Slashdot Mirror
Cursive Writing Is a Fading Skill — Does It Matter?
antdude sends along an AP piece on the decline of the teaching of cursive writing in schools — ramifications of which we've discussed a few times before. "The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. ... Handwriting is increasingly something people do only when they need to make a note to themselves rather than communicate with others, [an educator] said. Students accustomed to using computers to write at home have a hard time seeing the relevance of hours of practicing cursive handwriting. 'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'"
Wasn't there a very similar story linked to about a month ago called the death of handwriting?
I dont care to read it, and i hated writing with it. i could probably manage to use it, more or less, if i had to, but its been many, many years since i had to.
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
You can use cursive writing on a computer, you just have to pick the right font.
Cursive is archaic, like hieroglyphics. Let the scholars study them if they wish, and let civilization pass it by.
NYTimes recently had an article on penmanship. Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl. I'd explain why, but the article does it so much better.
why it was important.
I know I know you can "write faster" well I can't so I don't care.
----------------
That's why it's declining, and why it doesn't matter at the same time.
I really hope they don't waster her time teaching her cursive. Printing is prettier. Cursive was originally taught only in public schools, since those kids went on to do secretarial type work.
No.
There might be some inherent value in knowing how to use the underlying skills that make up the essential underpinnings of literacy?
Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press.
Now, "any form of writing at all" is important. But curisive?
Gee I don't know, I use a calculator to do all my math at work, why should I learn how to do long division?
Short division should be good enough for you.
Cursive writing will persist as a specialty skill for those of a historical or artistic bent. My mother did the most beautiful calligraphy when I was growing up, and it was already fading fast with increasingly cheap typewriters. Some people are still learning it, to show off at the Renn Faire. People shoot bows and arrows, but not because it's a way to survive like it used to be.
Finally modding someone offtopic when they rant about what "Begging the Question" means: priceless.
This is nonsense. Cursive writing is the essential underpinning of nothing more than fountain pens and hand fatigue.
Cursive writing is no more a useful skill than illuminating manuscripts. Certainly, one should be able to write with a pen or pencil; but cursive letterforms are of dubious advantage with modern writing implements.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster. I finally figured out, that I could write tons faster without it. Then I learned how to type. Occasionally, I still break it out, but by and large, I won't miss its passing. Cursive's only real purpose, I think, is the highly stylized version: Calligraphy.
There's no purpose for it.
They should stop teaching cursive in schools, and start teaching typing instead.
I learned cursive in elementary school. It was standard practice to write all of your papers in cursive.
It was horrible.
It was very hard to read quickly. It was hard to write quickly. It didn't cooperate with pencils/pens.
It made me hate handwriting in all of its forms.
As soon as I got to the point where I could type papers and print them out, that's exactly what I started doing. The only words in cursive I've written since the 5th grade have been my first and last names.
All of that wasted teaching could have been used to better teach math (something US schools utterly fail at) or even teach a better grasp of writing. It wasn't until I got to late middle school were we given even a little leeway in the content of our papers.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
cursive is merely a style, it's changed many times over the years. as long as you can print, and lets face it lots of people's cursive has been unreadable for 50 years, that's fine.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As someone in the midst of grading 75 calculus 3 homeworks written out by hand, I have to say YES. Not necessarily cursive, per se, but writing by hand legibly tends to improve your grade.
"But cursive is favored by fewer college-bound students. In 2005, the SAT began including a written essay portion, and a 2007 report by the College Board found that about 15 percent of test-takers chose to write in cursive, while the others wrote in print. "
I don't really understand. There seem to be two kind of handwriting competing for the written part, but I have never seen that in classes. Writing in print is writing each letter like the printer does, without linking them ? How can you write an essay like that ? It must take ages ? In France we learn it and then quickly forget it to only write cursive.
If my computer can't read it, it sucks.
Cursive handwriting is the hieroglyphics of our age. Let it die. Please.
I don't think it's dying as much as people think. For one, sometimes you just have to write things down, and a computer is not always going to be the quickest way to do it (or even possible). Two, it's still taught in schools, and people still need to sign things.
Even still, who cares? I usually just print stuff out. Cursive isn't really that fast and printing is a lot easier on the eyes.
Learning and practicing Cursive writing has as much to do with the underlying skills of literacy, as proper Abacus operation and extensive practice solving problems with roman numerals has to do with the underlying skills of mathematics.
