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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 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.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
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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.
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.)
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
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.
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.
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.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
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