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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!"
26 year old people are just old enough to have learned to write before computers. If they can't, it's the school, not the keyboard.
Nothing in the real world uses cursive. It's all manuscript. Cursive is far harder to read, has more person to person variation, and isn't really faster to write. In addition, there's plenty of evidence that teaching it harms children's education by confusing them. So long as they can still read and write script, there's nothing to be concerned about here.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I tried to recall how to make all the letters, upper and lower case in cursive, and I cannot recall them all. I think the only cursive I've used out side of grade school is when I have to sign my name.
There's exactly one profession that requires cursive handwriting skills.
Third grade teachers.
The only cursive I use, oh, since high school, is to write my signature. And I hardly even bother with that any more either. I just put down a squiggle.
-Matt
No one's talking about being unable to write. What's happening is the death of script. The advantage of cursive over printing is that it is faster and less fatiguing to the hand. Nowadays, for long composition typing is the preferred mode, while the most common use for manual writing is filling in forms... where cursive is undesirable anyway.
Seriously. The answer is easy.
The whole thing on the 'decline of handwriting' is just silly. Anceint Greek isn't taught in most schools either - should we lament the 'decline of 26 year olds being able to understand Ancient Greek'? Of course not.
They can't write in cursive because cursive is either not taught at all, or taught poorly at best - and /nobody cares/ whether or not you can write well.
Why do we need cursive writing to begin with? While I think that there should be some attention paid to penmanship I don't see the need to write in two fashions anymore than I see a need to learn two systems of measurement.
Maybe one of the reasons American children are falling behind is because the curriculum is filed with crap that is outdated or never needed to exist in the first place.
We'd be best off to get rid of cursive writing and the Imperial measurement system from society and save ourselves the trouble. I'm sure there is more nostalgic and idiotic fat that can be cut from the studies of children. Especially since these two wastes of time are taught in a period of the child's development that bears a ton more fruit per hour invested than it does 8-10 years later when we're teaching high science and math.
I know I dropped cursive writing from my skill set the moment I was no longer penalized for not using it.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
This is mostly true. With the advent of no child left behind, they all are. Writing and cursive in general are no longer part of the curriculum. Though cursive is no longer a necessary skill unless you're planning on a career in the literary or graphic arts.
I'm more concerned about this generations' general inability to form complete sentences. They haven't learned their language mostly because it wasn't taught to them.
Children who have attended elementary in the last ten years are at the most disadvantaged. They haven't learned proper language skills. Their writing is being taught in template format. They will never be effective communicators. Educators all knew better and were silenced by the administration at every level. Now teachers just don't care. Children still aren't learning proper language skills.
Who should we blame when other children around the world have better second language skills in English than our childrens' first language skills?
They're using their grammar skills there.
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.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Which is not going to happen unless everything we base our civilisation on breaks down as well. And in that case, I'd rather worry about my hunting and gathering skills than my penmanship.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
And according to this news, it will be unlikely what anyone will be able to decipher your handwriting by then : )
You can't take the sky from me...
And according to this news, it will be unlikely what anyone will be able to decipher your handwriting by then : )
Actually, the makers of fancy pens have been reporting increasing sales over the past several decades. The number of people who are studying and practicing good writing may not be increasing as fast as the population, but the number is increasing. So there's a good chance that there will still be experts in all sorts of handwriting in another 70 or 80 or 100 years. It'll just be the great masses who were never educated in the topic who won't be able to read all those old letters and logbooks.
To use the ob automotive analogy, I have a number of friends who raise horses. There may have been a drop in the number of horses back in the early 20th century, but for some decades now, horse breeding has been on the increase. And it's not just race or show horses; various kinds of work horses are also being bred and trained. It turns out that there are a number of situations where horses are very practical tools for getting a job done. And people usually like them a lot better than machines.
I've read comments by a number of historians to the effect that new technology rarely totally obsoletes what came before. The new tools may take over a lot of the work, but there are usually situations where the old tools are still the best for some jobs. Thus, people who have several power drills usually have even more wrist-powered screwdrivers. And even though they know how to build with screws, they still use simple nails and hammers for some jobs.
So handwritten text probably also has a good future. The percentage of the population using it may decline, but we'll still have a reasonable population using it for the foreseeable future.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Nope, I can't use a printer. Good thinking, but it just won't suit legal criteria.
I am required to use a bound book. That means that pages cannot be added or removed without making it obvious.
Is the legal requirement that you use a bound book, or ensure that pages cannot be added or removed without it being obvious?
If the latter, then one-way hashes are a MUCH more reliable indicator. On the bottom of each page, print the hash of the previous page, the hash of that page and the hash of the hashes. This will ensure that not only can no page be added or removed, but no page can be altered, either.
To make it even better, use a secure timestamping service and include the timestamp.
Also, I strongly dispute your original assertion that no computer format will be readable in 70+ years. Plain ASCII text will. HTML will (ASCII encoding). Also, basically any format with an open standard and open source implementations will.
Finally, your log book is far too easy to lose, damage or destroy. It's not feasible to copy it (not without losing the integrity features provided by the bound book), so it can't be backed up. It's also bulky.
Your logging problem is solved by the log book, barely. Technology provides much better solutions with higher survivability, better accessiblity, easier production and much, much higher integrity verification.
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Cursive serves *one* important purpose. It's makes writing from a "real" pen (not a ball-point) readable, as you tend to get a splotch whereever you first touch pen to paper. Ballpoints, not computers, pretty much made cursive obsolete.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.