshiite. That's about as valid as saying that listening to rock music diminishes one's ability to appreciate classical music.
It's not that typing hurts their writing skill. It's that they type instead of writing, therefore one gets better and the other atrophes. I can't even state in good faith in a passive context that "typing and cellphones have ruined my ability to write legibly." If I can't write legibly, it's because I don't try to.
So what if cursive writing is a dying art. Cuniform on clay tablets just isn't used as much as it used to be, either, and I don't see anyone making a big deal about it.
;)
As a kid, I didn't really care for cursive writing in the first place. And the style that's been taught in the majority of American schools in the 20th century was just an arbitrary form of writing anyway. What if educators had settled on teaching something else instead?
So I just can't bring myself to care if cursive dies out altogether. The only use I see for learning it is so that you can read someone else's handwriting if you need to.
If I ever have to jot a note by hand myself, I don't use cursive. I print it. It's faster for me than trying to write in cursive. I don't think Palm's Graffiti has anything to do with it...
What a freaking whiner. As for text not having the passion of cursive, who gives a damn? The passion is in the words. As for cursive being more arty or beautiful, hogwash. Well placed text on a nice website can be freaking gorgeous. Someday humanity will get over the disease of nostalgia. I can't wait. Things change. They always have. I hope they always will.
As for the methods younger people, and older people employ to write, who cares again? Again, language changes and English is certainly the most mutatable language in the world. It's supposed to change.
Has anyone noticed that no one writes an f as the first s in any word? No. Who cares? Other than the President of that association.
-
...HOOKED ON PHONICS!!!!
Dolemite
__________________
Save the World! Use a Quote!
R.I.P. -- Cursive, Zapf Chancery, and Tekton
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
Some people find cursive easier than cursive, some find it harder. Cursive may have fewer pen-lifts, but it requires keeping careful control of the pen for longer periods of uninterrupted time without a break. Drawing a long intricate sequence of continuous curves can be harder than drawing a collection of short, discrete strokes.
So to answer your question: I'm 35, and I have totally forgotten how to write in cursive. I printed in all my essays in college. Maybe I had a touch of dysgraphia, but I found cursive to be more trouble than it was worth. Cursive generally takes me twice as long to write and is half as legible as printing. It's been that way for as long as I can remember.
I play Nerd-Folk!
I rarely handwrite anymore, given that I can type as quickly as I can think and my hands don't cramp up nearly as much. When I am forced to write something out by hand, I tend to use certain programming structures as shortcuts to avoid actual words.
Ex:
+= or -= when balancing checkbook
|| && ! when jotting notes
And since I work a mindless retail job, none of the peons I work with can understand any of my self notes, thereby avoiding any nosy browsers who happen to "notice" it on the table.
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: Cursive is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered handwriting community when IAMPETH confirmed that the cursive market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all children. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that cursive has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Cursive is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in a recent comprehensive literary test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict cursive's future. The hand writing (printed) is on the wall: cursive faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for cursive because cursive is dying. Things are looking very bad for cursive. As many of us are already aware, cursive continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Calligraphy is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core penmen. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time calligraphers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: calligraphy is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Handwriting leader Theo states that there are 7000 literate people. How many users of cursive are there? Let's see. The number of literate versus cursive posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 cursive users. Cursive posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of printed posts. Therefore there are only about 700 users of cursive. A recent article put cursive at about 80 percent of the cursive market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 cursive writers. This is consistent with the number of Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Cursive Handwriting Lessons went out of business and was taken over by Write Cursive Good, who sell another troubled writing style. Now WCG is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that cursive has steadily declined in market share. cursive is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If cursive is to survive at all it will be among writing dilettante dabblers. cursive continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, cursive is dead.
Fact: cursive is dying
I've been using computers since I was 9 (and I'm now 34) and I can't write with a pen to save my life. The only time that it is a problem is in my country of origin where cover letters to any company must be handwritten otherwise they won't even consider you. Even for computer jobs. Guess why I work in the US ? (okay, it's not the only reason, they are always on strike, that's why)
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I couldn't write worth shit then, and I still can't write. That didn't have a thing to do about computers.
Hey I know some girls that do that. ;-)
real skilled, too.
Educators are also worried that kids aren't learning proper spear-making technique.
Shockingly, no one gives a fuck.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The Human Mind and Body are good at certain things and not others. Rembering Large amounts of info accuratly over a long time is hard for a human mind to do, We know if its written down (in ink or digital) we can rember where to find that info and reclaim it. Even the person with the best writing skills (is anyone listed in the book of records?) cannot beet the quality (legibility) and speed of an LCD/CRT display or ink/laser jet printer.
Education should be optimized for what humans can do best. People can do all kinds of complex math but how much time does it take to teach them that complex math, and how much less time does it take to teach them to use a calculator that does that complex math at the push of a few buttons. Once a calculator can be used think of the time they can save for every required calculation. I'm not saying don't teach any of the complex math we still need to have an understanding of what procces that calculor is going through.
I also am getting annoyed by people getting the urge to print everything.
Some kids have the excuese of my printer ran out of paper. To a professor this is unacceptable you could have e-mailed it to me or put it on a disk...
Your notary sounds clueless about her "job", which is to validate that *you* signed the document. If signatures intrinsically meant anything, she'd have no function.
I had a notary refuse to sign an letter-of-authorization allowing my wife to take our child on vacation out of the country. "It is not a legal document", she claimed. Er, yes, it is. I wrote it, and it grants a specific, limited power to my wife. It also happens to be a required piece of documentation in that circumstance. But to her, a "legal document" is written on a form or letterhead. The barrier-to-entry for a notary seems to be far too low for (my) comfort.
American cursive writing was created by the American educational system. The cursive script was taken from script from a silver engraver. Somehow this style of writing was adopted by the American educational system as the standard. Unfortunately, this style of writing is awkward and unnatural. Originally, Europeans wrote in a script called "italic". It was based on a writing style from Italian monks who perfected ergonomic writing thru years of transcribing manuscripts. This style is marked by curves and ligatures that are more natural to a human's style of writing. Studies have shown that people who forget the cursive style that they learned in school and gravitiate to what comes natural starting with printing as a base, write much faster and more legibly than those who adhere to the "cursive" style forced on them in school. I myself, after years of illegible handwriting, researched this and came across some wonderful books about he subject. These are: "Write Now" and "Italic Letters". These books opened my eyes to what I had intuitively come to realize: American cursive is unnatural and slow and people who define their own styles using natural human tendencies write more legibly and faster. I hope someday, that students will be taught the ergonomic "italic" style of writing in schools. They will learn to write much faster with less effort. I still remember in 5th grade a boy who had handwriting that looked like a seismigraph. The teacher would get so frustrated with him because he wouldn't write the traditional "American cursive" way. The teacher ended up giving him an "F" in writing. This is just ridiculous. Teachers should let children write in a style that is natural to each individual child instead of forcing them into an ornate, complicated, unnatural way of writing.
"Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
They got it backwards. I'll be 26 in July, and I got started with kebyards because I've never had neat handwriting and still don't seem to be able to hold a pen or pencil "correctly," no matter how much various teachers tried. Hell, I even remember the silly wire guide one of my teachers had me put my pencil into to teach me how to do it "properly." To this day my hand cramps up if I have to write for more than a minute or two. I knew that, if I ever wanted to communicate on paper clearly, I should use the typewriter and later the computer.
So I've never been a big fan of pen or pencil. It's not for a lack of manual dexterity, because I can type around 70 WPM (80+ on some days). And my poor handwriting was about the only thing my English teachers had to complain about. I'd be more concerned with avoiding sentence fragments and improper comma use than I am with the "dying" art of penmanship. Sure, I probably have one or two grammatical errors in this post, but it's easier to read "1337" than my handwriting.
At any rate, these cursive Nazis ("script kiddies?") should be happy with the popluartity of QWERTY and ten-key. While only those people that are interested in handwriting are learning the art, only those people that are interested in handwriting are learning the art. Think of what Kodak has done for the world of painting, both weeding out most of the disinterested amatures and letting those still in the art to explore new ideas, letting the camera take over the grunt work. And I'm sure most domestic horses live a happier life now that more riders want to ride instead of need to ride. Keyboards aren't turning handwriting into a dying art, they're turning into an art.
They could use their battery operated cell phones to send 'em a text message. So they can't find a cell phone? Maybe they can't find a pen either. Besides, we're only talking about cursive here, not any ability to use a pen.
Personally, I'd be a lot more worried about places where Chinese characters are used. I've studied Chinese and It's a lot easier to recognize the characters then it is to actually write them. Using a keyboard you can forget how to draw the characters entirely, while still being able to communicate using them.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The best handwriting was (and still is, IMHO) from the renaissance. Various forms of "italic" hand were developed by people who's names later became typefaces, such as Palatino.
The interesting thing is, if you write with an italic hand, even with a monoline ballpoint, your writing becomes a bit more angular, but a bit neater and easier to read, and (alors!) faster. It *is* faster to write italic than palmer, because there are far fewer strokes involved.
I'm as much of a computer geek as the rest, but I also have a passion for calligraphy. It is an amazing practice that should never die.
RR
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Just to put some perspective on my background, I've taken calligraphy courses, both for Roman alphabets and for Chinese. I admire beautiful, clear handwriting as much as next person, and I believe that writing letters "the old fashioned" way has something to be said for it in terms of "romance".
But we don't send kids to school to teach them to write because of the "romance" of hand lettering. We teach them it because it is a valuable communication skill.
First of all, let's examine the legibility of cursive writing. I'm sure we have all got a relative whose writing is absolutely illegible, and odds are they were writing cursive. Cursive is simply harder to read. That should be evident by its near total absence from any kind of print media. If cursive writing were easier to read, you can bet that all the paperback books that you see would be typeset with cursive fonts. You don't see that, and the reason is obvious: you'd take a dull spoon to your eyes and gouge them out after only a few pages.
So if it's hard to read, then why bother learning to write that way? Well, the justification is usually that it is faster. The reality is that most people can only write cursive letters about 10% faster than they can print them. I know that I can print very nearly as fast as I can write cursive, and more importantly, you can decipher my printing, even when I am in a hurry, even when you have to read pages of it.
If we really were interested in teaching children to write fast, we'd have them learning any of a number of shorthand systems.
You want to do kids a favor? Get them typing. They will have neater work with less effort and fatigue. They'll produce work faster. They'll have more time to concentrate on what they write rather than how they write.
There is much pleasure to be gained in useless knowledge.
I love it! The path to deep insight goes like this: I can't write cursively so it musn't be a worthy skill.
Occaisionaly some comment along the lines of "I can't ever remember what a cursive capital Q looks like, let alone scribe one" is interspersed among the whinging.
Sour grapes!
I'm laying out 10 to 1 that these same sour grapers hold their pen with their thumb and middle finger with the pen raised at right angles to the paper. Come on, there are people who care about things you don't. Get over it.
