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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!"
I grew up in an era when cursive was still common but I struggled with it right through until the end of High School. It was always terrible. When I got to college I abandoned it in favor of printing and it was a great relief. Now and then I use cursive for a letter because it still is the most personal way to write but it looks as awful as ever.
Cursive still has a place as a form of expression and as such should still be taught, but for the cursive challenged like me I understand its abandonment.
I was also considered a 'special case' at my school because my hand writing was terrible due to a fine motor disability. I was given a choice between physiotherapy and a laptop computer. Guess which I asked for?
Oh... and guess which I actually got. :P Really, I can't complain because it was probably better for me in the long run.
That also makes me wonder whether people are going to lose fine manual dexterity as a result. Already kids do less manual craft (like building models) in favour of computer games. I wonder if lack of fine motor training will result in a generation that is unable to do anything more accurate with their hands than push buttons.
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Meryl Streep's character in Doubt had it absolutely right. Ball-point pens are to blame. People in my parent's generation who learned to write with fountain pens always seemed to have better handwriting than me. I always struggled with cursive in school: my writing was very slow and messy.
A few years ago I bought my first fountain pen, and now, writing is a pleasure. I still don't write terribly neatly; it seems whatever pen you learn to write with determines your handwriting for life. But I can write in cursive much faster and my penmanship has improved a bit. If you have never tried a fountain pen, I urge you to. I never thought writing cursive could be a pleasure.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
You are ignoring the atrophy issue. I'm 28 and distinctly remember writing cursive in 3rd grade, but 3rd grade was 20 years ago. Afterwards I could write proficiently in cursive, and for the next couple of years they forced us to write at least some cursive, but after that everything that wasn't on computers we were allowed to hand in with print. The fact of the matter is that it's just easier to both read and write and print.
Hell, the pressures of high school are probably as much to blame as computers, we were expected to create complex, deep essays within 50 minutes. At that point, there simply isn't enough time to worry about your handwriting.
Monstar L
By "cursive" English writing learned in school, most people probably got taught the Palmer Method or possibly D'Nealian. While it was considered to be aesthetically pleasing, it was really hard to do right. I learned it in 3rd grade and never was any good at it. Not only that, but the Palmerian style was the one you lefties like me hated, either because they forced you to use your right hand or just because you could never get the slant right and still form all the letters while staying on the baseline. On the other hand (haha), writing by hand neatly and legibly still has value, and if you like working with your hands its worth looking at something like Getty-Dubay or other modern italic handwriting style. I re-taught myself from a couple of books over a summer a few years ago. In any case, if we are losing the ability to do Palmer Method writing, who cares? It's not even that easy to read when written well. BTW this is very Western alphabet-centric. Arabic, Hebrew, and most asian languages still have a strong handwriting grounding.
I'm 26 and I've struggled with poor handwriting my entire life. And that was not because my teachers didn't try. In my early years, handwriting was graded curriculum- Thus, despite straight A's for everything else, my performance always looked mediocre because of the C's and D's I'd get in the handwriting portion. I can still remember that wide-ruled shitty tan paper that tore if you used an eraser. Line after line of cursive A's and V's, then the next week O's and B's. And on and on, when I could have been learning something useful.
My handwriting now looks identical to my handwriting from at least as far back as 6th grade. And those were the days before we ever typed anything. In high school I hand-wrote papers and notes literally by the ream, and my writing never improved.
Interestingly, my handwriting is very close to my father's, and I saw very little of his writing as I was growing up. We do share some psychological issues which are almost certainly genetic (runs throughout his side of the family), but making a connection between handwriting->psyche issues would be dubious.
-b
No offense, but I've stopped responding to AC's.
I've never understood why joined-up writing is suppose to be better.
For several years, that's what I did just coz it's what I was taught. Then, while at uni, I realised that my illegible handwriting was making my revision almost impossible, and resolved to change it. I did a lot of experimentation, and discovered that 'printing' (i.e. writing each letter separately) was pretty much the same speed, much neater, and remained easier to read even when writing in a desperate hurry. (I.e. it degraded much more gracefully.)
(Another useful thing I found was that most of the information is in the central parts of the letters, not in the ascenders or descenders; so reducing the ascenders and descenders almost to nothing and making the central parts relatively large helps too. And, like another poster, I find a fountain pen or fibre-tip far more conducive to good writing than a ball-point or roller-ball.)
