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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 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.
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.
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.
"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.
The only thing you need cursive for is to sign your paycheck.
TODO: Insert witty sig
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
buh? uniquely american? surely cursive script wasn t invented here? do other countries have cursive handwriting?
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.
A good point if it were plainly beneficial, but really, we'd only be teaching kids to handwrite for the sake of handwriting.
Bored with karma, be a fan/freak
I think Samuel Pepys would care about the end of writing.
There are so many concerns about digitizing documents and what format to choose because readers may not be available even five years after the project, let alone 400.
Meanwhile, thanks to the ability to handwrite, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hammurabi's Laws, the Rosetta Stone.
And as the CNN version of this story mentions, which is more significant to you? The handwritten letter that you received from your relative just he or she died, or that quick email saying "Call me" you got and deleted?
What?
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.
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...
So if the kids are stuck in a power outage and need to leave a message for someone, how exactly do you propose they do it?
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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!
So if the kids are stuck in a power outage and need to leave a message for someone, how exactly do you propose they do it?
Print, in all caps if they have to, you can figure that out just by knowing what letters look like when they are typed (being able to read...).
"I'll have a Guinness, no wait, make that a Coors Light" -Grad student I work with, who shall remain anonymous...
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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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
I couldn't write in cursive LONG before I ever touched a computer keyboard!
Seriously, I was never able to learn it to my teachers' satisfaction in grade school. They always told me that my writing was messy and hard to read and that they would take points off for not writing in cursive. Then when I wrote in cursive, they complained even more, so eventually, I went back to my current writing. If my writing is so hard to read, why can Tablet PCs that Iâ(TM)ve never used before get almost 95% of it? My Newton's HWR accuracy approaches 99% now that I've trained it.
I just don't see cursive as being a useful piece of knowledge. I can read it just fine, but I don't see any reason to write it. I can write in my script much faster than anyone I know can write in cursive. Everyone Iâ(TM)ve asked has no trouble whatsoever reading my handwriting; so maybe my teachers were just on crack.
I already use my thumb to ring doorbells and I have never used a mobile phone's keypad. Of course, I use the center of my thumb and they probably mean that the next generation will use their thumb tips, but I really wonder about the conclusions people reach sometimes.
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.
Sure it is. It's part of a cultural history that is being lost. Much as we have Ebooks or Audio Books, there is nothing quite like sitting down with a good hardcover book. The same could be said for emails and a nice handwritten letter. Which says "I care" more?
One word: exams. If you're still writing individual letters separately by the time you sit written exams, you'll write at about half the speed of someone with good joined-up handwriting. In essay subjects it really helps to churn out long answers as fast as possible, and even in subjects with short answers it doesn't hurt.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
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...
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
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.
No, a unique scribble which represents a given individual is standard for a signature. Seriously, how many signatures have you seen which are actual, recognizable cursive? Very few, in my experience...
By that reasoning, kids who print just need to be smarter. If they spend less time thinking about the answer, they'll have more time to write out their answers.
Still I don't necessarily agree with you. I wrote individual printed letters, and I never had problems running out of time on tests.
blog
Then stop writing your name in cursive for your signature. You don't need to.
Your legal signature is simply a symbol or mark by which you can be known. Any symbol will do as long as it is relatively unique and you use it consistently.
Look at your average doctor or lawyer... they've got signatures that are nothing more than a squigly line. But when you compare it, the squigles are the same from instance to instance. Mine is the same way, my name is entirely too long to write cursively, so I make a few loops and a few sqiggles, takes about 1/2 second to make my signature for a name with 20 characters (not spelling out my middle name).
Whatever you choose to use as your signature, be sure to get your government issued IDs re-issued with your new signature in case anyone questions you about your it.
Most Americans have been taught that a signature is your name written in cursive, but then again, most Americans are taught that the government is a Democracy and that the seasons are caused by our distance from The Sun. Educators are not perfect, and some of what they teach is for convienence instead of accuracy.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
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.
Oh, heavens! The ability to properly illuminate latin texts is probably dying out as well. However shall we cope?
I know I'm supposed to hold the opposite opinion, since I am by profession and vocation an historian, and spend a lot of my time reading old manuscripts. Even more so, in that I do calligraphic art in my not-so-copious spare time.
However (you knew this was coming, didn't you?), I have to say that this isn't really as big a problem as it seems. Every generation has bemoaned the slipping-away of skills that seemed essential to the previous, at least in the handwriting department. My grandparents had lovely cursive hands, but would probably still have been incapable of reading (much less writing) the old-style gothic cursive that their great-grandparents wrote. Plus Ãa change, plus c'est la mÃme chose, as Karr put it.
