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26 Years Old and Can't Write In Cursive

Posted by timothy on from the but-good-penmanship-is-sexy dept.

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 of 921 comments (clear)

  1. Oh Noes! by binarylarry · · Score: 5, Funny

    If we let cursive die, calligraphy could be next to go!

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    1. Re:Oh Noes! by Fieryphoenix · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Oh Noes! by clang_jangle · · Score: 5, Funny

      What? Cursive is just a matter installing a cursive font.

      --
      Caveat Utilitor
    3. Re:Oh Noes! by cawpin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    4. Re:Oh Noes! by Tony+Hoyle · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:Oh Noes! by shaitand · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:Oh Noes! by Scrameustache · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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...

    7. Re:Oh Noes! by megrims · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well done. You've requested justification for an unsupported statement and made one in the same breath.

    8. Re:Oh Noes! by tcolberg · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    9. Re:Oh Noes! by anagama · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
    10. Re:Oh Noes! by jc42 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
    11. Re:Oh Noes! by lgw · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.
  2. 26 years by Jurily · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:26 years by antifoidulus · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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
  3. Because its a useles skill by AuMatar · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:Because its a useles skill by cmdrkynes · · Score: 5, Insightful

      These are not facts. You pulled this straight out of the air. I have absolutely no problem reading neat cursive riding. For me I can write at least 2x as fast in script and I experience less hand fatigue while writing it because I am not always moving my hand up and down for every letter. Also I am exactly 26 years old. I use it mainly to write in a personal journal which I choose not to type out. Just because you are bad at it doesn't mean that its a completely useless skill.

  4. Are you freaking kidding me? by st0rmshad0w · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm nearly 40 and haven't used cursive since high school. How is this a Gen Y thing again?

  5. 29 and cannot write the full ABC's in cursive by Tynin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Who cares? by The_mad_linguist · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's exactly one profession that requires cursive handwriting skills.

    Third grade teachers.

  7. Signature and that's it by m.dillon · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  8. Ball Point Pens Destroyed Cursive by BitterOak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:Ball Point Pens Destroyed Cursive by Ragzouken · · Score: 5, Interesting

      For us users who have never used a fountain pen without it scraping horribly along the page, could someone explain what's so great about them?

    2. Re:Ball Point Pens Destroyed Cursive by Drishmung · · Score: 5, Informative

      You say "Ball-point pens are to blame", but that implies that you don't like the writing done with ball-point pens.

      In fact, the style of writing depends, and has always depended, on the writing technology used.

      From chiselling letters into stone, we got serifs. They look beautiful and help reading, but unless you are chiselling inscriptions, you don't tend to use them for writing. Moveable type brought them back for printing, just because they look good.

      With a quill pen, you have thick and thin strokes, and you don't want any up strokes, because the nib judders and splatters ink everywhere. The reaction to this was the lovely uncial and half-uncial scripts. Half-uncial is what we now call lower-case. Another solution was black-letter, which was also a solution to the high cost of materials. Black letter is very dense, and quite pretty (in some respects), at the cost of being almost, but not quite, illegible. If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read!

      The Chinese took a different tack and used a brush rather than a pen. This in turn impacted on the shape of their glyphs.

      Then came the steel pen. At first, just a metal replacement for the quill, it evolved with the addition of a rounded blob on the tip. This allowed upstrokes without splatter! But, if you are doing longer continuous strokes and not dipping your pen quite so often, then the nib tends to dry out. Now, enter the fountain pen. A reservoir allows for continuous ink. Other requirements required the development of something other than the thick and corrosive, black "India Ink" (which is a Good Thing if you are writing on vellum, but less so with a steel pen on paper). Blue-black ink became popular. But now it became more important to have as continuous a line as possible. Hence, 'joined up writing'. And once more, people found ways to make it beautiful, even though it gave up the light and strong emphasis of the quill and flat steel nibs.

      Then, the ball-point. Special ink that does not dry out in the pen, so joined-up is not necessary. A natural writing angle that is more upright than a nib, which leads to a preference for slightly different letter forms. In other words, with a ball-point pen there is no need for a continuous line, and it's actually slightly more difficult to write in that particular style anyway, which was designed and tuned for a particular technology.

      People can write illegibly using almost any technology. I've seen 19th century handwriting that was perfectly legible to my eyes, but I've also seen stuff that is a painful exercise in decryption. Likewise I see people who write, or print, at high speed with a ball point pen and produce beautiful handwriting

      --
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  9. Age-related CAPTCHA by Crash+McBang · · Score: 5, Funny

    Just use handwriting in a CAPTCHA to filter out the twentysomethings!

    --
    To put a witty saying into 120 characters, jst rmv ll th vwls.
  10. Re:What is the point of cursive? by mattack2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To complicate matters, when we see a cursive "n", we often misread it as "m".

    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.

  11. The Last Time I Used Cursive by coaxial · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.