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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!"
If we let cursive die, calligraphy could be next to go!
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
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'm nearly 40 and haven't used cursive since high school. How is this a Gen Y thing again?
M.e.h.
Just wait 50 years: "That's right kids, grampa used to use his hands to program computers!"
God, schmod. I want my monkey man!
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'm almost 40 and I can't write nor read cursive. It makes me feel illiterate when I have to hand something written in cursive to someone else and ask if they can read it to me. But, honestly, people are using cursive less and less these days and I've discovered that I'm not the only one who has trouble reading it.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
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.
Seriously, except letter for a job candidature or a post card, I never use handwriting anymore. And even for the job search , I really do think that hand writing is utter useless, except maybe as a useless filter (can't read his handwriting / can read). Everything I have to do, I do in block writing (official forms, bank receipt etc...) or with printer.
The hand writing is going the way of the draw-cariage with horse. Plainly and simply. Hand writing is QUAINT that is it.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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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
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.
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?
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.
... the death of Blackletter.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
Just use handwriting in a CAPTCHA to filter out the twentysomethings!
To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
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?
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
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.
In second grade they taught us cursive, claiming that we would use it for the rest of our life and without it we would never get a job. When we switched over to middle school none of our teachers used cursive, and none of them would accept papers written in cursive either.
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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.
that was the hardest part of the SAT for me.
...and I don't use it anymore either. It's just not needed. Grew up with it, all school papers and tests (and penmanship was part of the grade always) and snail mail letters in cursive, but since around the mid 90s or so, with having a decent enough machine with a printer, I can't recall actually writing anything long and involved in cursive, and before that going back to the 70s, most everything I wrote longer than a thankyou note was typed on a manual typewriter anyway. Not all, but most. I can still do it of course, and it remains legible..but I would agree, it's going the way of the dodo. It is faster for me than block writing though, by a considerable degree.
I can't really say if this is overall good or bad, it's a learned skill, but I can't see it as being terribly useful for much longer outside of treating it more like art than a day to day necessity. Electronic communications has been a huge game changer.
I think you can see something similar with languages and immigration. Folks from nation A move to B, they struggle to learn the new language, and even if they do, retain an obvious foreign accent forever. By the second generation, the new language is prominent, but the old language is still understood at home with the family. By the third generation it is mostly gone except for a few words and phrases. Significant change doesn't take very long.
Have you ever received a letter, or a note penned on the inside cover of a card? Writing has an aesthetic that is missing in hand printing, or electro-mechanical rendering. It wasn't for lack of imagination that emoticons didn't arrive until computers; it was a lack of necessity.
I appreciate a written note, or card; it shows that they have taken the time to at least write my name, and perhaps had a thought about me while they did it. That is what writing is for.
As awful as the grammar here may have been, I think it's worth noting that I completely understood it with no problem.
If con is the opposite of pro. Then isn't congress the opposite of progress?
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'm 28. I learned cursive in the third grade and have not used it since -- unless you count signing my name. In my case, you probably shouldn't given that I sign my name with one initial + scribble and a second initial + scribble. My signature isn't even close to legible, but nobody cares.
It's not an easy skill to learn, but it was incredibly easy one to forget. We really probably shouldn't be wasting Kids time with this -- I don't see what the practical value is in teaching kids how to write cursive these days. Other than reading letters from my Great Grandmother, now dead, or the original copy of the Declaration of Independence or perhaps various signatures (in as much as they could be read) I can't really even see the value in learning to read cursive either.
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.
My handwriting is almost illegible, so I went into the only career path where it is acceptable. I start medschool in September,
7000 lives could have been saved EVERY YEAR if not for the poor penmanship by doctors: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1578074,00.html
if reading things in cursive was beneficial, we'd all be using cursive fonts all over the place on computers. I dont think I've seen anyone use a cursive font on a computer that made things better in any way ever, so I can only conclude that reading cursive sucks compared to a nice clean (preferably san serif) font.
now there's the personal preference aspect, that you may prefer to hand write something; but having established that reading cursive is inferior to pretty much any decent font, you're not doing anyone any favors by opting to handwrite things.
in short, good riddance.