...to become mainstream.
Then we'll have the International Association of Touch Typists, Programmers, and Courtroom Transcribers complaining about people not knowing how to use a keyboard.
I hold my pencil between the tips of my middle finger and thumb, and the middle joint of my ring finger. Also, I usually print, but I am completely capable of writing in cursive.
... complain about times changing. News at 11.
I too fail to see what the big deal is, although the source of the moaning, as well as some button-pushing (since when is calligraphy a "unique form of American expression"?) tells me this has more to do with certain teachers afraid to lose their jobs as the skill they teach becomes irrelevant, than with the real consequences this could have.
Notice the lack of studies of any kind. There's a lot of "some say", "few statistics", "many adults", etc. No numbers, and no solid source.
Nor are there any quotes (much less trace of concern) by someone in the position to deal with this as a "problem". It's not that the Department of Education has to go out and say something about it, it's that it's interesting that no one asked anyone but a "teacher fighting the trend" and "a 54-year-old artist" who's former President of an Association of People Who Make A Living Writing And Teaching Cursive.
The only other people complaining apparently "parents who pride themselves on their penmanship", "bemoaning" that their kids don't write as they do. The tone is the same the mother might use to "bemoan" their daugther not taking the same piano lessons, the same ballerina classes, or perhaps having the debutante ball she had at X age. All that was so "character-defining".
This is a "social interest" story with no substance, not even as little as would be expected from the subject.
Considering the deficiencies in basic math and language skills present in US education (not to mention geography, history, literature and all that useless "general culture"), I would think there are more important things to worry about in education than whether Little Jimmy pens or types his homework. For example: whether he can actually do his homework, and learn something from it.
If they want to teach children an artistic skill that shows "your inner being, your core" and "it's not translated into dollars, like computer skills", I'm sure private lessons could be accomodated somewhere between tap-dancing and archery.
It proves nothing, shows nothing, says nothing, except that some people like penmanship so much they forgot why schools teach the Palmer Method of Business Writing in the first place: as a business skill.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
...if you just verb it.
My handwriting sucked to begin with. I'm also one of those people who can think faster than they can communicate (which makes for some interesting word combinations, like today when I read a "cyst and decease" letter aloud). Typing, on the other hand, allows me to quickly express complete thoughts in fluid form, and even edit those thoughts on the fly (ala the Backspace key).
So...fuck handwriting...
Who cares about the 'art' of handwriting, when it is useless. What would you rather read..a handwritten letter that is in cursive, or one that is written using block text? The only person that 'handwriting' serves is the person doing the writing, as it takes a little less time/effort than printing, and is usually pretty much illegible to anyone but the author.
If you print enough, you get fast at it. I stopped seriously using cursive in about 3rd grade (well, I still sign my name in cursive, and I tend to doodle things like "hello world" or "cursive sucks" in cursive), and I can print just as fast as I've seen anyone write in cursive.
Heck, the same is true of typing. I don't type the "standard" way... I've been typing since I was 5, and my hands just know where the keys are. I move my hands all over the keyboard, which made my computer teacher throw a fit in junior high, but I was able to type 60 WPM then and I can type 110 WPM now.
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
A signature is a unique personal mark.
It's not required to be cursive by any means. Many people do use their own names in cursive as a signature (including me), but by far the majority of the signatures I have dealt with share no similarity with cursive.
They're just a bunch of traces that are easily reproducible for a single person and difficult to reproduce for other people.
Sometimes you can see an A or an M here or there, but just as easily you could match it to the interesting parts of a seismograph's at LA.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Mr Doyle: So, you never learned cursive?
Bart: Well, I know hell, damn, bit...
Mr Doyle: Cursive handwriting, script. Do you know the multiplication tables? Long division?
Bart: I know of them.
"Smoking helps you lose weight - one lung at a time" -- A. E. Neumann
I don't have to bother with adding my middle initial for "uniqueness". Anybody who can forge my crabbed little scrawl deserves a pat on the back for effort at least.
I never understood the point off cursive anyway. I've printed my letters since I was in middle school (unless forced to use cursive). It was painful, it hurt my hands, and made my handwriting more unlegible then it already is. I always print when I write. I haven't used cursive in 10+ years now -- there is absolutely no reason to. I'll be happy when this form of "kid torture" is dead and buried. Goodbye and good riddance!
In fact, if they want to prepare kids well for future science and math classes (a little bias here, yes), they should teach them how to write Greek characters well.
The best thing for my own writing was my transition from cursive to all caps printing in 7th grade -- my writing is so clear and distinctive that it makes a good font...
Ditch cursive completely; stick with block print in schools. Speed writing is no longer an important skill for people to have.
There are certains skills that go away when they lose their relevance.
Radio operators don't need to know morse code anymore. And sailors have given up the astrolabe.
And we don't write in the fancy scripts favored by monks copying scripture.
Cursives will be with us for a while yet, because we still have a need to write with pen and paper, but when there is no longer a need for it, it effectively will go away.
Me, personally, I found computers to actually improve my penmanship because I started to pay attention to fonts... Heck, to this day, when I write my e-mail address, I write in Courier...
Personally, I find cursive to be a bit more personal and insightful than typing, which tends to be rather generic and ambiguous.
Typing tends to lack feeling (aesthetically speaking), whereas writing can tell you a lot about a person. Not to mention, writing usually takes a bit more effort and patience.
I find that it can be very relaxing - I realise this is the world of the instant "now", but not everything has to be 120wpm. Sometimes it's nice to write a letter in a park or wherever at your own leisure.
If I receive a hand-written letter from someone, it means a bit more than an email. I find it to be more sincere form of communication.
As well, cursive can be very beautiful way of expressing yourself.
It looks like a 2. It's difficult to write smoothly and always looks out of place on the page.
I found a (pdf document) reference that has all of the letters and some tips on teaching.
I believe it was my own handwriting that led them to call it cursive.
--qtp.
Read, L
all the people in the company who write well on paper for those that can't write on paper at all but have good keyboarding, typing and mouse skills.
That subset of people that can write nicely is the same group that consumes the 80% in the 80/20% 20/80% rule.
Might as well be mentally retarded if they cannot type (in my opinion).
Schools would do their students a favor by making sure they can use a keyboard, mouse, and have used a computer before graduating. Otherwise it's a one way ticket to the blue collar playland.
The time spent teaching them to 'write' (as my school district called it, the other type was 'printing') should be used for basic literary skills, typing skills, and being able to put thoughts into a computer in a cohenrent manner.
My 'writing' method rapidly turned into incoherent scribbles in college while taking notes in class. To this day I do not bother with 'writing', with the exception of a few letters and groups of letters that still come out nice, its all 'printing'.
Of course, I can bang out 45 pages of software manual per day on a computer... I'll take that over post-it notes with phone numbers and email addresses written in beautiful script.
Recent developments in automobile and locomotive design have resulted in mass layoffs in the buggy whip industries. Carriage wheel manufacturing is down nearly 100% in the last 100 years alone!
In addition, seafaring technology has resulted in the loss of thousands of manual labor jobs at sea doing things like shoving coal into a 1500 degree "glory hole" for eighteen hours straight, and climbing to the mizzen mast to cut tangled rigging. These lost jobs are gone forever unless we immediately abandon all technology and return to an awkward agrarian society with high infant mortality and a total lack of advanced pharmaceuticals. Similar fields report severe cutbacks as the behemoth of technological progress continues unabated. Eschew the tech! Your iMac is a tool of the devil and it will burn your retinas with its cool shiny grey goodness! You can't even feel it as every day another technique revered by thousands is rendered obsolete! Today cursive, tomorrow, toilet paper! Nobody will ever aim a particle beam at my backside, I assure you! In a thousand years they will annihilate all we hold dear such as amoebic dysentery and irritable bowel syndrome! The HORROR!
It's stupid that such things are happening.
I didn't touch a computer until I was 12, and less than a year later, I could type at 70+ wpm.
And, best of all, I can write faster than most people, too.
Disruptive technologies have emerged throughout history making inferior technologies obsolete:
Written language -> cave drawing
Sail boats -> manual row boats
Ball point pen -> quill feather
Automobile -> horse and buggy
Tractor -> ox and plow
And on and on....
Why should this trend stop now with handwriting? Really, how many people actually hand write anything of substance? In school, I remember teachers that reduced grades on hand-written papers to encourage proficient typing skills.
Future disruptive technologies:
Typing -> hand writing
Internet -> newspapers
Internet -> television
Internet -> telephone
Internet -> sex (just kidding on this one).
-ted
My signature's atrocious too! I forget letters in my last name constantly. This causes bank tellers endless grief. Once I endorsed 3 checks while standing in line, then asked to deposit them. The signatures looked nothing like each other. The teller asked for ID, then asked me to verify my "mother's maiden name".
Useful fact: The field labeled "mother's maiden name" is simply a password field. Feel free to fill in an alphanumeric string. As long as you can recall it when asked, it serves its purpose.
I've taken to the "celebrity" style for most signatures, first initial then a squiggle, and if I remember to throw a few ups and downs in the right places, so much the better.
How about a Ban Cursive Month, when we all flatly refuse to sign or write in anything but regular block letters?
i am always the last one to finish writing that paragraph in cursive on that cursed SAT answer sheet. mine ends up half print and half cursive anyway...
The more standard the pen-strokes, the easier it is to fake.
I hated freaking handwritting when *I* was in school!
Best thing that happened to me was getting a manual typewriter!
In THOSE days, of course, we carved our cpu's out of WOOD.
And our computer weighed 6,000 tons!
And we programmed with ones and with zeros!
AND SOMETIMES WE RAN OUT OF ONES!
It's Christmas everyday with BitTorrent.
As long as the handwriting is readable, nobody cares if it reaches calligraphy quality or if it bareley readable. The important thing is , you MUST be able to write. You could forget your PC at home, it may break down and anything else can happen but you still would be able to write if needed.
Also, each handwriting style has distinctive features that makes authentication a lot easier then authenticating a "digitally signed" document, or you could use both for additional security.
I've been coding since I was 8, but ironicly I have the opposite problem:
I cannot write in manuscript! That's right, I can only write in cursive. It's hard being the only one when 95% of my graduating class can't read or write the shit. It isn't that they are learning to type instead, most couldn't get past 20gwam after a whole semester of keyboarding class.
Thank goodness I'm not a native of this civilization-forsaken part of our nation...
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting
Bwahahahah
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Handwriting requires a different style of thinking, especially when writing in ink. I've become too dependant on the backspace and delete keys when I'm composing something on the computer.
I believe that one of the best examples of how the medium changes what one writes is found in the novels by Kurt Vonnegut Jr..
His earlier works, such as Slaughterhouse Five and Welcome to the Monkey House were written or typed on an old typewriter, are distinguished by an efficiency of words, short chapters, and a unique irreverence for both literary and social convention. Then someone boughjt the man a word proccessor and he wrote Hocus Pocus which is very wordy, has standard length chapters, and seems rather conventional in comparison to his other work.
