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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.
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 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?
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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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.
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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
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
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.
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...
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.
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