Cursive writing does not "make up the essential underpinnings of literacy..." Cursive is simply a way of writing a block of text quickly with minimal pen lifts. It's completely irrelevant today.
Why not just print the letters, or as I do, a sort of fast/smear print, which gives you some of the advantages of high speed cursive, without all the stupid looping and formatting requirements?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
For the 21st century, I would replace cursive with diagrams, schematics, timelines, maps, hierarchies, document structuring, concept maps, graphs, and charts.
I would start students on simple systems that they understand well: Diagram how characters interact in their favorite stories, how the timeline works, the places in the stories, and so on.
With time, I would develop it into articulations of the conceptual structure of essays and movies. I would create more and more detailed maps as times went by. Near the end, I'd have students make complex presentations of scientific and technological objects that put enormous relevant detail into compact spaces (like in mechanical blueprints, software diagrams, scientific explanations, and so on.)
Traditionally we've taught outlines and charting, but I'd step that up way more.
Slate recently had an article partially along similar lines (palmer vs italic cursive styles). It's also worth a read: http://www.slate.com/id/2227680/
Agreed. I'd even go farther than that. While I do feel that handwriting with a pen or a pencil is something that should be a part of a general eduction; it's by no means inherently necessary for literacy. Understanding letters, words, sentences and grammar, does not require that you are able to pick up a pen and draw those symbols on a piece of paper. And the idea that a certain style of handwriting is somehow vitally important seems a very quaint notion.
The Long Now Foundation
'I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds.'
Come see me when the electricity is gone once civilization tanks.
With such a technology dependent world, it's sometimes nice to write on paper and not on a keyboard.
Any equation is easier to write down by hand than by tex, MS Word equation editor, etc.
And you look like a total douche if you can't write an equation neatly enough that others can read it.
Of course, this isn't cursive specifically, but handwriting in general.
Good! Cursive is a skill for writing fast, not for writing legibly. I haven't used it since leaving school.
Print is easier to read in the circumstances where you can't use a computer, and those situations are rapidly decreasing. The vast majority of interaction and professional work is typed these days.
This is the counterpoint to the recent article asking if typing should be taught in schools - yes, in elementary, in the slot that cursive used to live in.
-- Kate
Goddammit! Cursive writing is never gonna fuckin go away!
...at least in the Coast Guard are all done in print in uppercase. So you get:
and all that sort of thing. Most folks' uppercase print letters seem look the same. At least they do after they're forced to rewrite a log for neatness :-)
The Army reading list
It's clear that most of the people posting so far are code monkeys or some other key-whackers/
/.ers were saying it was a useless fad because the keyboard and mouse were the height of usability. Teach cursive, give kids touch enabled computers, and the physical keyboard will fade into oblivion.
Call me a Luddite, but learning to write without a computer is as important as learning to add without a computer - that is, essential.
Also, I recall a conversation about touch interfaces where
Smoke signalling is a dead art. No one remembers the old smoke signals used by native american tribes - not even native americans! Should we worry?
It's called progress. Those grade school teachers who insist on continuing to preach arcane methods would probably find a more efficient use of their time if they taught their students to type right after teaching them basic writing skills. I don't know many people who can spout out cursive at over 80 words per minute.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
With the knowledge of penmanship goes the ability to sign a pact with the Devil in one's own blood. I suppose a syringe and an empty ink cartridge would do the trick, but why bother? Whatever Life trouble you are trying to bypass with such a pact cannot seriously be as bad as the anxiety this will cause. Imagine the stress of not only owing your soul to Satan, but also to living your life in fear of litigation from Canon, Epson and the like for breaking the DMCA by refilling those cartridges.
No sir. I am glad to see the day of this cursed writing.
I installed the cursive font sometime around 2nd grade, but I haven't really used it much since then. Comic sans is what I currently use by default, and while font snobs may sneer, I think it works pretty well for legible handwriting.
We learn two forms of writing and two forms of measurements. When are we going to stop living in the past and do away with these old customs? Next they'll have our students churning butter forging horseshoes.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I don't signatures going away this quickly. As much as I would have loved to sign my mortage digitaly...the good 'ole John Hancock is embedded in every day life.
My wife has been forging my sig on papers for a while. All the stupid little things that come around. It does seem a bit easier with everyone scratching it out in block letters.
You need to sign your name.