I think that handwriting still has it's place, although it is a shrinking niche. But it is clear to me that the product of writing by hand and writing by machine are definately not equivalent.
Read, L
Since when do we really NEED to write in cursive. Printing tends to be more legible anyways.
Has no one mentioned handwriting analysis (graphology)? How will we catch embezzlers and disgruntled employees if they won't write in cursive? And for more serious consequences, look at the effect computers and e-mail are having on very important historical records. You know how historians always quote letters to explain what a President or general was doing? That's pretty much over now. See this:
The End of History - How e-mail is wrecking our national archive
On the internet, no one knows you're a frog.
I memorized Latin verse in public school. That said, I hated cursive, never really learned it. But I think teaching good, legible handwriting is a priority, at least for the next five or ten years. Because right now, I still have to leave notes for people, write adresses, test answers, directions, and so forth. None of them very long, but they have to be legible. I print, personally, but I wish I'd spent a year working on that instead of having cursive shoved down my throat, because my printing would probably be better.
(Bart at his new, good school is having troubles.)
...I know *of* them...
Teacher: Don't you know cursive?
Bart: Well, I know hell, and damn, and bi--
Teacher: No no, that's not what I mean. What about fractions? Long division?
Bart:
But seriously folks. I remember a few years back, I was just about to take the GRE, and the last thing on the signup sheet is to copy this long, drawn-out "I will not cheat and I will not tell anybody else about the questions and bla bla bla" integrity statement. In *cursive*. It was seriously 15 lines long. I hadn't written cursive since 2nd grade. So I was sitting there for minutes, trying to remember how to draw a capital G, and looking like a general imbecile. The lady was delaying the start of the test because she had to wait for me to pump out this crap that looked like it was written by an epileptic. "And this kid wants to go to *grad school*?" they must have been thinking.
Because he's drunk :~(
You're all monsters.
Cursive was always such a waste of time to begin with. Despite taking it for a year in third grade, I've never actually used it.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
I believe it's quite important to write with a pen, just not in cursive. It's slow to write, slower to read, and utterly impossible to OCR. Engineer-style block printing should be taught and required.
As far as actual illiteracy goes, I agree completely. My sister used to walk home from elementary school, red pencil in hand, marking the mistakes in the principal's newsletter as she walked. The educators in our "exemplary school district" can barely spell their own names, much less explain the difference between "there" and "their".
I'm all in favor of simplifying the language. "DRIVE THRU" is just fine with me, since
through
though
tough
ought
is just ridiculous. Certain spellings deserve to die out. Grammar, on the other hand, does not! I never learned how to diagram a sentence, I can't tell you the difference between a dangling preposition and a gerund, and I can barely remember the different parts of speech. (Is it just me, or is "parts of speech" a stupid term that sounds like it should mean "phonemes"?)
At my last job, the receptionist (who secretly held the whole place together) insisted on proofreading letters written by the owner and president. It's hard to tell someone "You sound like an idiot on paper." but she managed somehow.
She and I used to commiserate about the inability of the engineers to express themselves, and the money it cost the company because of vague contracts, misinterpreted job specifications, and delayed vendor support. A little misspelling here and there just makes you look stupid or hurried, but unpunctuated paragraphs are difficult to extract meaning from!
Sounds like it's going the way of calligraphy, where a minority will know how it's done, but most people won't care.
My handwriting stopped evolving in the second grade. I learned cursive, but quickly forgot. So long as I can read it (and I can) I'm happy. There's never any reason to use cursive as opposed to good-old prining.
Heck, I even print my signature.
Never eat more than you can lift -- Miss Piggy
Any non-USAsians want to question this claim? I was under the impression that people in Europe knew cursive too.
"ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly" who gives a rats ass? How often do you have to write with a pencil in the real world? And shouldn't every one of those times have an electronic alternative been offered, such as a smart card with the same info I put on every form I have ever filled out from doctor's offices to credit applications? At least are kids learn how to handle high-tech military equipment better than anybody else in the world, turns out that is more important than the pencil stuff... Pen vs. Sword, I will take the sword any day... Need sleep sorry for about rantings... Tired... Need to get jazzed on caffine and set up airport WAPs...
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
I had a Japanese teacher (she taught the language which is spoken in Japan, for clarification) once who would scan the paper for any mistakes in kana or kanji (Japanese symbols), such as lines not being quite straight when they should be, or it being out of proportion, and she would write "PUKE!!!!!" next to it. Then she scanned the page for any scratched out or poorly erased marks, and wrote "PUKE!!!!!". Did it make me write them better, no, all it did was piss me off. Do these people complaining about me typing make me want to write cursive, no, all it does is piss me off. Maybe things should change, look at how screwed up the past was.
Isn't saying that kids can only type, and not handwrite, like saying kids don't know how to paint on cave wall or chip messages in stone anymore. Who needs handwriting anyway.
Schools have long been locked into forcing children to learn a rigid and extraordinarily ugly cursive hand. Cursive is difficult under any circumstances for many children whose hand-eye coordination has yet to mature. And any child with even a rudimentary esthetic sense will rebel at being forced to reproduce the ugly cursive hand being crammed down his throat.
In reality, the teaching of cursive is an obstacle, not an aid to the acquisition of cursive hadwriting. Children should be taught to print, and be allowed develop their own natural cursive handwriting over time--which will almost always more attractive and legible than the one taught in the schools.
Hopefully QWERTY will indeed be the next cursive, in this regard.
As an exmaple, Dvorak's key layout is, indeed, more efficient for typists than the QWERTY. Early research on that topic might have been biased by Dvorak himself, but a more robust examination provided solid evidence five years ago.
With decades of further ergonomics and language learning under our belts since Dvorak made his design, one would think we could improve upon QWERTY even more drastically today.
If we let this writing thing slide, next to go is the ability to properly use a buggy whip and trim lamp wicks. Then civilisation as we know it is doomed. Oh, my!
I got a 1600 on my SATs (about 8 years ago here), but almost didn't finish writing that paragraph of cursive in the time they alloted us. Have they gotten rid of that yet?
I hear they'll be putting a handwritten essay section into the SAT in a few years; I hope they don't force kids to write *that* in cursive!
This whole debate is wanksville anyway. The focus should be on getting kids to write clearly and legibly in any way possible. For some kids that means print, for some kids that means beautiful cursive loops and for some kids that means some hybrid between the two. Time spent trying to turn every kid into a carbon copy master calligrapher could be better spent teaching vocabulary, grammar and style. Form is nice, but function is essential.
And we'll wear them on rings called signature rings, which we'll shorten to signat rings and pronounce 'signit'.
fear for their jobs, that is all. times change jobs become something (i dont remember the word but i dont care).
this post was written using computers.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Jebus H. Crisco, I'd certainly hope that teachers would grade for content and not for aesthetics. And this is coming from the kiddie who turned in everything with a sleek dot-matrix, clear plastic finish.
Another handicap when writing is left-handedness. Because our language is written left-to-right, left-handed people tend to require much more time to write than right handed people do (and I should know because I am one). Does this mean that we should require all left-handed people to start writing with their right hands? (I'm assuming that you will think this is as absurd as I do, otherwise you're going to have to tell me why it makes sense).
A lot of people can write more legibly when printing, and this is often more important in creating the impression of a good writer (and when you're writing for someone who is grading 90 papers, the impression can be as important as the writing itself - especially if the actual writing isn't that good), just as good grammar and spelling do.
Not that this particularly will matter. Typing is more efficient and easier to read. I can't think of any reason why computers won't replace pen and paper for essay examinations; it would certainly make it easier on everybody. Possibly the only reason that this has not yet happened is because the cost isn't low enough - but it will certainly be low enough in the fullness of time.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
"Cursive was so character-defining when I was in school," says Amy Greene... And now those characters are defined in Arial 12pt.
If I had spent half the time I spent on cursive in the 3rd grade on learning computers i would probably have a job right now.
More like the people who still use cursive will be dead in a few decades
When I was in elementary school my teachers would not LET me turn in handwritten assignments anymore due to my god awful handwriting. It actually probably contributed to my interest in computers since I often sat at one of the class computers typing my work...
Of course I still can't write cursive for the life of me (my printing is not so good either).
ExInferus
Too many are falling for the straw man in the article -- they juxtapose problems with cursive and with writing in general, but only very tenuously link the two (and in the other direction -- kids don't write regularly, so they don't have the right muscles developed to learn cursive well).
Being able to write is important. Being able to write pretty according to an old standard that is hardly ever used in practice (currently) is not.
Maybe if they taught what they call "Italics" (presumably the same evolved joined printing that many people develop over time) little Johnny *would* be able to write well. Instead they emphasize "perfect" cursive that is an artificially high goal, and kids end up not writing legibly at all.
If a particular writing style is generally used, and can be very legible, why not teach it instead of forcing the tight, pretty (but not easy, innately legible, or comfortable) traditional style?
If your prose is so bland that only your penmanship can lend it a cherished style then it's lucky you're good with your hands. At least you can tickle her fancy.
All my essays have been "as long as needed to explain your points thoroughly." They usually come with rough guidelines (e.g. "5-7 pages" or "2500-3000 words" or something), but these are just to give you an idea of how ambitious a topic you should pick, not strict rules on how much to write.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Who wants to read the shit that elementary school/high school/some college grads write anyway?
AngeLPrinceSS4U: Y R U 2 COOL 4 AOL?
CoherentTypist49: Because you're all dolts.
AngeLPrinceSS4U: WUT R U TALK N A BUT?
CoherentTypist49: Kill me. I can't take it.
ASiANGaNGStA90210: Yo StFU DoNt b SaY N DaT 2 MaH GuRL sHe B FyNe.
I don't think it has anything to do with teachers not being paid enough. I think enough of the old ruler-weilding hags have died off and the younger ones realize that for the vast majority of the population teaching cursive is pointless and stupid. I will not mourn it's passing a bit, except for the purposes of telling my grandchildren uphill-both-ways-in-the-snow stories (and I won't really miss that either).
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does.
Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does.
Cursive writing does not mean what I think it does.
Cursive writing does not
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.-Well fuck you, Taco. I happen to enjoy The Simpsons.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
In terms of keyboard efficiency, it's my understanding that the QWERTY keyboard is intentionally inefficient. The earliest typewriters had problems with they type bars jamming. To prevent this, the keyboard was laid out in a patter that would slow the typist down.
Unfortunately, we are stuck with it not because it's better, but because it's what everybody uses. Just like M$ Word, VHS, and gasoline powered internal combustion engines.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Who the hell ever thought up writting cursive anyway. Many people that I know that write in cursive and have hand writting that I can't read. Not the new kiddies that grew up with computers but the older adults. I grew up writting in print because I learn to written from my mother. She wrote in print because she was a nurse and her notes had to be legable to the next nurse that came to take over her shift. I value having people being able to clearly understand what I write rather than how pretty it lokks. Now because of this my hand writting look ugly and down right sloppy but I can read and everyone else can too. If I wanted to be all artsy fartsy about my handwritting I'll get a caligraphy pen and do it right.