TIAEAE!
I also moved between second and third grade. The school where I moved from taught cursive in the third grade, the school where I moved to taught it in second. I remember that summer as kind of miserable, having to do homework all summer long to relearn the frickin' alphabet.
Personally, I'd be perfectly content if cursive writing simply went away forever. Keep a record of what it looks like for historical information, and let it die. From third through sixth grade, I was constantly berated by my teachers for my bad handwriting, most likely because I didn't learn cursive like everyone else did and I hated it so badly. In sixth grade, I told my teacher that I wrote so badly because I hate cursive writing. He looked at me like I was crazy and finally said, "Then don't! I don't care what you write in, as long as I can understand it."
The only problem I had after that was when I got to be a junior in high school, and my teacher failed me on the first essay I wrote because it wasn't in cursive. What an idiot. Every essay I wrote for her after that took me twice as long as the other kids, because I had to sit there thinking, "Shit, how do you make a cursive F?" That was the one and only class, though. In everything else, I write normal letters, and I'm actually quite neat at it.
I don't understand the comments from people who say that cursive writing is faster or that your hand tires out less. Sounds like a bunch of BS to me. While printing requires that you pick up your pencil more, cursive requires more strokes and longer periods of pressure on the page. I can write plenty fast enough, thank you, and neatly, without tiring, too.
I honestly think it's idiotic that in the English language, we have four glyphs for each letter that kids are forced to memorize, upper- and lower-case variations for both print and cursive writing. 104 symbols to represent 26 letters. As if we don't force our kids to jump through enough hoops without really learning anything. As for me, I won't be forcing any kids to learn cursive.
Late 30s, learned cursive in primary school, have NEVER willingly used it and am glad its dead. It's ugly and horrible and near-illegible and one of the most pointless inventions ever. It sacrifices all regularity and readability for a marginal speed improvement and there are no professional situations I know of where it's acceptable to use; you'd be better off learning how to write clearly on a whiteboard, at least those are in use.
Now, Palm Graffiti 1 (sadly mourned)... now that stood a serious chance of permanently rewriting my *printing* skills until I couldn't remember how to write a 't'.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I'm 20 years old and back in Elementary school they forced cursive on us; always telling us, "You need to learn this now, if you don't write your papers in cursive when you get older then they'll give you an F." After I got out of elementary school cursive was never mentioned again. Three years ago when I had to take the SAT we had to write a sort of contract statement and it had to be written in cursive, but no one in the room knew how to write in cursive except for the teacher, she had to write the letters up on the board because we didn't even know what they looked like. Cursive is definitely dead.
I'm 50 years old and the product of private Jewish schools. Penmanship was a requirement in grades 2 through 6, if I remember correctly and, yes, I was taught the Palmer method with a fountain pen. Ball point pens were forbidden. I high school I reverted to block printing with a ball point and my penmanship sucked. During my career as a software engineer I have worked a number of places that required us to keep notes in a hard bond notebook. When the notebook was full they were turned over to the company lawyers who reviewed them for anything that could be patented. I got so sick and tired of having to go down to their office and translate my handwriting that went out and bought a few used fountain pens and forced myself to relearn good penmanship.
Oh, the reason that writing with a fountain pens often produces better handwriting is the fact that it requires a certain technique and discipline that writing with a bell point does not require.
Yes, I know it is archaic but cursive writing does have its uses. Do you ever write to your congress person? Any damn fool can send an email but a hand written letter gets their attention. They get so few of them they are treated as special especially by those on their staff who have never hand written a letter before.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
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.
As a Java developer, I regularly find myself misreading directory listings containing Maven POMs as p-o-r-n.xml.
Not only have I forgotten how to write in cursive, I've forgotten how to write in lower case.