Some form of cursive provides a more distinct signature that is harder to forge. And more importantly: you can sign your name a lot more quickly if you don't have to lift your pen for each letter. So think about security and convenience...
Students benefit from knowing:
Cursive is indispensable for quick note-taking, and answering questions on tests.
Students generally aren't allowed to have electronic devices during a test, even an essay test. This is especially true in colleges. Some tests may be administered electronically, but not all are, at least not today.
If students don't have the most rudimentary of cursive skills, they will be at a disadvantage in the current environment.
Because it will take them longer physically to write what they want to say, using print letters.
This is only a problem with languages where cursive is entirely different from printing. Arabic is one of the few languages where cursive and printing are the same in appearance.
is so that old handwritten things like diaries and letters are still able to be read.
I haven't used cursive probably since sixth grade or so, and I'm 30. My print is much easier to read, and since I've been a computer weenie for most of my life I usually type long papers, negating cursive's alleged speed benefit.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
people who have learned often don't learn cursive (perhaps reading but not writing). Does it matter to ESL people? Probably not a big deal.
I had a third grade teacher who made me stay after school for several days so I could learn how to write a proper lower-cased "r" in cursive. Never mind that I was the best mathematician in my class; for some reason I was a terrible excuse for a human being by not being able to properly write that letter "r" in cursive.
I don't remember the last time I wrote anything in cursive. My signature on my credit card doesn't in the least resemble the cursive that we were drilled on for so long in grade school. Cursive can go away and be banished to the deepest levels of hell for as far as I am concerned.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I happen to travel quite a lot,
On two years of (rough) traveling, i lost 1 laptop, broke 2 dd's, and was stolen a laptop (that was in ecuador ^^)
As a geek (i'm slashdotting as you amn't I?) I decided to write all my memories on paper asap, and from there copy them in decent w3c xhtml
all that because: I don't have electricity or internet or a computer available all the time...
and I'm lazy and not interested in the forms, so as I learnt to hanwrite in cursives, I just keep it on ^^
so nice and chicks digg it :D
One of the primary uses for cursive writing, historically has been for students to take notes of what teachers and professors are saying in class. This could also be applied to similar note-taking situations outside the classroom, for example, when listening to a speech.
One could argue that this is no longer important because lectures are increasingly videotaped with transcripts (or at least outlines) distributed to students. But taking notes is a way for students to maintain involvement in class. By taking notes, a student is, in a way, recreating the lecture in real-time. It is all too easy to let one's mind drift when one can fall back on transcripts or videotape.
The availability of audiotape or videotapes is dangerous because it generally takes just as long to listen to them as it did to attend the original lecture. It's easy to kid oneself about this, only to find there is not enough time to review them.
I suppose one could type notes into some electronic gadget, but chances are that would strike people as overkill. Why bother? Besides, typing does not support the kind of random access editing of one's notes that cursive writing does (or if it does, it would take too long to do it in real time while the professor is talking).
Supposedly it is faster, however that doesn't matter since typing is by far faster still. Other than that, there are no advantages. Cursive is harder to read, which is who we don't use it as a standard font on computers. Computers these days could do a fine job of making actual cursive (properly joining the letters and all that) if we wanted but we don't. A good proportional block font is much easier to read, so that is what is used. Cursive isn't just a pain to write, it is a pain to read too.
We should be teaching kids to emulate computerized type in penmanship to the extent possible. Make your letters as clear as possible, not frilly. If speed is an issue because you've a lot of text to commit to paper, then get a computer and type it out. Because I don't care how fast your script is, I can type faster. Write for maximum legibility, not for some dead style.
"Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press."
so what will signatures look like in 20-30 years? Printed out? "Print name" and "Sign here" will look identical?
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
I don't understand what this discussion is about. Cursive is basically an alternative alphabet. Not knowing cursive doe NOT mean you can't write clearly by hand. Printing by hand is far more clear a form of communication that cursive.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
Have you ever tried to read your old report cards written in cursive or doctor notes, or any cursive? They are undecipherable. Sometimes even to the people that wrote it..
i suppose the graphologists willsoon bee reporting their findings on how the choice of font type,font size,use of bold and italics,the use of i instead of I and dozens of other typing choice we make tells us all sorts thing about a person's personality which we could use for counseling,crime investigationand recruitment purposes...