Interestingly enought, I've always attributed my lack of serious carpal tunnel problems to the fact that I never learned to type correctly, and have been typing several hours a day on average since I was 8 or 9. I've videotaped myself typing, and it's pretty impressive to watch.. absolutely no technique, and I have absolutely no idea where the keys are. My brain just knows.
Stuck at around 80wpm though..
..don't panic
I can't even read my own cursive! My printing is barely legible either. Computers, yeah, that's it I can blame it on computers now, even though I'm too old. Hell Yeah!
Aye. QWERTY is good for typewriters, but not so good for writers.
QWERTY is a common (though bogus, we now know) example of commercial 'path dependence'. The 4% efficiency gain of the Dvorak (cf. above for the reference), or an even better gain from a new layout, suggest that it is still worth migrating away from QWERTY, despite its current ubiquity.
I'll be 25 this month and most of the people I went to school with preferred printing. At least at my school, computers weren't too big and there was no internet. Most of the students had no internet at home either (most of the people at the school were from poor families). So at least with my peers and I, computers had absolutely nothing to do with our hate of cursive. I think handwriting is pushed on to students too much. It made us all so sick of it to the point that if a teacher told us we had to use cursive for a paper, we'd all groan.
Fitting classroom computers with a digitizer pad and programming the thing to properly recognize nothing but the finest handwriting (with individual variations) would cure that problem real quick.
The former president of the International Association of Master Archers, Swordsmen and Teachers of Falconry has stated that the wide spread adoption of pistols, rifles and other explosive weapons has led to the decline of archery skills among the nation's youth. He said that failure of the schools to emphasize archery will threaten the Country's ability to defend itself in the event of the complete disapearnce of industrial civilization.
The more that people can't write, the less grafitti will be covering all the walls. Oh wait, now they're cracking into web sites and plastering them with HTML. Nevermind.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
"Videogame experts fear that with the advent of powerful, accurate voice-recognition systems performing the majority of tasks once reserved for joysticks and thumbboards, American children could lose their global dominance in such thumb-candy categories as first person shooters, sick million-point THPS4 combos and Final Fantasy XXIV...."
-mj
When I was in grade seven a friend of mine could not write but instead printed everything. That was in 1977. I thought it was interesting, particularly since he printed faster than most people wrote. I thought I'd give it a try and found that I was much more legible. Twenty-six years later I still print or type everything, and like my friend of long ago, I am pretty fast at it. I have no regrets.
What really freaks me out, though, is the number of teenagers who have probably never tied shoelaces. Young kids wear slip-ons and shoes with velcro straps. Older kids have coiled elastic laces. Then there's the floppy-skateboard-shoe stage where the shoes have laces but they are permanently knotted loose enough to just slip on and off. Now basketball shoes come with zippers and skates all use cantilever or ratchet fittings. I guess they'll get Mom to tie their dress shoes when they graduate from college.... :-P
People will actually be able to read each other's writing! shock! horror!
The only time I ever use cursive is to sign things. I would have no problem with the public school system throwing out teaching cursive altogether.
Right. So the Chinese got together and decided to make a written language that discriminates against the vast majority of them? Duh.
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
Many European writers will write the digit 1 as a vertical line with a hook at the top (sometimes with a bar at the bottom) and the letter I as a vertical line (sometimes with a dot above, even for an uppercase I). This is the same appearance as many sans-serif computer typefaces (such as Arial and Helvetica).
Many engineers and mathematicians (especially those from the US/UK) will write the digit 1 as a vertical line and the letter I as a vertical line with bars at the top and bottom. This is an exaggerated form of the serifs you find in serif typefaces (such as Times and Palatino).(Yes the above descriptions are simplistic, but hopefully the illustrate the point.)
Seriously, some of us, no matter how hard we try will NEVER be able to write legible cursive writing. I believe that cursive writing is a throwback to the old feather quill days where it was advantageous to not lift the pen from the paper lest you get a nice blob of ink dripped on your page from the lifted pen. Furthermore, I think it is an art form. I can't even draw a stick figure for (insert favorite mythical supreme being here)'s sake...let alone nice pretty (artsy) cursive writing.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
This looks like as good a place as any to make a really braindead observation that everyone else seems to have missed.
"Cursive" handwriting is not the only form of "joined up" handwriting. 100 years ago everyone learned a different type of script, and I had to struggle to understand anything written by my late grandmother. Once educators get a clue, our current cursive will be just as alien to our kids.
The key issue with "hand printing" is that young children are taught to write letters with only downstrokes. They don't have the fine motor control for making well-controlled motions in both directions, and pushing kids into "cursive" too soon will result in a lifetime of poor penmanship.
But there's absolutely no reason why teens and adults can't do "hand printing" in both directions. That means an "A" is two strokes, not three. More importantly, you can start a lot of letters with either an up or downstroke - "B," "n," "m," "r," etc. You'll lose the small serifs, but the letters are still easily recognized.
It doesn't take long for letters to flow together - they're still "printed," but the pen either never leaves the paper or is briefly lifted just off the surface. With practice you can print just as fast as another person can write cursively... and it's a hell of a lot easier to mix in equations, foreign and mathematical symbols, chemical notations, etc.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Perhaps now is the time that someone does an analysis of where the great cursive copout is happening. When you've got a keyboard that's optimized (I know, I know, Dvorak's misrepresented, wah) for Latin alphabet based languages, of course it's somewhat easier to type than to write.
Of course, if you're looking at something like Chinese, or a complex script language that's not based on an alphabet (pinyin doesn't count), then it's a lot harder to express a coherent thought using the same keyboard. It takes more time to hunt for those characters that express exactly what you're trying to say.
Imagine if we had to type a pronounciation, then wait and hunt through a list that may or may not have exactly the word that you're looking for, as opposed to just writing it by hand on a piece of paper...I bet a lot more people would be learning cursive.
It's really a matter of practicality. Who wants to print out all these nasty letters when a few hits on the keyboard does the same thing?
I found that in a lot of college stuff, simply churning out loads of crapola netted a decent mark. As long as I was close to the topic of the question (for multi-mark questions) and hit a few key points, then I got some of the marks. I think it's a fallability of teachers... with so many tests to mark, they just don't/can't take the time to entirely read every answer fully, so they skim for key points or common mistakes. Don't really screw up, and you get the marks. I remmeber at one time smart students were embedding "easter egg" comments and still getting super-high grades, simply because the teacher felt secure in briefly skimming their answers (my 150+ page final coding project was nice for this).
Oh, and in an aside... I tried to fill out a form today, my handwriting definately seems to get less dependable the more time I spend behind a keyboard, and of course there's no backspace key.
I haven't used it in years. I hated learning it. By then I already knew international morse code and could copy about 8 WPM. And learned to type in the 4th grade.
I imagine, at one time, the ability to write in cursive was indicitive of certain rigorous habits of thought that were desirable in an employee. i.e. Someone who is good at cursive, clearly has spent time on it, therefore her spent time on his school work, even the "less important" parts, like cursive.
They could just think it's nicer, though, which would be pretty silly, to tos on great applicant, for one mediocre one. I mean, I've never met a good programmer with good handwriting.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
A laser printed e-mail is to a handwritten letter what "should I commit suicide?" is to "to be or not to be?".
Do you mean to say that's what the soliloquy means? I thought it was just a bunch of beautifully strung-together nonsense like Coleridge's Rime.:)
Is this a sigs-optional kind of place? 'Cause I am totally down with that if you know what I mean.
That was bullshit, but like most things people learn in Third Grade it is absolutely impossible to convince people that they're mistaken.
Under the model Uniform Commercial Code a signature is ANY mark indicating assent. It can be your legal name in cursive. It can be your nickname in block letters.
It can even be the rest of your "unsigned" check, one you forgot to sign... or "forgot" to sign because you were running low on cash and thought this would give you a week of breathing room. Courts have ruled that the other handwriting legally constituted a signature.
But hey, what do I know? I only "signed" checks with a (somewhat distinctive) printed form of my usename for a number of years. "Usenames" are "nicknames" on steroids - I had an alias on my checks, credit cards, etc. This is a situation where you're forced to learn the law very well - you occasionally run into a legal scholar working a second job as night manager at the store... at least they seem to think they're experts in the law. I eventually changed my name legally because I realized that few of my friends would recognize my name if I were in an accident and the police called with my legal name.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
what the? since when is handwriting a unique American form of expression. Last I checked handwriting was done in ancient civilisations dating back many thousands of years.
Why do Americans have to come across as such pompus pricks who invent absolutely everything, including handwriting.
Isn't this a good thing? Ultimately the less we write the less we paper etc.. we waste. The paper I need to have and more things stored electronically.
'celebrate', not 'celebate', due to poor penmanship of the ancient priests...
www.rexguo.com - Technologist + Designer
what will I do if cars become no more (say, oil crisis)!
So, kids cant write with a pen. So what?
I cant draw, effectively, on cave walls with crushed rock paste either.
Is my point being made?
Same here. My elementary school report cards are filled with "needs improvement" grades for penmanship. It's a good thing I eventually learned cursive. I believe it is the sole reason I have been able to finish graduate school. My ability to ask questions, analyze, research, type...all that is merely incidental. In all seriousness, though, my younger sister, who is in her mid-20s, learned to write on a VIC 20. When she got to kindergarten, we had a heck of a time convincing her not to print her name in all caps. And, to top it off, she managed to avoid learning to tell time on a non-digital clock until she was in her early teens. With a VCR (not flashing 12:00), microwave, stove, and digital watches, she never needed to learn how to read an old-fashioned clockface. I just wrote out all my wedding thank you cards. I think my printing sometimes slipped into a semi-cursive style, but that's the closest I've come to long-hand in years!
-- SYS 64738 --
It's supposedly slightly faster to write in, but it's certainly a whole lot slower to read!
*ducks*
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Although the art of writing love letters is probably also on the way out, your loved one will usually prefer a hand-written message over one which is printed from a word processor.
On the other hand, send her an email - works for me!
I say it's better to print practically everything even when handwriting. Also, hand printing can also use less ink, with faster readability compared to cursive.
Maybe I should read the article.
When in middle school, I knew a sickeningly large number of people in my grade who couldn't even write proper print, regardless of cursive. Also, why concentrate on cursive? Have any of these people talked with people online? Chat-Speak is becoming so prevalent it's disgusting, with "words" like u, y, r, ic, idk, lol, rofl, lmfao, etc. I personally would worry far more over how long it will be, until people will find it difficult to write with their hands at all.
-Dae
"Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht." - SDS Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund.
j00 4r3 3n73r1ng l337 w0r1d.
when I was a teen (14 or so), I was taught to write down morse code (as I copied it) in ALL UPPERCASE. the military does this (I was told) and it was due to speed in writing. you can write in all uppercase block letters faster than in upper/lower and cursive just doesn't cut it when copying morse code at 40words per minute.