Ever since, that's how I've written. And several people have complimented me on my writing. It may not look especially refined, but it's neat and clear and easy to read, which is the intent.
So: why all this fuss about joined-up writing? Why is it seen as superior, when (in my case at least), it's clearly less successful? Why is it even a requirement, tested for in some schools?
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My family moved when I was at the end of second grade, from Iowa to Louisiana. Unfortunately Iowa taught cursive in third grade, while Louisiana did in second.
As a result, I moved in just in time to learn X, Y, and Z, and then the term was up. Next year and all the way through junior high (8th grade) I was expected to use cursive for all my written works.
In high school and college, of course, no one cared. I could write suitably fast, taking notes for myself that did, rather quickly, cramp my hand. (Timed essays such as AP tests in high school or some of my physics exams in college were very painful.)
Now that I've been full time in the workforce for almost a decade, it just doesn't matter. I use grid composition books to take meeting notes or to think on paper, but everything goes into the computer as soon as it's viable. Interestingly my typing skills have improved dramatically in the past decade; when I graduated from college I still had to look at the keyboard, but now I never do.
Thus, at this point, the only thing that I can write in cursive is my signature. =p
(Now, let me add that, had I ever learned shorthand, I would have been most grateful. My mother was a reporter for many many years and can take fully legible (to her) shorthand notes far faster than anyone else I know.)
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Actually, cursive is slower than printing. John Holt looked at that. Cursive is just another timewaster the schooling system foists on kids.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That can happen in printing too. Surely it's due to my geekiness, but in the newspaper, the word "modern" sometimes reads as "modem" to me.
The problem I've always had with cursive, and the reason I haven't used it in forever, is that it's completely illegible. It's an inherent flaw, not a recent problem. My grandparents' perfectly-crafted script gives me trouble.
Dave Barry wrote a funny (yet true) piece on the topic.
I was forced to use cursive. I sucked at it and had to teach myself how to print.
My elementary school taught cursive. Period. Students transferring in from other districts who knew how to print had their grades docked until they learned cursive - no matter how awful it looked. While my elementary school was quite insistent, my high school (no middle school, district was too small) didn't care either way... and because my cursive was hideously illegible and years of forced "practice" hadn't improved it at all, I spent all of seventh grade and most of eighth teaching myself how to print.
Almost two decades later and my self-taught handwriting style is still legible. Early samples are a bit weird (the cursive "I" took a long time to shake, for example), and if I'm rushed you can't tell my 5s from my Ss, my e's from my c's from my g's from my l's, but it works extremely well for me - I print faster than I was ever able to write in cursive, my writing is more legible, and most importantly, it was self taught. The public education system was absolutely no help in this regard, and for the first six years of my public school career the system offered no help or support - and in fact penalized - students who wanted to write but just couldn't deal with cursive.
Good penmanship is certainly an art form, but I really think the majority of society will happily settle for a lettered populace that can simply write legibly. Print, in my experience, is a hell of a lot more legible than cursive - there's a reason that every post-it note or hand-written message that lands on my desk at work is printed - so I can read it.
Make "penmanship" an elective. Teach the kids print - everything - everything - we read is printed or displayed that way... why should we be forced to learn an antiquated writing system that bears only the vaguest of relations to the type we read every day... unless we want to?
Screw cursive - that's six years of docked grades, extra coursework, and being GROUNDED and forced to practice for hours and hours in the parental and school district-al hopes that operant conditioning will produce their demanded assembly-line results. Six years I could have spent learning hand printing and how to type - both of which are things I had to teach myself later in life.
Cursive was one of the most useless things taught to me in school. When I hit 6th grade I realized typing my assignments was much faster. All through out middle school I had teachers telling me to handwrite my assignment and would down grade me for not doing so. I would write in the most illegible cursive ever imaginable! I think I was the one who got the last laugh. I had one of those teachers in 8th grade that would consistantly lose my assignments. I believe it happened at least 8 times. 7 of those times it was a matter of reprinting the last assignment!
I hate handwriting anything. I regularly can reach 60-70 wpm which is consistent with how fast I can think up what to say. My little brother is in 3rd grade and is sadly being taught this useless skill. I say trim it out of the curriculum and fill it with some more reading.
Also makes it unreadable. I used to go out with a teacher and I never figured out how she could read the scrawl that was handed to her.
No, cursive doesn't make it unreadable. Poor penmanship makes it unreadable. I assure you, if you look at cursive written by somebody that is currently 60+, their cursive is most likely very readable. If they happen to be 80+ it is probably beautiful.