I see a whole new field of pseudoscience just waiting to be brought to the forefront of public imagination by a CSI episode.
Typology and typography are already taken, what shall we call this new science?
Your signature will be your public key attached to your common access card issued by the state. Just scan and go!
What is this the second article about cursive writing on /. this year. Doesn't even seem very technology related not to mention it's pretty much a fluff piece. Tends to spur a bunch of mindless "cursive must die" postings. Probably the occasional moron "nine-times" will post...
Even if we want to think this is discussing technology - there is very little of general import to discuss. Is cursive still useful. Yes. Is it less necessary than before? Yes. Therefore it's reasonable to believe that less people will be doing it (or doing it well).
Now on to the fluff.
The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019.
The article seems to be about excluding the teaching of handwriting. So what if this test is going to be on a computer (and I'd say that it at least could be argued that this is a *bad* thing). We can assume that the students are both being taught keyboard skills and are using keyboards at home. The writer only has an argument here is if one could be shown as a detriment to the other - and even then one would have to argue the relative merits.
"We need to make sure they'll be ready for what's going to happen in 2020 or 2030," said Katie Van Sluys, a professor at DePaul University and the president of the Whole Language Umbrella, a conference of the National Council of Teachers of English.
Uh...why would this necessitate that? No answer. In fact if you read Oppenheimer's "The Flickering Mind" you'll see just how close this parallels the fear-mongering arguments given for computers for ages - without much evidence to support it - "Oh noes if our children don't get exposed to computers by grade three they will lag behind".
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
It's interesting because you could argue the same thing about computers themselves. That they distract from the actual process of writing.
Besides, it isn't as if all those adults who learned cursive years ago are doing their writing with the fluent grace of John Hancock. No, but Id wager that most of us know what good writing is and could write well when the need arose. In the odd case where I do need to compose formally by pen my handwriting is rather good - if I do say so myself.
Anyway this article doesn't really ask any interesting questions, doesn't cite any interesting research. It's less valuable than water-cooler talk.
Ahhh, fountain pens. Archaic, not because of keyboards, but because most people no longer have any idea what it is like to own and use a truly finely crafted machine; you know, something worth keeping. Something not from the 99 cent bin at Walmart. Computers are, almost by definition, certainly by manufacturer advertisement, disposable consumer crap.
I get your point, maybe even agree with it, but nobody is going to die clutching email in their hands. (Your point about hand fatigue is a non-starter. I get hand fatigue trying to touch type without looking. It's simply fatigue from movement to which you're not accustomed. Hardly confined to pens. But you knew that.)
Well they have a point. If it is faster, cleaner and generally more efficient to type a message, why should they be required not to type but instead produce an inconsistent, generally lower quality hand written version? I suppose if your printer/computer are broken then hand writing is better but that is because you don't have the ability to create a typed copy, same as if you didn't have a pen or pencil to write out a message. Let students use the skills they have to do the best job they can and don't try to force them to learn a skill that the vast majority will inevitably learn poorly. (see previous post about cursive penmanship) Nostalgia for the old days when computers did not exist and students had no other choice is irrational.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Times change. So do methods of communication. Worry about communicating and getting your idea across first, not how pretty it looks. There's absolutely NO reason for children to be put through that mindless slave-work for years on end.... well, not anymore.
Cursive is... pretty. That's about it. And that's when you can still read it clearly.
As long as people don't lose the ability to read it, it doesn't matter if they can't write it. There's plenty of ways to be expressive in handwriting style, and people who want to use handwriting in that way will put the effort in and develop the skill. I'm certain that people will find value in this and will do it on their own.
This will still be true even if many people do not do it, because the people who wouldn't be bothered to learn it on their own would not have been the people to use it in real life anyway.
There's no need to waste scholastic resources teaching this to kids, especially when there are so many other things that they need to learn that are more important.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
The only time I ever use cursive is when I sign something and it looks like a squiggly mess. We could just teach kids to sign their name in cursive and be done with it after that.
Once I was through with penmanship classes, I reverted back to printing. I high school and then college (engineering) we took drafting and I refined my hand lettering skills. I have done some free hand drawings that have been deemed by my (ex) boss as being of sufficient quality to scan and import into our engineering documentation. This, IMO, is a much more valuable skill than cursive writing.
Have gnu, will travel.
First of all, there's the decline of paper-and-pen(cil) as a form of getting 'stuff' down. Secondly, there's the decline of actual cursive writing.