;-) weird to think that's the only reason for me to still know cursive. of course I type well over 100wpm - but handwriting is worse than a doctor, at this point.
so at a very early age, I started to lose my ability to handwrite. then a few years later I got my first computer (trs 80) and from then on, even my schoolwork was done with a printer (dot matrix!) and very little was hand-written.
I'm now over 40 and still have to think about how to write those checks out - where you have to -write- the amount of the check in cursive
well, its trading one skill for another. I don't mind all that much - but it is interesting to see such a big change in skillsets in such a short amount of time.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Just look at history. When people first began writing we all stopped using our memory. Damn evolution. It`s all happening again!
Mr. 0.000000001% (or others): Could cuneiform be easily used on a reasonably sized keyboard? And how fast is it to write, once you know all the characters? It seems to my unformed eye that many ancient languages use complicated character sets that are good for a highly trained elite, but not good for use on machines. Could this be an exception? Ignorantly yours, med
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
When *I* was in school - that is, the 1960's - I was told my handwriting was lousy. So I started printing in cursive script - i.e., I don't connect the letters I write, I separate them.
Over the last thirty years, I have YET to see ANYONE's handwriting that is more legible than mine (and others have said so - and others have also been surprised at how fast I can print legibly).
What this personal experience means is - you monkeys never could write worth a fuck...so who cares if a kid can't figure out how to hold a pencil? He'll grow up to be a doctor anyway...or George Bush...
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
.:Why Johny Cant Type:.
..::Tux Forever::..
It has come to the attention that typing skills are falling in the general population.
Many believe that the problem leys with the introduction of cerebral imaging used in electronic communication, where one party broadcasts images directly into the receiving parties brain.
In other news, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (enacted in 2000 AD) was struck out by the Supreme Court. Many long time vocal advocates of removing the DMCA proudly donned their classic DeCSS t-shirts and walked by the court house.
but for a totally different reason. (Okay, "crisis" is too strong a word.) Your point was more valid in the past, but not so much any longer. Other responses have touched on this, but I don't think they explained themselves clearly enough for most people to understand.
In Japanese, there are three sets of characters: two parallel alphabets that are basically phonetic, and the characters imported from China that are symbolic, called kanji. Kanji represent whole or parts of words.
Modern Japanese word processors usually have phonetic input methods, and can replace the phonetic letters with the appropriate kanji. It's not quite automatic, but all you need to do is choose from a list of options.
Now you have to understand that the skill of reading kanji is not the same as the skill of writing kanji. Word processors let you do all your writing without using the latter skill, of remembering the mapping from a word to the kanji that represents it.
As a result, some people are becoming less and less capable of remembering how to write the kanji for a word unless they have a machine to show them the possibilities.
The duality of this skill is apparent when you try to learn kanji. It's a bit like multiple-choice tests being easier than the usual ones in which you have to come up with the answer. Although, in one or two cases, I found that I could actually write a kanji, but be unable to read it! That was really bizarre.
You might wonder why Japanese bother with kanji... why not write everything with the phonetic alphabets? Believe it or not, it's easier to read with kanji. Part of the reason for this is that there are no spaces between words in Japanese (although some children's books do use spaces when they haven't learned any kanji yet). Kanji give you "signposts" of where words begin and end. There's more to it than just that, but that's part of the reason.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
coyote-san wrote: Under the model Uniform Commercial Code a signature is ANY mark indicating assent. It can be your legal name in cursive. It can be your nickname in block letters. If I remember correctly, the important thing when agreeing to a contract is the "affirmative act." Signatures are just the natural result of a small class of affirmative acts. I half remember reading about some medieval land transactions where the documentation had twigs or pieces of sod sewed to the bottom of the vellum. The important thing was the exchange of the stick, symbolizing the exchange of the land, NOT the text of the contract or the signatures. The stick was the signature. But IANAL, medieval or otherwise.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
This argument has no merit whatsoever IMO. I don't know how to fletch an arrow with very much precision, or closer to the argument, how to make or use a quill pen. Surely these were indispensible skills in our society some time past. Kind of like writing with a pencil was.
I wonder how much argument among the flat-earthers originated over the realization that children were becoming more skilled at producing precision arrows rather than mastering the sublties of sling operation.
I have been trolled, but at least I realize it.
There is no good reason whatsover for anyone to know cursive, or rather to be forced to learn cursive in school. It is not faster, really try timing yourself! Cursive was invented as a way to write on metals cleanly. The only reason they teach it in school is because someone long ago thought it might be nice for kids to learn.
I hate cursive, It was then beggining of my disdain for compulsury schooling. I remember having to stay after class in fourth grade with those sheets where you just have to copy the letters repeatedly. CURSIVE SUCKS!! It is also a lot easier to read most peoples print vs. their cursive.
Cursive is well and truly out of date. It takes a lot of practice to master, and the only benefit is the aesthetic value on the page and perhaps some speed - and then only in the hands of the practiced. But from what I've seen I doubt it.
From what I can see, 'nice' handwriting is inversely proportional to the amount of education you've had. My grandfather had a truly exception hand for writing in the italic style, and used to write regularly to relatives, and as favours to people who needed something special written. He left school at the end of year ten, and studied writing years later.
Meanwhile, doctors spend between six and fifteen years in the education system after year twelve - and look at the standard of their writing! It really is that bad!
I write regularly on black notepads I carry around with me everywhere, and in a separate written journal I keep. We had to study propre cursive technique at school, I gave up on it half way through high school when I was writing a lot for my humanities subjects. It's too hard to legibly and consistently, and prefer printing.
Believe with me, my saplings.
Honestly, ya gotta cut back on the gonga. Thats as stupid and as asinine as claiming to write perl code only with a pearl typrwritter and python with a boa wrapped around your head. This is a summary of your post: I am insane and one of my turettish, annal habits is build around cursive therefore it would make me feel better if everyone was also toutured to the point of oblivion. There is nothing that you can express in cursive that cannot be equally expressed in print( they are both touring complete).
I haven't used cursive in years... For me it never was fast and personally I think it looks ugly. Call me crazy but given a page of print and a page of cursive, I'm gonna be reading the printed version. Usually teachers were impressed that I typed assignments... Little did they know I can type MUCH faster than I can write. Give me someone that can write 80-100wpm in cursive or not, and I'll stop taking interest in the written word again.
And don't get me started on numbers. An American 7 is like a German 1, while the German 7 has a little horizontal bar through the middle, like one of those Russian Orthodox crosses. Germans don't regonize the American 1 as a numeral and think it is some kind of mistake. Now, the German postal service seems to know theses things and will get letters from the U.S. to you just fine. The American postal service, however...
Good riddance. You should know how to write by hand the same way you should be able to change a tire or do CPR: As a last-ditch resort.
making it up while I go, and editing it over and over again .... while holding a lit butt here, and the whole right-handed 40+ w.p.m. world can just kiss it. Who thinks anything significantly deep that quickly, anyway? Bah. Righties.
About the 6th grade, I was getting bad marks because my papers were hard to read. This angered me, so I decided to print even though the educators at the time recommended remedial writing classes. (got into a lot of trouble over that)
The school made a *big* deal about this. Said, I would not be able to write a check, sign legal documents and other things. They said my writing would be slower. Nothing but FUD directed at preserving something that does not need to be preserved.
I did not agree and decided to do a little research. Found out that we didn't need cursive then. We sure as heck don't need it now.
The appearance of ones handwriting has a lot to do with their internal wiring. How we all do it depends on how we are built.
I spent the better part of that year learning about handwriting in all its forms in my spare time. Looked at writing from famous people, read their bio. Looked at different styles and related the use of same by different types of people. Looked at documents and fonts. The proper use of these can convey many things not directly contained in the actual words used.
I reached the following conclusions.
- There is no need to handwrite anything using a cursive script. --Nothing.
- You can extend this to the lower-case characters as well. Not needed for anything.
- Knowing these two things makes learning the art of writing a lot easier. (I had not yet used a computer or typewriter at the time.) Less hassle. The effect on me was a better ability to focus on what it is that I was writing instead of how it was written.
For a young child trying to understand the use of language, this is huge. Good educators should be encouraging this instead of clinging to the old ways. Why spend years working hard at a manual skill that one is not well adapted to? That time could be used to better the use of language and structure.
- Trying to make someone write in perfect copy book style who is not pre-disposed to doing so is a direct assult on their being. Could that assult do harm to a young person who might otherwise enjoy the art of writing?
It almost did exactly that for me.
So, the end result?
Some yelling, punishment and poor marks for another 6 months until I was able to better articulate what made me angry about cursive writing. My parents were told I would have problems later in life. I was told, I was not working to get a good education. Bullshit. I could tell them more about writing then they could tell me!
I never wrote that way again and am *way* better for it. Humans tend to evolve. We are seeing this now. Cursive will never die because there are people out there that are well adapted to its use.
Schools will eventually understand the things I learned long ago. They will learn to classify and improve their students writing strengths and provide them with good tools to improve them rather than force everyone into a style of expression that does not fit them.
Blogging because I can...
i used this exact explantion to someone the other day about my writing...freaky
This has nothing to do with basic handwriting or printing for useful purposes. It's a decorative art, like illumination or calligraphy.
I've barely written more then a few scribbles on the back of an envelope all year, but I frequently type arround 100,000 chars per week. I had major problems yesterday when it came to sitting down for two hours and writing an exam. I cant believe we still dont have the opportunity to use a computer in exams.
Just SMS or e-mail the note via your cellphone.
I agree, but I wonder if older pens with nibs, from quill pens to fountain pens, are faster to use with cursive. Do these pens make blots more easily when they are touching and leaving the paper more than when moving across it? Somebody who does calligraphy have an answer? I don't have answers - my cursive is truly awful unless I really slow down below the speed I can print legibly.
It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows. - Epictetus
Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.
Good god, you should really show Linux to those kids. Opensource email clients and instant messengers have been able to erase both cursive and noncursive for quite some time now...
1 Earth is warming, 2 It's us, 3 it's royally bad, 4 we need to take action NOW
My main problem with Cursive is that it is far to hard to remember.
I have had many English teachers who couldn't remember how the cursive lowercase "z" went. . . .
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
Take a look at letters and such written by 8-11 year olds back in the 1800's, esp. the latter part. You will find that in many cases, those children of yesteryear were able to write and compose stories better than many contemporary adults, let alone children. I tend to wonder what this shift in ability says about where today's society is, and where it is heading...?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I am fifteen, I know how to write in cursive, but I never really do, unless I have to. My print is not really print either, it has the connected letters like cursive, but it is generally made up of regular letters. Personally, other than a few teachers, I do not know anyone who writes in cursive unless they have to. And realistically, unless we are writing an essay, we tend to write in the IM style shorthandand add symbols like the "smiley things," "These are my favorite alternative smileys"
Anyhow, the way I figure it the only time I will have to use anything that resembles cursive is to sign something and technically, I wouldn't have to use cursive. And to clear things up, I saw a post somewhere on these pages that said The last time I used cursive was on the SAT..., I don't no about when (s)he took the SAT but I just took it this weekend and it said Copy the following in the lines provided (DO NOT PRINT).... This suggest the use of cursive, but does not mandate it, if you had another way of writing you wouldn't have to write in cursive and they coudn't do anything about it.
