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26 Years Old and Can't Write In Cursive

theodp writes "Back in 1942, Chicago mail-order house Spiegel's looked to handwriting analysis to identify inconsistent, unreliable, poorly adjusted people. Ah, those were the days. TIME reports we are witnessing the death of handwriting, noting that Gen Y struggles with cursive and the group following them has even less of a need for good penmanship. And while the knee-jerk explanation is that computers are to blame for our increasingly illegible scrawl, literacy prof Steve Graham explains that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. 'Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore,' he says. So much for 100 Years of Handwriting Success!"

27 of 921 comments (clear)

  1. Oh Noes! by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Funny

    If we let cursive die, calligraphy could be next to go!

    --
    Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
    1. Re:Oh Noes! by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Funny

      What? Cursive is just a matter installing a cursive font.

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
    2. Re:Oh Noes! by tempest69 · · Score: 4, Funny
      actually, the problem is that schools arent teaching children to text.. look at how many 40year olds struggle to get out a paragraph in 15 minutes.
      Texting would be the far more appropriate skill to teach.

      Storm

    3. Re:Oh Noes! by CrosseyedPainless · · Score: 3, Funny

      See, that's the advantage of print. That link you provided? Gibberish. I couldn't read a single word of the handwriting examples provided. It looked like somebody wrote "pengÅ'", which is obviously not a word.

    4. Re:Oh Noes! by MaskedSlacker · · Score: 4, Funny

      You just don't know how to do this on a computer.

      I use a custom perl script so I can write all my essays in plain text with comment lines. The script strips out the comments, builds a latex source file, and compiles to pdf automatically. I've been considering adding in rtf support for the rare occassions I need to work with people who insist on using word processors (which I despise for being slow and inefficient for my purposes), but haven't gotten around to it yet.

    5. Re:Oh Noes! by arclyte · · Score: 3, Funny

      I'm a lefty you insensitive clod! This is just another of piece of the oppressive propaganda spread by the righty elite. Lefties have rights too, you bastards! Not only am I quicker at printing than cursive, but it is also much more readable... Part of this has to do with righty teachers not knowing how to teach a lefty (although, unlike when my dad was a kid, they actually let me write with my left hand...) but also because the cursive writing system has biases against lefties. Lefties unite! Death to cursive writing!

    6. Re:Oh Noes! by megrims · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well done. You've requested justification for an unsupported statement and made one in the same breath.

    7. Re:Oh Noes! by Velox_SwiftFox · · Score: 2, Funny

      But it's so hard to not make a mess when you lift your quill from the parchment for every letter, instead of a new dip in the inkpot for a new word.

    8. Re:Oh Noes! by forkazoo · · Score: 3, Funny

      I keep my weekly logbook in cursive writing.

      I'm an Engineer, and my logbook must be kept for 6 years after my death for legal reasons. If all goes well, that'll be in 70+ years. It is unlikely at best that anything written on a computer will be readable in that time frame.

      Are you kidding? In 70 years, my cell phone's built in camera will have enough resolution to do full forensic data recovery just by taking a picture of a hard drive.

    9. Re:Oh Noes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      Speaking every every word and makes it easy to hear what is missing

      but apparently not what is superfluous...

    10. Re:Oh Noes! by dzfoo · · Score: 2, Funny

      And I agree with you both: I have this uncorroborated idea that since I've had some trouble reading some random people's hand-writing, then it stands to reason that no hand-writing can ever be legible, as a matter of incontrovertible truth. The fact that I have poor penmanship myself just proves this point beyond all doubt.

              -dZ.

      --
      Carol vs. Ghost
      ...Can you save Christmas?
    11. Re:Oh Noes! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

      If only there was a way of transferring digital information to a hard copy medium, then you could have the best of both worlds.

    12. Re:Oh Noes! by Scrameustache · · Score: 2, Funny

      We'll start seeing epigraphy as a worthwile career choice, woot!

      Bonus points for making me google a word :)

      --

      You can't take the sky from me...

  2. Think it is bad now? by SirLurksAlot · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just wait 50 years: "That's right kids, grampa used to use his hands to program computers!"

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    God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
  3. not important by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    Righting in cursive isn't important anymore. Who ever did this study should of looked to see if peoples grammer abilities are any worst then before. From what ive seen, I don't think their.

  4. And I'm still mourning ... by Skapare · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... the death of Blackletter.

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    now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
  5. Re:Because its a useles skill by Bandman · · Score: 3, Funny

    Right, but how's your cursive fare against your typing?

    There are people who still write using calligraphy. There will still be people who write cursive. It'll just be a niche skill, sort of like Blacksmithing is.

    Keep practicing your cursive. Some day you'll be useful in the SCA. ;-)

  6. Age-related CAPTCHA by Crash+McBang · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just use handwriting in a CAPTCHA to filter out the twentysomethings!

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    To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
  7. Re:Signature and that's it by Rockoon · · Score: 2, Funny

    My squiggle has been standard since 1983, when I spent an afternoon writing my signature over and over again, until it evolved into the most efficient thing I could muster that still resembled an attempt at writing.

    --
    "His name was James Damore."
  8. Re:Because its a useles skill by Sir_Lewk · · Score: 2, Funny

    Also I am exactly 26 years old.

    well in that case, Happy birthday!

    --
    "linux is just DOS with a UNIX like syntax" -- Galactic Dominator (944134)
  9. They told us we would need cursive to get a job by basementman · · Score: 2, Funny

    In second grade they taught us cursive, claiming that we would use it for the rest of our life and without it we would never get a job. When we switched over to middle school none of our teachers used cursive, and none of them would accept papers written in cursive either.

  10. Re:26 years by digitalgiblet · · Score: 2, Funny

    Soldering and woodburning are great teachers of fine motor skills. Searing burns are great for focusing your mind.

  11. Re:The SAT by boast · · Score: 2, Funny

    that was the hardest part of the SAT for me.

  12. Re:26 years by Weedhopper · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well, he can't write and you can't read, so it all works out, right?

  13. Hinderance? by senorpoco · · Score: 4, Funny

    My handwriting is almost illegible, so I went into the only career path where it is acceptable. I start medschool in September,

  14. Re:What is the point of cursive? by trg83 · · Score: 2, Funny

    As a Java developer, I regularly find myself misreading directory listings containing Maven POMs as p-o-r-n.xml.

  15. The Last Time I Used Cursive by coaxial · · Score: 5, Funny

    When I took the GRE, they made you write this big long pledge in cursive ("DO NOT PRINT"). It took me forever. It hurt my hand It hurt my arm. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew, they knew, everyone knew, that this form was just going to be turned into a checkbox and then thrown away. I hated every minute of it.

    But what really prompted me to post this was seeing the eights in the 8th grade Zaner Bloser assignment linked to in the blurb. The '8' was absolutely horrible. Seeing that horrible version of the S-slash, made me think back to the first grade. Until then, I always wrote my eights as two circles, one over the other one. Then my first grade teacher started marking me, and everyone else who made eights like that, down. I can still see her in that damn salmon colored suit standing there saying, "Some of you are making eights like they're snowmen. That's wrong. The correct way is to make an S, and then draw a line connecting the ends, like this. Practice it. For now on you will make eights the right way, or they will be marked wrong."

    And so I changed the way I made my eights. 25 years, I've made eights with the s-slash, mostly without even thinking. Occasionally I remember how I used to make them, and try to reclaim my eight. It never lasts long. I inevitably fall back to the s-slash. My "slave eight" if you will, and when I realize it, I die a little.

    Fuck you Mrs. Scheffer. Rot in your fucking grave.