The loss of cursive seems more a sign of the social age, rather than of the technology age. We could easily lose cursive entirely, without a single computer in existence. The world could simply shift to printing, and seems to be going in that direction.
On the other hand, there are still valuable places for using a pen, and will be for some time yet. There's no better way to jot down notes in a meeting, or when brainstorming with someone else. Computers just aren't there yet.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Same thing, different links...
can't sleep slashdot will eat me
"In the age of computers, I just tell the children, what if we are on an island and don't have electricity? One of the ways we communicate is through writing," she said.
When the best argument you can come up with for why a skill should be learned is that it would be useful were you to be marooned on a desert island, it's probably time to admit that learning said skill is pointless.
I've seen people that used "print" to sign their names. It was different from the print name because it was much closer to a scribble. You don't need to use cursive for a signature. Mine started as cursive, but has evolved into a scribble that I usually do the same way.
Cursive is written sufficiently different enough that learning to write it will help you to read it. Which also incidentally connects to how a lot of people learn by writing things down. Asian characters are similar. You may be able to read a number of them, but until you write them you don't notice the little things that help you differentiate them for when you learn more of them.
For signatures, I sense the day that cursive dies, biometrics will be what replaces it.
Once you start despising the jerks, you become one.
Cursive has some orgins in cryptography. Early "Secretarys" (we're talking Elizabethan early) main job was to write in "Secretary Script" which was an altered form of readable letters, obfucating of the originatory's thoughts from peering eyes.
Cursive as a magic agreement that somehow has weight over a printed name isn't really based on anything. Why would it matter if it just became printed? Anyway, there are plenty of people who do use something much more like printing than cursive already, and the world isn't falling apart.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Have you seen this document recently?
There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
About a dozen years ago, I read a book on handwriting analysis.
While initially thinking the text was going to provide me with a good laugh (by being full of bunk), I actually learned a few things.
(Note that I still put little weight into reading personality traits in the way people form their loops.)
However, the way we join letters can identify us.
We have 26 x 26 ways to join pairs of lower-case letters together.
The ways to join letters increases when we include upper-case letters.
Each of us has our own style of forming and joining letters.
Samples of our writing (or print-writing for many people today) provide a form of fingerprint.
Now for the most valuable lesson:
If you want to print something anonymously with a pen:
Form your letters with lines that do not intersect and do not let your letters touch each other.
(The fewer intersecting lines in our penning, the more anonymous our writing.)
And what font to you use when you are writing a check out in your checkbook?
And what font will you use when you sign legal documents? Make a bix "X"?
No, no matter what font, you still need a legal signature that is not computer generated?
Or at least in the state of New South Wales, where the Foundation Style is the script that has been taught in schools for at least 15 years.
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/parents/k6writing.html
Foundation script was introduced to ensure that students produced a readable handwritten script and in the expectation that most future "writing" would be done at a keyboard. (Although I have spoken to Board of Studies people who deprecate keyboard skills, saying that we have to anticipate true speech recognition in a few years time).
To properly understand the things you're doing now it's never a bad idea to learn how they were developed.
I have possibly the worst handwriting of anyone in my generation, but I still say it's a worthwhile endeavor to learn to achieve serviceable cursive handwriting. There are many situations in the cold hard real world that don't involve a post apocalyptic future where all electronics have been rendered useless by a massive EMP, that do warrant nice neat cursive handwriting. Say meetings at work? Say, writing a note for coworkers? A love letter? Your diary? Just the freaking idea that you should know how to write by hand? I find this sort of thing a fascinating testament to how fast attitudes change and apparently how old I'm getting, but on the other hand you do need to learn to write, also get off my lawn.
It does matter.
Cursive is necessary to make signatures reasonably unique.
(insert my own unique scribble here)
20-30 years? I'm 24 and that's already the case for me, I gave up cursive the second they stopped trying to teach it to me.
A signature doesn't need to be anything readable, it just needs to be something you can duplicate yourself but is hard for others to duplicate. My signature is completely non-legible. But it looks pretty similar to other instances of my signature, and a handwriting expert could verify that, while pointing out how a forgery is different.
It doesn't matter if you're scrawling "Mickey Mouse", as long it's your signature.
And yes, the only thing we need to teach kids as far as cursive goes is their signature, however they want to write it (legible or not).