If all else fails, everyone in future and present generations that will be affected by this can become doctors, then it won't matter what our cursive looks like; as a matter of fact, it would be better if it is bad.
Today was the first time since high school 11 years ago that I've had to write in cursive. Man, it looked like crap.
This has nothing to do with computers though. I think it is part of a general decline in basic skills (basic grammar and spelling are down the commode too), and a lack of need to write in cursive. I just prefer printing, and can print fast, essentially a shorthand. While there is some merit to maintaining penmanship as an artful skill, there's really little actual demand for cursive in the real world. On the other hand, the ability to write legibly, in cursive or printing, has gone down the tubes. Most of my coworkers write like middle school kids. I swear. You know, the big blocky letters with nary a straight or parallel line in sight? That's the downside to the decline in penmanship - when necessary the written word is often unreadable, and definately doesn't look professional.
Derek
(Yes, I know. Google)
ACTUALLY, there is one VERY good reason why kanji is easier to read in Japanese than thier phonetic alphabet... homonyms. Japanese is filled with thousands and thousands of words that sound exactly alike but have different meanings. Many times in Japan I would see two Japanese speaking to each other write a kanji in the air after saying a word so that the other person knew which of the many different possible words that they meant.
It does not matter if people can't write with a pencil or don't read books, as long as they know how to type on a keyboard and read the alphabet on-screen.
The world is changing. Maybe we can save the rainforests if we stop using paper, and that is far more important than knowing how to write. Don't knowing how to write in the conventional way (with a pen or paper on a white sheet of paper) is not very important. The medium changes, that's all.
The worrying fact is that many people are illiterate when it comes to knowledge of previous generations. That is, they may know the PC inside out but they are ignorant as to what happenned in May 68 or in WWII. And that's a problem of education, not of the medium.
As for the connected vs. unconnected letters argument, I rarely stop to pick up my pencil while printing; most of my letters are connected anyway. As a college student (admittedly, in CS) I've never found my writing(printing) speed to be a problem, slow as it is.
Even my signature isn't official cursive, but rather my own script: the first letters of my first and last name are my own uniquely printed characters, and the rest are a sort of psuedo-cursive that is not unlike my printing.
I, too, had to write that paragraph for the SAT and SAT II tests. It took me at least 10 minutes, and I had to raise my hand twice to ask how to write some of the letters. It certainly didn't reflect on my english skills, with a 740 verbal on the SAT I.
In short, I haven't suffered any from my inability to speedily write cursive except for an artificial situation on a standardized test; I have notebooks full of notes to prove that I can 'write' legibly and easily without it.
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned
Interestingly enough, the Japanese exchange students at my university write better cursive than anyone I know! They seemed surprised that I couldn't write a lick of it. We tried our hands at writing `The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' and the Japanese student was _much_ faster than I was! I beat her at printing, though. Take that! :P
SELECT quote.text AS sig FROM quote NATURAL JOIN attribute WHERE attribute.description = 'witty';
0 rows returned
when you don't know how to write your own language properly, it makes no difference that you trash it in cursive or in typing.
What is cursive ? A form of communication. What is typing ? Another form of communication. One is "dying out" ? So what ? Nobody uses wooden logs or dot-dot-dash either, except for archologists and history freaks.
Personally I care very little about the future of tiny, scrawny, unreadable handwriting. I care even less about what is to become of large, curly text and i's dotted with round circles. If the advent of typing can do away with such nuisances and replace them by clear and discernable signs of regular format, I say : great !
It is, however, extremely interesting to imagine a few parallels between history and now. In the China of old, a few thousand years ago, the immense majority of the population knew nothing about how to write at all. That was the sole province of learned scholars and administrative workers.
Today, the immense majority of the population types away like mad, but still does not know how to write. That is the province of a scant few people who bother to proof-read and check their dictionary.
The advent of the PC industry has introduced many unknown technologies, such as "planned obsolescence". The advent of the Internet will have had the incredible effect of transferring that technology to our entire society.
Kewl !
Through 3rd grade all I heard from my teacher was "in 4th grade they're going to make you write in cursive". repeat through grade 7. I learned to write it for my lessons, but NEVER used to it write at any other time. To me, it always seemed like more trouble than it was worth.
... and cursive handwriting is a life saver for me. It allows me to learn the shape of entire words rather than having to think through the letters on a keyboard.
Also my Mum taught me joined-up handwriting one summer - the old fashioned way with joined-up fs, gs, ys even x and s so I can write a whole word and not break the flow.
I got some of my exams transcribed (written out again by the special needs teacher) until my geography teacher said that my writing was more legible (if a bit less neat) than Mrs Bells.
So I think learning joined-up writing is very important for some people. Typing kills my train of thought as I get stuck in the spelling all the time.
Islay
Nah, just write a lot, and develop your handwriting as you write, kind of like learning a new keyboard layout. When I was in 7th grade or so I decided that I didn't like my handwriting. It looked like it was written by a girl, with big round loops and lots of space everywhere.
First I developed a nice angular, heavily slanted script with tall risers and short lowercase letters that looked cool to me, and then I practiced it. I just copied a book I was reading so I was at least entertained, and every time I caught myself going back to the old style I slowed down and concentrated. By the time I was through 2 chapters, my handwriting was permanantly changed, and much, much neater.
Gave me a nasty writers cramp though. Don't try to do it all in one day like I did ;)
"Verbing weirds language." -- Calvin
In other languages, like Chinese or Japanese, calligraphy is an art. Every single stroke must be done with care, and the end result is a very, very nice looking piece of art.
;-)
:/
While Japan probably has the largest percentage of people using cell-phones and the such to type, only the older part of the population still hold the skill.
A skilled calligraphist(?) can easily make a fortune out of just working just producing piece after piece of philosophical and wise statements about life. Each piece can be from a rather small A4 sheet to a massive piece that can cover your whole wall. Those large pieces can easily cost more than a grand, depending on the style, and the words used. Each symbol/word can take as long as ten seconds for each one, so imagine trying to write an essay like that
I usually type whatever I can myself, as my cursive is illegible, and my handwriting in general is ugly. There has been times when I lost my train of thought because I was crossing out my last sentence
Founder of Mirror Moon - Tsukihime Game Trans
The letters are supposed to tilt slightly to the right when you write in cursive. If you're left-handed and you have good penmanship, this means that you must curve your hand nearly 90 degrees more than right-handers, which means more muscles are used, and, more importantly, it takes longer.
Printing COULD be about the same, except that the tendency is towards cursive-print - habits that exist for one exist for the other - so that lefties tend to always curve their hands around if they learned good penmanship. "Working harder" and "improvising on your own" should have produced this result - a slower hand. Once again, I know this because I'm left-handed (and have very good penmanship). Even among those who don't have good penmanship, this trait is common among lefties and is why they commonly write slowly. You may be an exception. As far as keyboard accuracy...your anecdotal evidence doesn't hold much sway.
Letters where chosen which may perhaps slightly favor right-handed individuals, but mostly chosen to favor the index and middle fingers of both hands. Besides, this is an area where it is likely that left-handers should excel because left handers tend to more often exhibit ambidexterity towards new tasks than right-handers. With something like a keyboard that requires both hands so much, someone who is ambidextrous is the most likely to excel.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Amazingly, the loseriest group ever mentioned on slashdot isn't a computer group.
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
Since addresses on envelopes are mainly read by machines until they get down to the individual walk, you might find it more reliable to print addresses (especially zip/post codes) rather than use cursive.
"phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting"
cool these kids got encryption built-in!
If the photograph accompanying the CBS article is of "good" handwriting, then it deserves to die. The A is misformed, the D and G are too similar, I looks like an illiterate ampersand, J and Z are too similar, with what we can see of T also looking too much like a J. M and N are misformed, and U and V are too similar. Looking at the lowercase letters, f looks too similar to J and j. Some of the letters - particularly G - are misformed to the extent of being illegible.
I'm also primarily a typing person (a complete dvorak geek) so I've been wondering if there are some nice online exercises somewhere to learn a fast and beautiful script? I found no books on the topic at my local library.
There seems to be more than one type of cursive writing out there. I changed schools after a couple of years in the middle of learning "running writing" and the new school taught a different system of it. I never learned either system properly, and after a few years of absolutely atrocious writing I switched to print, except for my signature. Probably didn't help that I was left handed either.
I also suck at touch typing, and never got further than 5wpm. That still beat my friend, who got 2wpm. To this day I struggle to comprehend how he could have been so damn lame.
I am not a lawyer but my sister is, so don't mess with me
In a word... so?
Just yesterday I wrote an actual letter for the first time in years. (My girlfriend is away at boot camp.) Know what? Writing hurts. I'll stick to the keyboard and take my chances with carpal tunnel, thanks.
I failed handwriting in second grade, and that was before I got my first computer. I've been writing in all-caps since I took drafting in high school. I have difficulty reading other people's cursive handwriting. Good riddance, I say.
> the rules required a typewriter that had no spell checking
> capability, and could hold only a single line in memory
> (for correction purposes) and could not hold even that
> single line in memory after being switched off
So does your professor hold stock in the one remaining company that still makes those relics?
Or is he just a raging neophobic asshole?
cya,
john
Imagine all the people...
Everybody could write in cursive. Writing in individual letters was a thing of the past, reserved for pre-revolutionary times and people who draw a cross instead of signing their name. I honestly don't understand what is so difficult about cursive. And despite the educational system being totally fucked up today, writing in cursive is still not a problem for the Russian kids.
I must admit, though, that my own cursive skills are somewhat lucking. When I use handwriting, I tend to use Palm Graffiti instead...
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Handwriting began with scratching runes into rock with a piece of bone.
Perhaps its time to move on.
Or put another way, not many people really know how to make fire with two sticks, or a piece of flint. Should we lament the loss of archaic skills, or look forward to the next leap?
my hand writing has gone to hell since I left primary school (actually is was never that good) i can type 40+wpm but writting what a chore. I hardly ever write thats the problem. Spelling too.
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
Isn't this the point of school? To teach these things? You can't blame computers for the downturn in handwriting ability, just the schools.
----- I refuse to have an argument with an unarmed person
Why is it "a uniquely American form of expression". What we don't use it in the rest of the world. hmmmm
-- Karma Karma Karma Karma, Karma Chameleon - Boy George
1 -- Japanese people (under 30) are at least as bad at writing their own language as Americans.