I find cursive horrible. They tried to teach it to me and eventually gave up.. it's just completely unnatural. Being left handed didn't help - they tried to force us to write it with 'real' pens (those ones with ink cartridges) and if you're left handed you end up with a blue hand and nothing on the paper but a smudge. Got multiple detentions for that.. which didn't endear me to cursive at all.
The only time in the past decade I've had to write in cursive was on the GRE. For some reason they had us copy a honor statement in cursive before we took the test. I wasted about 10 minutes on that stupid thing, my head trying to control my hand, which kept slipping back into how I normally write (I stopped using even lowercase letters back in 8th grade, trying to copy my Dad's blueprint-style handwriting).
Eventually I gave up and just wrote as I normally do but just didn't move the pen off the page between letters. Of course no one ever looked at it and I never heard anything about it.
I wonder if it's not some devious psychological trick to throw the test taker off his game. My fellow grad school students also had to do the same thing, they were all were confused and annoyed by it and eventually gave up like I did. Preparation for the frustration and pointlessness of grad school life maybe.
Your father was probably in the military right? They call it recruit handwriting and every letter is a capital and written distinctly. Once learned it is perfectly legible and unambiguous when written with even the worst penmanship. It is used for official logs and forms which must be legible.
As far as I am concerned it is the only form of writing by hand that should ever be taught. In the modern world focusing on typing makes far more sense, its faster than speaking vocally let alone writing by hand.
I'm a lefty and was taught cursive as early as 2nd grade. Handwriting became my lowest grade semester after semester throughout grade school. With pencils and later ink, my writing would be smudged all to hell and my hand still cramps after only a paragraph's worth. I think the cramping has to do with having to inch my hand across the paper like a worm rather than sliding like a right-handed writer. By the end of high school, my teachers requested I start writing in print just so my in-class essays could be legible.
A couple months ago, I had to write a paragraph in cursive for an honor code and found that I couldn't remember how to print a few of the capital letters anymore.
In my work, I often have to write documents of moderate length (10-15 pages). I find it extremely helpful to read the document aloud after I've done all my editing. It is very easy to pass over small glue words such as "to", "at" and so forth while typing, and just as easy for the brain to insert them when they aren't actually there while reading silently. Speaking every every word and makes it easy to hear what is missing -- typically several omitted words per document.
It is also helpful to delay the read aloud session for a few hours or if possible, till the next day. It seems like our brains build up the pattern the document follows automatically inserting what isn't actually there. It is easier to hear what is wrong once that pattern has faded.
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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.
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Not only that, Slashdot has certainly been around since before 2000 yet posts before that are not availible. IIRC, it was something to do with a server crash or drive failure and the costs of backing up the posts at the time meant it didn't happen. So even if it is around in 70 years, there is no guarantee that a post would be.
I dropped my cursive handwriting several years ago when I went to the German equivalent of Highschool Senior Year. I had been taught a curvy flowing writing style from primary school onwards and was required to write like that even though I found it exhausting. Then people started expecting me to write half a dozen pages or more in under 90 minutes for class tests which subsequently were graded badly because ... heck ... how am I supposed to write legibly in that amount of time when the style of writing I was taught looks like a curvy mess. I specifically remember my English teacher one day handing a class exam back to me which got an "F" because he couldn't read the 13 pages I had to squeeze into the 80 minute exam time, ironically the same guy a few years later told me that he couldn't give me anything but straigt "A"s in his classes. The difference between an "F" and an "A" -grade wise- for me that's enough reason to think Fuck Cursive. My primary school teachers and the idiots writing the curriculum obviously didn't take into account that some day kids would have to complete real life tasks with that crappy writing. Thus started a lengthy process retraining myself to "print" style writing. After all, what good is a handwriting nobody else can read. It might be fun for literary scholars or archaelogists but my employers and teachers have been more than glad to see me drop that cursive hyroglyphics. A year of cramps and wasted trees later my grades got (significantly) better. Nine years later I can finally decipher things I wrote in a hurry months ago and for really long texts nobody can expect me to avoid typing it anyway anymore. Those that find a romantic spark in writing books and letters in wriggly bible font are welcome to learn how to do it. Just don't expect me to do it if it's detrimental to my everyday requirements. I maintain two seperate keyboard layouts (QWERTY and DVORAK Type 2) on full 10 finger typing speed. That should be enough writing geekery for me.