Slashdot Mirror
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;
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!?
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...
.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not that they don't care - it's not on a standardized test. "Penmanship" is not something the No Child Left Behind Act requires; neither is memorizing Latin verse. Just as one has gone the way of the dodo, so is the other going, for sheer pragmatic reasons of budget and schedule. What else could the valuable class time be used for, if you drop penmanship?
BTW, my local public school system dropped it altogether from the elementary curriculum several years back - apart from a few predictable hysterical letters to the editor, gone in a week, nobody noticed.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
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.
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.
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
You obviously aren't left handed. Cursive just wasn't designed (or at least wasn't taught correctly) for left handed people.
However told you that was wrong. In my home countries (both of them) your signature has to be written in English text but that's the only restriction.
:-) I've never gotten complaints about m signature for anyone, and it's on my passport and green card.
There's another Urban legend in the USA that states you have to write your first and last names in full on a signature. This is also false.
Me, I write my first and middle initials and my last name in full - all in cursive. At the end stick a Tengwar rune which is my initial. Yeah, I'm a geek
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.
-
> Worldwide cuneriform literacy down 99.999999999%!
While this is a funny comment, in reality, scientists have demonstrated that physically forming letters when writing, at least during early years, is crucial to understanding writing skills.
Kids who only learned keyboarding did suffer in their abilities.
So yes, this is a bad thing folks.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
I've been told (by a Babylonian scholar) that there are more people alive today who read and write Babylonian cuneiform than at any other time in history.
When it was a living language, the world's population was tiny and the literacy rate microscopic. The literate of ancient Babylon are far outnumbered by the linguistics undergraduates who study cuneiform today.
-Tom Duff
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."
When I was in grade seven a friend of mine could not write but instead printed everything.
This is what I don't understand. Why does "writing" automatically mean cursive, as opposed to "enscribing characters on a surface"???
When I write something, be it a letter, directions somewhere, or some note, i use "printed" letters instead of cursive letters, but i'm still writing. I'm still using a pen or pencil.
So of course your friend in grade seven could write; he wasn't illiterate. He just didn't write in cursive.
Oh, and most of those zip up basketball shoes have laces underneath. You tie them, then zip the laces up inside. I guess so you don't trip on them, or they don't come untied.
blog
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
Why bother? There are plenty of nice, dressy loafers on the market...
IMHO, both good penmanship and the ability to tie a bow knot are destined for obsolescence. They're simply not needed by the majority of our society any more. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! How many of you can churn butter? Tie knots other than bow knots, and know which to use when? Whittle? Perform basic carpentry, or masonry? Care for and ride a horse? Tan leather?
Tons of skills which used to be part of everyday life have fallen into disuse, simply because most people don't need to do them any more. And tons of new skills are aquired to fit the new needs. It's called progress.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.