2 -- It has been easy to type Japanese text for quite some decades. I've never measured but I woudn't be surprised if it takes me less finger movements to type something in Japanese than in English.
3 -- Calligraphy is considered a 'revered art form' by people who happen to revere calligraphy. Regular people send text messages (although the glyph diversity in Japanese text messages is very high).
4 -- Just as with America, you can live your whole life (after school) in Japan without ever having to handwrite fluently, which is damn lucky considering nobody *can* handwrite fluently any more.
In some ways it's cool that Americans have so many superstitions beliefs about Japan, though
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
I've been happy since then, never looked back. Handwriting can never approach the keyboard. Handwriting is way too slow, even for the best of them. No worries folks, you only need to learn basic handwriting and then you should concentrate (and I mean concentrate, don't be sloppy about it) on learning touch typing. If you end up as a programmer it'll take your productivity to a totally different level.
But when people are forced to slow down, they have more time to think about what they're writing rather than just writing about what they think. The advantages of word processing - speed and being able to edit what you've written - are double-edged swords. When you've become used to writing up everything on a computer, you forget how to plan and construct a document from the start -- instead you (or at least I) tend to put down a mishmash of ideas and then slowly work them into shape.
Now I don't doubt that for most written work, I end up with a better result the word-processed way. And many people never need to write anything longer than a birthday card by hand. But the mental skill of being able to develop a proper argument as you go along is essential in many other ways. I'm thinking of SPEAKING.
Maybe I'm just an old fogey (and I'm not even 30) but it seems to me that kids today have a much harder time having a proper conversation than they used to. They seem to have a 5-word cap on sentences. ("And he was like, yes. And I was like, no. So I said, hi. You what? Oh My God!") Now I'm studying law and I need to be able to stand up in court and make an improvised speech that will persuade a judge and jury, so I'm having to learn those skills back over.
The author of this post asserts his moral rights.
(Keep in mind, when I went to school, we had no computers.)
I wouldn't know how to use a teletype, astrolab, or the bow and string method for starting fires...
but I don't need too.
We have evolved and advanced. What does it matter if we trade off one antantiquated skill for something modern?
In this day and age computers can go everywhere. We don't need to be without them. So why would we need writing skills beyond the basics (if at all)?
Geez, what backwater do you live in? The kids will just send the person a text whether there is a powercut or not!
Now that you mention it, I did overdo it by a large margin on that point ;-)
If you're writing your representative, a hand-written letter is the way to go. Anything that looks like a form letter isn't even opened. Writing a complaint letter in by hand also gets a much better response, same with a thank you letter for a job interview.
Writing something by hand says you spent time to make something personal. Recall the typed letters were impressive because they implied that you had either an expensive typewriter or cheap labor armed with an expensive typewriter.
Even before I learned Qwerty my handwriting was atrocious. If it wasn't for learning how to type in elementary school, I'd probably be creating indecypherable codes for the Allies. Of course kids need to be able to write, but this article stinks of Luddites and FUD. Must be Bic and the other writing instrument monopolies banding together to stomp out computers - "Did you know that typing leads to poor grades and bad dental hygiene? Take away your kid's computer and give them a pen!"
Oh, and my spelling sucks too.
-Ryan
I've been typing since I first got WordPerfect on my PC-Junior. My handwriting is good enough; not award-winning but not illegible either by any stretch.
Just as many others here, I learnt cursive in elementary school, found it inpractical, and forgot it. I'm a professional now, and have never had any trouble whatsoever writing in print.
And so what? I find print easier to read, and type even better, and now that we're allegedly on the road to a paper-free workplace, what's wrong with kids typing better than they write? Times change. Time was, everyone wrote in formal script. That ended, and civilisation (such that it is) continued to progress.
"Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves or we know where we can find information." -Samuel Johnson
First the bullshit:
"'They've got good handwriting now, and they love cursive,' Bolton says as her students filter in from recess."
--I haven't met a child that likes cursive. That's a load of crock.
And the brainwashing:
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"
The students eagerly shout, "No!" and return to loops and curves.
--Hey; I have e-mails saved from years ago that I cherish. I have them in an imap folder or printed out.
A better conversation, perhaps, is how kids can't spell anymore becuase spellcheck (and particularly autocorrect type things) make it unnecessary to do so. If I type nieghbor instead of neighbor and it gets automatically and invisibly changed each and every time, I'm not a slave to the red wavy underline and have no reason to realize or correct my false use of the i before e rule. What should be done about that?
Perhaps a plug in into Word and clones that proactively helps correct the spelling of the user not just the document. I'm serious about this.
I haven't posted in so long, my sig is out of date.
And the only way I can really write, as opposed to rewriting or editing, is to write on notebook paper with pencil, in cursive. That's really the only time I use it, but I'm glad I know it. And I want my progeny to know it, too, if only because more knowledge is never a bad thing.
!#@%*)anks for hanging up the phone, dear.
At least I can typ quickly and accurately!
I do like the poster's comment further down that, although percentage-wise, it's a dead language, there's more scholars alive now that can read cuneiform than when it was actually in use.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
It's a similar phenomenon to Japan's. It's a result of the skill sets needed to read characters and write characters being different. Word processing has helped people to forget how to write characters. I've had Chinese teachers in China who had to use dictionaries in class to look up how to write words. And of course there are the rural Chinese citizens, their reading skills are on a much lower level than urban residents (and their writing is even worse!).
It's a problem that will continue to grow.
ÂInternational Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of HandwritingÂ? This is funny.
I see another movie by the same guys who brought us Best in Show, A Mighty Wind, and Spinal Tap. I can even see Christopher Guest and Michael McKean as pen men.
Writing love letters.
I wonder if they're seeing a drop in cursive writing in Russia? Probably not as much, since the Cyrillic alphabet is too unwieldy to block-print. And if you think our cursive is hard to read, try learning to read handwritten Cyrillic script. Argh! It often looks like a bunch of lowercase M's, U's, and E's strung together. Cyrillic is a perfect example of why linguists should NOT be allowed to develop alphabets.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I'm pretty sure Cursive writing we developed to make a page written with a quill and ink pen more legible, because picking up the quill to form "print" letters would cause drips and spots all over the page. let it die. I'll limp by when i write on paper by using Grafitti, it's close enough.
I post links to stuff here
It is really all relative. Everyone needs to know how to write, whether that is printing or cursive. I learned to print and then moved on to cursive. I don't think that it made me a better person for having learned them but I can say that it is important to learn them, no matter how badly the script is because of brain development and fine motor skills. If, once they are learned, a person chooses to type everything then so be it. By then the development that needed to be done is done. That doesn't mean that if a person never again picks up a pen and paper that they won't suffer some irreversible damage. Who knows! I can say though that I prefer email to mailing letters through the post office and I prefer to type than write. The important things to learn is spelling and grammer.
The Chinese ideographical system doesn't require you to write more than 1 character at a time. More like printing, which is a lot easier on the small muscles of the fingers than cursive is. You get to lift and reposition your hand between characters.
During my earliest school years [1] of the 1980s, having a computer in the classroom was uncommon. If there was a computer room there might perhaps be half a dozen computers at best[2]. As they had to be shared among the whole school we did not get to use them often, hence much of the work we produced in class involved handwriting.
There was a strong emphasis on good handwriting and cursive was used often around school. Teachers used it on wall displays, and when writing on the blackboards. The educational TV shows we watched focused on it also [3]. For the last lesson of the day on Wednesday afternoons the headmaster took us for handwriting class. I became good at using cursive and still use it now.
These days I see 8th graders who can't read properly, let alone write even in print.
Some other poster mentioned ties and shoelaces being replaced with snap-on or elastic ties and zip/velcro/etc shoe fasteners. I have no problem with this, and the convenience is obvious. Perhaps I'm just old fashioned in thinking you should be able to do these things the 'old' way too. Being able to tie your own shoelaces and knot your own tie was quite normal when I was a kid.
[1] Referring to the British public school system.
[2] BBC B/32k with tape decks, and later Acorn DFS/Cumana 40/80 track 5 1/4 floppies. Ph33r!
[3] e.g. Words and Pictures, with Wordy the orange floating character covered in letters, Magic E, and the floating pen with the light in the end that would write letters against the black background while a voice said 'up and down, round and over' and similar.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
The fountain pen has made writing so much more pleasurable that I have re-learned cursive just for the beauty of writing in script - and now after a few months can write faster than I ever have before. I have started writing journals in script using a fountain pen, because my hand won't cramp and I have a blast.
Seriously, try a good fountain pen. They kick the BUTT of every ballpoint you will use. And get one rollerball (they also use an easy flowing liquid ink) for plane trips, as the changing pressure with elevation are the one weakness of fountain pens - they will leak because the ink flows so easily.
-- John
And how many using Netscape Navigator know what a compass, or a sextant, are used for?
.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
Children are taught to write making only downstrokes? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The American educational system continues to amaze me.
One summer when I was around 14 I redesigned my own handwriting from scratch. Inspired by the bauhaus design school, I worked out an optimal set of upper and lower case letterforms. The idea was to make every symbol unambiguous, so I adopted European-style crossed 7s and Zs, '1' and 'l' were distinguishable, and so on. This later helped a huge amount in mathematics and physics.
Next I worked out the easiest way to write each symbol in a small number of strokes. So an "A" is two strokes, an "N" is one stroke, and so on.
Then over the summer vacation, I practiced. By the time school started again, I was pretty much up to the speed I used to be able to achieve via cursive lettering. I switched to my new handwriting at school, and refused to go back. The teachers didn't mind too much because it was easier for them to read and mark my work.
Twenty years later, I cannot remember how to write cursive script at all, except for my one-word signature. If I'm in a real hurry, I can partially join some adjacent letters to increase speed at the expense of legibility, but it's rare I have to write something that quickly.
Obviously designing your own bauhaus-inspired handwriting system is exceptionally geeky, downright obsessive even, but the point is there's nothing inherently slow or ugly about non-cursive handwriting.
Another unexpected benefit was that my handwriting turned out to be incredibly easy for the Newton printed recognizer to read. I got better accuracy on the Newton that I've ever managed to get from Graffiti on the Palm.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Hooray! I learned cursive by staring at the cursive alphabet above the blackboard while being bored to death in 2nd grade. I recall that I got in trouble for using it on a spelling test too, since we weren't supposed to know cursive until 3rd grade... what a wonderful school system we have (I live in the US, can you tell?).
Probably because of this, my handwriting is pretty bad... so if laptops help kill off cursive, I'm all for them! It will help save the eyesight of millions of postal workers and beaurocrats all around the world who no longer have to try to read that stuff.
Besides, there are plenty of cursive fonts if you're feeling nostalgic, and they have much better handwriting than I ever did.
Hmmmm... does that mean that cursive will eventually become an encryption? If so, you reading it might be a violation of the DMCA... and faxing it would be illegal here in Michigan.
