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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?
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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,
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.
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.
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.