Slashdot Mirror
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!"
I'm nearly 40 and haven't used cursive since high school. How is this a Gen Y thing again?
The same way you had no problem reading his typing when he used the word riding instead of writing. If you are fluent in a language, you usually are able to use context to understand what people intended to write.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
Getty-Dubay is the way to go. I learned penmanship in the late seventies. I was taught the "ball and stick" method for print and a version of the Palmer method for cursive (lots of loops). Taking notes in college was a struggle. I wrote faster in cursive but with all the loops, it became illegible pretty fast. I got Getty and Dubay's book Write Now and that changed everything. They use the "Italic" method which goes back to Michelangelo and Davinci. It has a very classic look. Italic is much easier and more natural to use. I highly recommend it.
For us users who have never used a fountain pen without it scraping horribly along the page, could someone explain what's so great about them?
The problem is you're writing with a fountain pen as if you're using a ball point. You don't need as much pressure with a fountain pen, or more precisely, you apply the pressure a bit differently, and hold the pen at a slightly different angle. Try writing more as you would with a pencil. It takes a bit of practice, but once you get it right it really is less fatiguing.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I'm 28. I learned cursive in the third grade and have not used it since -- unless you count signing my name. In my case, you probably shouldn't given that I sign my name with one initial + scribble and a second initial + scribble. My signature isn't even close to legible, but nobody cares.
It's not an easy skill to learn, but it was incredibly easy one to forget. We really probably shouldn't be wasting Kids time with this -- I don't see what the practical value is in teaching kids how to write cursive these days. Other than reading letters from my Great Grandmother, now dead, or the original copy of the Declaration of Independence or perhaps various signatures (in as much as they could be read) I can't really even see the value in learning to read cursive either.
As a brit, this was actually my reaction, it's called handwriting over here. I'm still trying to figure out what gen y is supposed to mean.
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
You say "Ball-point pens are to blame", but that implies that you don't like the writing done with ball-point pens.
In fact, the style of writing depends, and has always depended, on the writing technology used.
From chiselling letters into stone, we got serifs. They look beautiful and help reading, but unless you are chiselling inscriptions, you don't tend to use them for writing. Moveable type brought them back for printing, just because they look good.
With a quill pen, you have thick and thin strokes, and you don't want any up strokes, because the nib judders and splatters ink everywhere. The reaction to this was the lovely uncial and half-uncial scripts. Half-uncial is what we now call lower-case. Another solution was black-letter, which was also a solution to the high cost of materials. Black letter is very dense, and quite pretty (in some respects), at the cost of being almost, but not quite, illegible. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read!
The Chinese took a different tack and used a brush rather than a pen. This in turn impacted on the shape of their glyphs.
Then came the steel pen. At first, just a metal replacement for the quill, it evolved with the addition of a rounded blob on the tip. This allowed upstrokes without splatter! But, if you are doing longer continuous strokes and not dipping your pen quite so often, then the nib tends to dry out. Now, enter the fountain pen. A reservoir allows for continuous ink. Other requirements required the development of something other than the thick and corrosive, black "India Ink" (which is a Good Thing if you are writing on vellum, but less so with a steel pen on paper). Blue-black ink became popular. But now it became more important to have as continuous a line as possible. Hence, 'joined up writing'. And once more, people found ways to make it beautiful, even though it gave up the light and strong emphasis of the quill and flat steel nibs.
Then, the ball-point. Special ink that does not dry out in the pen, so joined-up is not necessary. A natural writing angle that is more upright than a nib, which leads to a preference for slightly different letter forms. In other words, with a ball-point pen there is no need for a continuous line, and it's actually slightly more difficult to write in that particular style anyway, which was designed and tuned for a particular technology.
People can write illegibly using almost any technology. I've seen 19th century handwriting that was perfectly legible to my eyes, but I've also seen stuff that is a painful exercise in decryption. Likewise I see people who write, or print, at high speed with a ball point pen and produce beautiful handwriting
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
I'm still trying to figure out what gen y is supposed to mean.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Y
not really, John Holt merely timed himself versus his class printing. Not a scientific study.
If you need your cursive-written pages to last long term, then you had better use acid-free paper. I've seen lots of cheap paper get yellow and brittle and then start to crumble after 10-15 years, which is hardly archival. After 70+ years, your logbook is probably going to crumble to dust if someone tries to read it if you are writing it in a blue-lined spiral notebook.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
1. It is a myth that cursive is faster than printing. "Fluid" printing (not the block letters taught in the first grades) uses far fewer strokes. Jumping from letter to letter instead of dragging the pen between letters also uses fewer strokes and is more direct, and is thus faster.
2. Cursive is harder to read than printed letters. Some proofs of this fact: (1) the ubiquitous instruction "please print" on forms, (2) the rarity of continuous-cursive forms in typefaces used in publishing, (3) the difficulty one has in reading supposedly stellar examples of cursive penmanship, such as the US Declaration of Independence.
3. Cursive is much harder to learn than printing. Of course, for this reason it is inflicted upon schoolchildren after they have a chance to master printing, since many never succeed at it.
4. The "Palmer Method" (for example) of cursive pedagogy stifles a child's developing a personal and distinctive style of handwriting. Within reasonable limits of legibility, printing leaves more freedom for this artistic outlet.
5. The techniques of cursive handwriting are filled with self-contradictions. A "slant" is dictated as a matter of efficiency, when there is no apparent anatomical justification for this practice. Left-handers (when tolerated) are taught to mirror the slant by tipping the paper to the left instead of to the right, but the inclination of the paper has everything to do with the slant of the writing (to the right whether executed right- or left-handed) and nothing to do with which hand is manipulating the stylus.
The mindless regimentation typically used to teach cursive is antithetical to the development of studious, inquiring minds. Unlike the rote of, say, multiplication tables, the diktat of cursive handwriting is not rooted in a useful natural principle. It is most popular in cultures such as the old German and Chinese, which value rote and regimentation to a degree usually held to be extreme by, say, Americans.
In light of the above points, why does this hideous art exist at all?
6. The only justifiable reason for commonly using cursive is obsolete. People traditionally wrote in cursive from ancient times because the quill pen technology penalized you for lifting the pen from the paper. The capillary action of the ink is lost when contact is interrupted, and restoring the ink trail is not reliable, so gaps often result. This is not a factor with modern pencils, fountain pens, ball-point pens, or fiber-tip pens.
7. Therefore it is a foolish pedagogy that continues to maintain the archaic art of cursive penmanship. This subject should be eliminated from the primary school curriculum, and filed away in the universities' classics departments, where it belongs.
no offense, but someone like a surveyor needs to keep those sorts of notes as well. kind of hard to bring a printer and laptop into a swamp. Then theres rain, snow.. paper is still very useful!
Sometimes the ignorance of others professions on slashdot is mind blowing.
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The style which you refer to is (I believe) Single stroke gothic, utilizing a single (capital) typeface. It's the preferred style of most engineers and drafters for legibility, and can be written at an adequate clip if necessary.
The point of these notebooks is to provide evidence for prior art in patent suits. This requires, above all, that it be difficult to fake dates by rearranging the pages. You could try throwing out an entire notebook and rewriting it with new material, but that's relatively hard to do convincingly.