I had to learned to write in cursive in grade school. It was a private school and we were even graded on "penmanship." Sissy-man-ship if you ask me. As soon as I was allowed I switched back to printing. I even took drafting in high school (before CAD was prevalent) and lettering was graded but it was block printing. Later, during my time in the military, my job required me to transcribe radio live transmissions. Most of us printed and didn't have too much trouble keeping up with speakers. A large part of our transcription was numbers though and last I checked there were no cursive numbers. If cursive was all that important there would be cursive numbers. BAH!
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
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.
1. It is a myth that cursive is faster than printing. "Fluid" printing (not the block letters taught in the first grades) uses far fewer strokes. Jumping from letter to letter instead of dragging the pen between letters also uses fewer strokes and is more direct, and is thus faster.
2. Cursive is harder to read than printed letters. Some proofs of this fact: (1) the ubiquitous instruction "please print" on forms, (2) the rarity of continuous-cursive forms in typefaces used in publishing, (3) the difficulty one has in reading supposedly stellar examples of cursive penmanship, such as the US Declaration of Independence.
3. Cursive is much harder to learn than printing. Of course, for this reason it is inflicted upon schoolchildren after they have a chance to master printing, since many never succeed at it.
4. The "Palmer Method" (for example) of cursive pedagogy stifles a child's developing a personal and distinctive style of handwriting. Within reasonable limits of legibility, printing leaves more freedom for this artistic outlet.
5. The techniques of cursive handwriting are filled with self-contradictions. A "slant" is dictated as a matter of efficiency, when there is no apparent anatomical justification for this practice. Left-handers (when tolerated) are taught to mirror the slant by tipping the paper to the left instead of to the right, but the inclination of the paper has everything to do with the slant of the writing (to the right whether executed right- or left-handed) and nothing to do with which hand is manipulating the stylus.
The mindless regimentation typically used to teach cursive is antithetical to the development of studious, inquiring minds. Unlike the rote of, say, multiplication tables, the diktat of cursive handwriting is not rooted in a useful natural principle. It is most popular in cultures such as the old German and Chinese, which value rote and regimentation to a degree usually held to be extreme by, say, Americans.
In light of the above points, why does this hideous art exist at all?
6. The only justifiable reason for commonly using cursive is obsolete. People traditionally wrote in cursive from ancient times because the quill pen technology penalized you for lifting the pen from the paper. The capillary action of the ink is lost when contact is interrupted, and restoring the ink trail is not reliable, so gaps often result. This is not a factor with modern pencils, fountain pens, ball-point pens, or fiber-tip pens.
7. Therefore it is a foolish pedagogy that continues to maintain the archaic art of cursive penmanship. This subject should be eliminated from the primary school curriculum, and filed away in the universities' classics departments, where it belongs.
The style which you refer to is (I believe) Single stroke gothic, utilizing a single (capital) typeface. It's the preferred style of most engineers and drafters for legibility, and can be written at an adequate clip if necessary.
When I took the GRE, they made you write this big long pledge in cursive ("DO NOT PRINT"). It took me forever. It hurt my hand It hurt my arm. It was incredibly frustrating because I knew, they knew, everyone knew, that this form was just going to be turned into a checkbox and then thrown away. I hated every minute of it.
But what really prompted me to post this was seeing the eights in the 8th grade Zaner Bloser assignment linked to in the blurb. The '8' was absolutely horrible. Seeing that horrible version of the S-slash, made me think back to the first grade. Until then, I always wrote my eights as two circles, one over the other one. Then my first grade teacher started marking me, and everyone else who made eights like that, down. I can still see her in that damn salmon colored suit standing there saying, "Some of you are making eights like they're snowmen. That's wrong. The correct way is to make an S, and then draw a line connecting the ends, like this. Practice it. For now on you will make eights the right way, or they will be marked wrong."
And so I changed the way I made my eights. 25 years, I've made eights with the s-slash, mostly without even thinking. Occasionally I remember how I used to make them, and try to reclaim my eight. It never lasts long. I inevitably fall back to the s-slash. My "slave eight" if you will, and when I realize it, I die a little.
Fuck you Mrs. Scheffer. Rot in your fucking grave.