This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible. You might make out the first character or so in each name, and the rest is just a scribble.
penmenship doesn't matter here is 1 reason why: it's worse on your hands than a mouse or keyboard. why keyboards won't fade even with touch is simply because writing by hand, is bad for your hands and bad for your eyes as it requires far more strain on your eyes (looking at back-lit devices puts extra strain on your eyes) math should be done in writing, only because it's faster but text is wholly unimportant and the movements for it are completely unnatural (unlike educated use of a keyboard. which due to the use of board games over several centuries have caused us to be far more naturally adept towards than writing by hand.) and to nostalgia freaks: writing with a pen is about as new as modern as the computer (only the elite of europe used to write in the 17th trough the 18th century). writing text is too inefficient to proceed doing it by hand, eventually keyboards will faid and our minds will be the input device until then keyboards are here to stay (especially on touchpad devices)
Cursive handwriting does matter
Otherwise the autographs of famous people will look like a novel or worse a Finger Painting
I can write cursive, but when I need to take notes or jot something down, I print, and that's barely readable
Starting from about second grade until highschool the teachers would always say "now you need to learn cursive this year, because next year you're supposed to know it and use it." and every year they said the same thing and they never fully taught us how to write cursive and they never required it even though they said we would. It was this general apathy combined with the massive influx of computers for computer labs and internet connections that made it to where they just no longer cared and by the time I got to highschool everything was required to be typed and printed off so they stopped even telling us we should learn it, I still cannot even sign my name the same way in cursive every time, much less write or easily decipher cursive.
Orwell was an optimist.
It's damn good practice and practice is the best way to learn.
I do agree that cursive is useless.
I will never forget nor forgive being given a 'C' on my cursive writing because I didn't slant my letters 'properly'.
That same day I heard the teacher complaining that she COULDN'T READ her cursive-written notes.
I abandoned this method of intentionally making the written word more difficult to read, as soon as it stopped being required.
F* you Cursive.
I either sign my name in cursive thus rendering it illegible, or I print it so that it can be read. For years I only signed my name in print because my cursive handwritting was so horrible. No one ever objected, or even commented on my printed signature. I only changed because I got lazy and it's easier to scribble.
Most instances where you will be physically writting something for someone else to read you are explicitely prohibited from using cursive, so I don't see the value in it anymore.
Take the time they used to spend on cursive and teach young kids how to touch type. They still don't offer touch typing classes in my old school system until High School, yet they require 5th - 8th grade students to type their homework on a computer. Touch typing is infinitely more valuable than cursive writting at this point.
Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.-Oscar Wilde
Have you seen this document recently? There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
Developing good handwriting skills is calligraphy, not cursive.
Have you seen this document recently?
I'd bet that many people wouldn't understand that document even if it were typed up in Times New Roman due to the differences in language from then to now.
There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
There may be more to cursive than simply writing quickly, but developing good handwriting skills is hardly necessary for communication nowadays. The problems with practice and discipline are separate from the issue of handwriting.
SSC
If a fountain pen causes you hand fatigue, you're holding it wrong. You don't need to clutch it as if you are carving Trajan's Column. Just relax. The point of the nib only needs to touch the paper to allow the ink to flow evenly as you write.
A legal signature doesn't need to be anything, though. It doesn't even have to be your name, for goodness sake (mine, for the longest time, was not my name at all, in fact) and it certainly doesn't have to be externally legible.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Insightful? I think he was joking. Have you tried to do math with roman numerals? Roman numerals are absolutely useless for math. There is nothing about roman numerals that can teach a skill useful to math (except, perhaps counting, because, although it isn't convenient, it is technically possible to count using roman numerals).
How I despise all those loops that only look correct when pushing the line to the left and pulling it to the right, and the contortions necessary to simulate them with with the left hand.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
;-)
You'll get yourself burned as a heretic by saying that sort of thing here on Slashdot.
Think about this - do you compose an essay different when writing it manually compared to typing it out? Of course you do - writing manually forces you to take your time and think things out a little before you start. There's no going back to insert a new paragraph, or rearranging the order of your arguments at the last second. The skill of writing with cursive may not be useful - but don't dismiss learning to compose an essay "the old fashioned way." Technology is no substitute for substance and coherence... and it's about more than just spell/grammar check.
Ah, cursive. About as well loved as lawyers. The only thing worse is lawyers writing in cursive. That stuff is illegible.
