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.
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.
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."