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;
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.
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.
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
> 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