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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.
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.
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.