--
Toro
I strongly disagree, and would post this reply in cursive were it possible.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
If you think of cursive as a skill or an art, so too is horseback riding. But the purpose cursive is to enable quicker handwriting for quicker, more effective communications.
Quite simply, this is no longer needed. Our communications are increasingly becoming paperless. The last remnant of this still in our society is the "signature" which is also becoming increasingly needless and pointless.
Cursive is destined to become yet another thing like Latin.
Yes - if you don't understand why without someone explaining it to you, then get off my lawn.
Lots of things are getting phased out by new technology, and cursive wasn't so great to begin with. It's more difficult to read and slower than typing.
Awesome. Soon all us 'old folks' will have a secret code we can use to communicate that the youth will never be able to decipher.
Cursive was faster to write, but sacrificed readibility, being slower to read than print until one adapts to the individuals style.
Sound familiar?
Texting is faster than proper spelling and grammar, but sacrifices readibility, being slower to read than proper text, until one adapts to the txter's style.
It's much less pretty, and certainly more irritating, but the reasons are the same. Cursive handwriting is a kludge, because the english alphabet is terribly slow to write by hand compared to more writing friendly alphabets around the world.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The main point is about writing by hand in general and losing those skills over time, really. First cursive, then printing. The article brings up cursive as the precurser to a loss in handwriting skills, basically. Oh, but what's my point right? What with progress and whatnot. Well, imagine being in a situation where you are away from a computer or text-like device and needed to write something. If you couldn't accurately write something with pen/pencil and paper, you'd be totally boned. And unlike pencil and paper, computer files/texts can get corrupted. Or even lost if there's a power outtage. So really, losing cursive skills is something to be concerned about.
The problem is that most schools don't actually teach how to type, so kids type inefficiently and illegibly. I don't see this as an improvement.
Have a nice time.
Issues with interpretation will largely be due to changes in terminology, not the fact that the document is written in cursive. That aside, I've been writing in cursive since approximately 1986. I've been writing software since 1988 (and thus have spent a huge amount of time typing and staring at ASCII text), and I have no trouble understanding documents written in practiced cursive.
While practice and discipline may be separate issues when compared on the most basic level, they are still sorely lacking in modern education. Schools seem increasingly focused on teaching children the easiest method possible, to the point that calculators are routinely accepted in many elementary school classrooms. As a consequence, I know lots of young high school and college graduates who cannot perform long division.
Learning to write in cursive provides an outstanding opportunity to develop a skill that is respected among professionals, along with the increase in disciple required to achieve satisfactory results. I find the progressive paring down of educational requirements in this country quite disturbing, and consider this an important piece of the process.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Teach kids to read cursive. That way they can still decipher old letters, historical manuscripts, etc. Teaching them to write cursive? Not so valuable.
Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press.
Now, "any form of writing at all" is important. But curisive?
The advantage of cursive, surely, is its speed. Being able to take hand-written notes is still important in many disciplines (the sciences, for example) and if kids can't take notes efficiently, accurately and still maintain legibility to others then they'll fall behind. (I couldn't do my job, for example, if I couldn't keep a legible, detailed, handwritten lab book.)
Even outside of the workplace, it's often faster to take a note by hand on a piece of scrap paper than to fire up a PDA or phone and cumbersomely tap out a note that way. If you remove a kid's ability to write cursively, then you just slow them down.
And besides, what are emo kids going to do if they can't send a pretty hand-written love sonnet to their sweetheart??
It will become the new sign of someone who had a fancy education. The new way for colleges to pick favorites will be to ask for a hand-written letter and then be sure to pick the one with the most fancy educated looking handwriting. Yet another "first impression" test.
Nullius in verba
Cursive is important because many documents of historical significance, including the Declaration, Constitution, and letters between historical figures are written in scripts related to cursive. Many such letters have still not been "translated" to standard type. Without understanding how cursive works it'd be near impossible to understand them, as they are already difficult enough to read for someone who can read and write in cursive. Plus, is it really a good idea to make children illiterate to the original versions of the founding documents of our country and government?
That was the point. The relationship between literacy and cursive is the same sort of relationship as mathematics and non-positional notation number systems. They're not directly related to each other.
Learn something new.