It has to be said that these changes are natural - this shouldn't (even in this technologically enthusiastic forum) be regarded as an issue of high-tech vs. low-tech, or of luddites vs. technophiles. It's just change, which is constantly affecting any culture. Some things that seemed absolutely essential to past generations are now barely relevant.
I should be much more concerned if we were stagnating, trying to ensure that our children neither more nor less than what we ourselves learned ("If'n it's good enough fer mah grand-pappy, then it's..." etc.).
I'd really be concerned if our spelling and math were slipping. Um, hold on a minute....
The current decline (or rather, what most of us agree to perceive as a decline) in orthographic and mathematical understanding among the general population are a different matter, since these aren't just skills - they're fundamental tools necessary to understand a whole slew of other subjects. Now, in these cases, I think there is reason to be concerned.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
What I don't understand is why you make a difference between "print" and "cursive" -- both are hadnwritten... :)
:)
Must be an American thing to feel the need to use one particular style when you write a *check*.
For my part, I stopped using the "cursive" ("attaché") I learned in primary school early into secondary (when i started taking notes), for the simple reason it was slower to write (for me) and harder to read. The choice seemed trivial.
I handwrite almost as much as I type, and though I have somewhat of an interest in calligraphy I do all of this in a style which might be described as a quick uncial, or just print
AFAIM, it is very useful mostly to teach children coordination and precision with the hand at an early age.
Graphologists will doubtless agree that hadwriting
loses nothing in expressivity by not being "cursive"...
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
I have the opposite reaction, actually. My handwriting runs at approximately 15-20 WPM (for maybe a half-hour to an hour before serious cramping), while my typing can go at a sustained 90+ WPM (for hours at a time).a rly
Now the important part: my thoughts, particularly when writing, run in spurts of much faster than the 90 WPM... Probably (for a guess) closer to 120-150 WPM - I think faster than I speak, and being a New Englander, I speak fast. When typing, I can do a pretty good job of keeping up to my thoughts (only having to slow down slightly to allow my fingers to catch up) - when writing by hand, it becomes an
agonizing
and
halting
process
partic-
ul
with
long
words.
I find it much easier to be creative when my thoughts can flow onto the paper at close to the same speed they flow from my mind - the only possible improvement I could see is if perfect dictation software comes out... but even then, I'd tend to get dry mouth before I get to the point that my hands cramp.
While yes, the nice wide loops of cursive are awfully pretty, and that sure puts you in an artistic mind, it's just too damn slow for putting coherant thoughts down on paper.
-T
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.
Who cares if they can write cursive or not?
Cursive is an antiquated bunch of aristocratic bullshit. It has little or no use in moden society, except for perhaps signatures.
Printing is much easier to read. It is also even more easy to read something typed up, and alot quicker to type it up. Why waste time writing or printing a report when you can type it?
social sciences can never use experience to verify their statemen
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 hope not (27 here too). Yeah, I had essay questions, and I always printed. For me it was faster than cursive and I don't recall significant discomfort.
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.
It wasn't faster for me (perhaps it could have been had I done it more), and I question the motion benefits. The pen stays on the page, but you have to make lots of tiny and relatively precise loops and curves. Meanwhile print is mostly straight lines and circles (and therefore usually much more readable), and I don't see why it's so bad to raise the pen slightly between letters.
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.
Use whatever works for you. I find the opposite is true for me, and as the article points out many people use a combination of print and cursive.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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.
"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.
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."
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.
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.
... 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...
Actually, my assumption during school was that the teachers couldn't read what I wrote, and thus assumed it was correct based on past experiences. This in turn simple reinforced my good grades and the likelyhood that later teachers would assume I was correct when they could not decipher my writing.
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
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.
Faster and more fluid to write, but quite a bit harder to read (in most cases I've encountered).
Since the ultimate goal of "writing" in any format is to communicate, wouldn't the easiest to read be most important? Wouldn't it make sense that the harder to read a given medium is, the less popular it would become over time?
Survival of the fittest.
Bah. When I took the SATs in high school (about 5 years ago) they made us write -- in cursive -- a paragraph stating essentially that we were who we claimed to be and that we weren't cheating. Several of my friends -- and me -- had a lot of trouble with this because we hadn't used cursive in so long we forgot it. And this wasn't because of computers, we were high school kids who constantly took notes in class, wrote assignments and whatnot; it's just that we all printed rather than using cursive
Personally, I had bad handwriting long before I used computers regularly and stopped using cursive as soon as possible (they make you write things in cursive in elementary school and sometimes in middle school; but I didn't hvae to at all in high school).
My point? Only that good penmanship and the ability to remember how to write cursive may be dying, but not because of computers. I hated cursive and it actually was slower for me than "plain old" printing.
Any non-USAsians want to question this claim? I was under the impression that people in Europe knew cursive too.
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
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
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...
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
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?
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
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.