I am a doctor. I write in patients' charts everyday, but I never use cursive for anything except my signature, and then I frequently write my name in block letters next to my signature because my signature isn't very legible. In the current regulatory and medical-legal climate, it is becoming *highly* advisable to write all notes in block letters. Physicians can be held legally liable for poorly legible notes or orders that result in treatment errors. Personally, I view cursive writing as a sort of watered-down calligraphy that is geared more toward looking fancy and less toward actually communicating.
hmmm, perhaps this is the reason why pda's and tablet pc's are not selling that well?
customer: "what? i have to _write_ instead of _type_!? take that crap somewhere else!"
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
Well it doesn't exist anymore, sorry. Anyway to this day Russian is still frequently written in cursive, even on official documents and stuff like that. And Cyrillic cursive looks drastically different than the printed variety. Some letters look like other letters, for example t looks like m, d looks like g, etc. As well as being generally loopy if written quickly. In English at least the resemblance between cursive and printed letters is much closer. So, you know, just be glad it's dying here, and that it was never that bad to begin with.
I'm sure those who like cursive writing will still do it, just like people who do calligrapy for the art of it. But it's certainly not a survival skill anymore.
see this comment
My print handwriting has also been ruined by Denelian / Print mixed teaching (moved from WA to CO 2 years into a Denelian program).
Kids don't know how to use roatary phones, or plows, or ride horses today either. This doesn't mean we should get rid of touch-pads, modern farming equipment and cars.
Maybe it's interesting to note this decline in the use of an obsolete technology, but I do not believe action is needed.
Kids are still learning to write NON CURSIVE letters, and I think that's just fine. The reason for cursive is rapid writing, the reason for a keyboard is even MORE rapid writing.
The same arguments that can be used for "A kid doesn't need to use a computer" can be made for the "A kid doesn'r need to write" arguments.
You'll need luck to get a job if you can't wirte! You'll need a luck getting a job if you can't type too. Unless your writing skills don't need to go beyond filling out the application, you're going to need the keyboard skills. Most writing has been or is being moved to computers.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
You all fail to grasp the true significance of all of this. Don't you see that now, with the demise of cursive skills amongst the general population, Disneyland will be unable to hire new people who can write on hats (it has to be in cursive, you see, because the sewing machine doesn't render printed letters well at all, because you're writing in one continuous line)!!! That means that those few of us who work in this incredibly important industry will become... even more valuable... maybe even paid more... certainly get more hours scheduled... we'll become one of those idolized cast member subgroups, like the folks who work at the Haunted Mansion... Cursive is dead! Long live Times New Roman!!!!
Did anyone notice all the typing tutor ads that came up at the top of the screen on this article?
eh. I know how to write my alphabet (print uppercase and lowercase as well as script upper and lower...). My problem is that I lack the coordination to manuever the writing utencil properly. My handwriting looks just as bad today as it did when I was back in 4th grade, from sheer lack of practice. (I realized this from writing checks lately. Those bank people must get a laugh out of stuff like that. hehe)
eh. It's better off like this anyways. I can type WAAAAY faster than I can write. Palm/Handspring realized this a few years ago when they decided to start removing the script pad from their devices and just simply attached a keyboard; it's faster to type with one finger than it is to Palm-script words.
Think of it like when the first quill was used as a writing utencil: "Hey, I can write stuff easily on papyrus without using a hammer and chisel on a flat stone!" It's just evolution of media. Eventually even paper will be outdated (eventhough everyone today says it'll never happen) and everything will be on ePaper or eInk or whatnot.... The next step will probably be straight thought-to-storage-device technology. And beyond that, who knows?
Karma: NaN
They have this place called Crossroads village by me. Supposedly showing what the area was like many many years ago. They have a little school there and on the blackboard were lessons such as "How many horses in 6 teams of horses?" and "How many apples in 2 pints of preserves?" or something along those lines. My point here is that students no longer need to know how many horses are in a team, they no longer need to know how long to bake apples to make preserves. In fact, the schools would be extremely negligent if they wasted our children's time on such outdated subjects when far more relevent subjects exists that students actually need.
/. told us all messages had to be printed in heiroglyphics it doesn't show a NEED for heiroglyphics, rather it shows the need for heavy psychological counseling.
My wife is a school teacher, and when I saw the kids still learning cursive, I asked her what the point is. She didn't have a good answer for me and I doubt anyone here does short of it's tradition. Printing can be used in the case of any need to use cursive. Some of you will say, "but on this form/test it says I have to use cursive". Well, if the only need for cursive is because someone arbitrarily chooses it over printing, then there isn't really any need for it, is there? If
I work at a school that goes from Kindergarten to 8th grade. We have a 7 computer lab. Next year we will have 30 laptops to go with the old lab. In the USA new laws state that every child, every school, in every state must be computer literate by the end of 8th grade. These kids will have skills for programming, web design, office applications, that most of us don't have. And they wont even be in high school. I can't remember ever having to turn in a single thing at any job in cursive instead of typed. Do you think these kids will turn in cursive work, or typed? They'll have their reports in 7 fonts with pictures in graphs by 9th grade. In college those reports will be imbedded in multimedia presentations. When they go to work in an office EVERYTHING will be done on Word, Email, IM, or whatever is new then. For those who don't work in an office, anything they turn in might as well be printed. After all, their bosses probably wont have used cursive since third grade.
The last time I tried addressing an envelope it looked pretty lame as my penmenship is awful awful awful. So I grabbed some labels from the office, threw them in the laser printer, and fired up Word. My doctor can't write legibly and he probably makes $200,000 a year. I don't see it's importance. I'd rank it somewhere below Phys Ed.
When I do write in cursive, I usually just do stylized versions of printed capital letters.
-- SYS 64738 --
I always hated cursive and I could never write legibly. I taught myself to print much faster than I can type and it's just legible enough for most people to read. It's not my computer's fault. Many of my friends did the same thing.
If Windows is running and there's no one there to use it, does it still crash?
cmkrcs1 was here.
I know a johnny who cannot spell.
----- Friends, l33tists, l4m3z0rs! Lend me thy keyboards.
at work we have 9 digit omni lock doors, I have the same problem, I can't actually remember the number unless I go thru the motions of punching it in :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I'm glad cursive is dying.
It is vestigial, useful only for signatures. This is the only time in my life, since elementary school, that I have used cursive writing.
There are lots of good reasons that have already been posted. It is very difficult to read. It is not very faster than printing. It serves no use.
My grandmother used to be a shorthand expert (worked decades as a secretary, in the age before dictation machines). Shorthand is now dead. It has been made obsolete. Cursive will soon follow.
In elementary school, in the early 1980's, there was a fad that swept through, with yet another writing system: Denelian! This was some kind of hybrid between printing and cursive. It was supposed to be easier to learn than cursive, used as a stepping stone after children learned printing. Instead, it combined the disadvantages of both! Fortunately this fad died out after a few years.
Standard printing is easy to read and easy to write. It is easy to learn. It is just as effective at communicating information as cursive, if not more so. Isn't that what writing is supposed to do?
I dance on the grave of cursive!
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Haven't you seen any of those "cold-filtered" commercials on TV? Filter out the bad stuff, keep the good stuff.
Copyrights, Patents, Trademarks: temporary loans from the Public Domain, not real property ("intellectual" or otherwise)
By the time I got to high school, most of the writing was done on a typewriter (manual, not electric, this was in the mid-60s), except for the occasional exam. Having a preference for "science", I was taking as much math, physics, chemistry, electronics, etc. as I could, so I was spending a lot of time printing already and my writing became a mix. The same was pretty much the case in college as well.
Then I dropped out of college and started programming. Fortran, assembly, etc., especially on coding forms, isn't something you do in cursive. I did type my own code - on 80 column cards - but keypunches were a scarce resource so you had to know what you were doing at one.
By the time I got into a situation where I worked with people on a project, it was a more than a decade later and we all had terminals in our offices.
I'm back in college studying machine tool, welding, mechanical design, and for the first time I had an exam that included some signficant writing, a microeconomics exam. Every other exam has included significant technical jargon, formulas, or terms and procedures, and G-code. I don't have a clue how to write things like GTAW, GMAW, SMAW, E7018, cursively, much less stuff like G03X1.Y2.I-2.J0M06.
Maybe some people mix cursive with printing when writing "while (cyclecountctrreg)..." on white boards or making corrections or notes, but not I - find it easier to just print everything. There are times when I find printing a bit tiring, but then I wish for a keyboard, not writing in cursive. When I did mix them, lines of code would start out cursive and end in printing and then paragraph after would start out in print and switch to cursive until an equation or symbol name when it would switch to printing. Very strange to look at and read.
2. Did she write PUKE!!!!! in English, or did she use kanji/kana?
3. Does the kanji for PUKE!!!!! resemble a guy puking or the result afterwards?
By the way, not only would my education reform platform involve lots of mandatory reading of books without pictures, but it would also involve flushing some of these lousy ass teachers that manage to hang on somehow in our public schools.
Surely you'll want to *transmit* those clay tablets, won't you?
Better hook up with somebody whose college also had an Ag School....
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
So I don't find it surprising that this shows up in the Germanic Scandinavian languages as well, though I had no guesses what the Finns did.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Well, maybe not genetic per se, but it's hardwired into the brain from birth - that's how graphology (reading someone's character from thir handwriting) works.
According to a graphology talk I went to, people with messy handwriting tend to me *more* intelligent than people who write "properly" - an individual style shows individual thinking. If you can't get past a 5-year old's standard school handwriting, it shows you have the brain of a 5-year old...
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
we will think that we want the doorbell to ring and it will ring. And then, in the future after that, after we have thought that the doorbell should ring, and it has rung, should we think that we did not want the doorbell to ring, it will not have rung... ;)
From attrition.org:
---
"Students today can't prepare bark to calculate their problems.
They depend upon their slates which are more expensive. What will
they do when their slate is dropped and it breaks? They will be
unable to write!" -Teachers Conference,1790
"Students today depend upon paper too much. They don't know how
to write on slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves.
They can't clean a slate properly. What will they do when they
run out of paper?" -Principals Association, 1815
"Students today depend too much upon ink. They don't know how to
use a pen knife to sharpen a pencil. Pen and ink will never
replace the pencil!" -National Association of Teachers, 1907
"Students today depend upon store bought ink. They don't know how
to make their own. When they run our of ink they will be unable
to write words or ciphers until their next trip to the
settlement. This is a sad commentary on modern education." -The
Rural American Teacher, 1929
"Students today depend upon these expensive fountain pens. They
can no longer write with a straight pen and nib (not to mention
sharpening their own quills). We parents must not allow them to
wallow in such luxury to the detriment of learning how to cope in
the real business world, which is not so extravagant." -PTA
Gazette,1941
"Ball point pens will be the ruin of education in our country.
Students use these devices and then throw them away. The American
virtues of thrift and frugality being discarded. Business and
banks will never allow such expensive luxuries." -Federal
Teacher, 1950
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