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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!"
If we let cursive die, calligraphy could be next to go!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
Just wait 50 years: "That's right kids, grampa used to use his hands to program computers!"
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
... the death of Blackletter.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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. ;-)
Check out my sysadmin blog!
Just use handwriting in a CAPTCHA to filter out the twentysomethings!
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
Well, he can't write and you can't read, so it all works out, right?
My handwriting is almost illegible, so I went into the only career path where it is acceptable. I start medschool in September,
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.