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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."
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 perhaps grew up in a middle generation. We were taught cursive but it was never really enforced after 4th or 5th grade.
:)
I had been typing papers since the 2nd grade (on my C64 baby in GEOS Works or something) and could never find a valid reason for me to use cursive other than Mrs. Soandso said to.
Cursive is ugly, useless, and difficult to read.
I think that in the future EVERYONE should be forced to type everything.
AIM is destroying another MORE important part of writing. Grammar, sentence structure, and spelling.
Nothing
like
having this
show up on
your screen every
time you talk to
someone.
Page length requirements on papers are going to be multiplied by 100 due to that
Just my worthless rambling.
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
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
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.
blog
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.
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.