I doubt that cursive writing will go away anymore than concept sketching will go away. The neuro-motor connection is valuable in enhancing learning and understanding. People will still write in notebooks and journals that don't need electricity. The people who can't write in the future will be the same people who can't write now; the neglected, the mentally impaired, the lazy, and those who depended on the public school system to give them the essential skills.
Especially important is the need for learning and understanding. According to John Medina in his book, "Brain Rules", concepts are learned better and more thoroughly if there is a little more effort put into the learning process. Motor memory is apparently a good adjunct to learning, especially in complex relationships.
The ability to communicate, on the other hand, is being lost at a tremendous rate. People who can't spell are trying to write about complex problems. People with bad grammar are trying to discuss important political, social and scientific issues. People who can't do basic arithmetic are trying to make sense out of figures that are twisted, distorted and under-represented in the daily media. People who can't think are still trying to vote intelligently and failing. (And,look at what happens daily on /. !)
I can use a number of computer drafting and drawing tools pretty well, but if I want to really understand something, I draw it by hand. (There is also something satisfying about the order that comes from drawing my pencil across my straight-edge, but that's something different.) I spent many hours learning to create legible printed text to COMMUNICATE ideas to others, but my own thinking is usually accompanied by either quick notes that look like shorthand, or complete notes in cursive so I can understand them later. Sometimes my slide rule is more valuable to understanding something than a calculator. Short notes and memos are still more easily written than typed, printed and delivered.
A few months ago a lawyer friend of mine mentioned that her son couldn't read an analog watch. He wears one, but it doesn't tell him the time. There is a whole level of understanding about the world that came from learning to tell time. I seemed to have a connection with the turning of the earth. I could find true North if I was lost in the woods. I could calculate height and distance without a tape measure. I could go sailing and be pretty sure I would end up where I wanted. The ability to read, write and calculate helped mankind overcome basic limitations by enhancing basic metal abilities. I am afraid the serfs of the future will be those that have been removed from the basic skills by layers of technology they use without the underlying knowledge to support it. (In my field, I have already been all but replaced by people who are called programmers, but can't do Boolean Algebra or Assembly language. A bunch of "cookbook" programmers who seem to think that writing code is more important than solving a problem. They rely, as they should, on solutions painstakingly solved by the programmers of my generation which have been combined into large complex systems and placed in books and repositories. But they couldn't reproduce the solutions if they had to start from scratch.)
As you may have guessed, I'm worried that the loss of the ability to write will diminish our ability to think and communicate. Cursive writing is only part of this process, so the loss of manual writing ability does not depend on a specific style. Cursive penmanship did give us a common ground for understanding the ideas of other people. Linguists tell us that the actual understanding of written communication is tremendously difficult, even if the communication is simple and clearly presented.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Do we sign our name in cursive or print when signing contracts and whatnot?
Plus, there are advantages. Google search: cursive writing advantages
Because cursive writing has absolutely nothing to do with literacy, fool. People write stuff by hand all the time, and don't use cursive. I've been printing characters since I was old enough to not get in trouble for it.
That's what mine looks like.
... Like Math, History, Chemistry, Literature, Writing, Reading, and we waste time with spelling tests and teaching cursive. Nobody is going to be less successful in life because they completely muff this particular skill and print all their lives. Even spelling can be taught via writing on a computer and using the spell checker. Seriously, I never did learn to spell despite spelling tests all through grade school, Junior high, high school, and into college. But now, just so as to avoid those annoying red lines, I actually spell pretty well.
And I certainly write faster than I ever could writing cursive.
As long as I am typing.
Give me a pencil and paper, and I still can't spell my way out of a wet paper bag.
So what? Why did I waste all that time trying to learn these things that just didn't matter, long term? Sure, SOME time needs to be spent. We need SOME basic ability to spell. Certainly we need vocabulary (something I never had trouble with). And how to write. But it is just stupid to artificially make learning harder for kids, "because that's the way it has always been done".
We have loads of important information to stuff in the heads of kids today. We need to even teach them to go outside and play games. Junk this stuff with quilting and parchment paper.
... is the only font I ever use, even when handwriting.
Is this news? I used to write all text with computer 15 years ago. But back then, I had to have special permission allowing me to deliver printer works instead of handwritten. And of course all work in class room had to be don using pen and paper. It's not unclear that I didn't care hand writing when you see it. It's horrible, cartoon text. It was way clear to me that I won't use pen and paper in future.
I wouldn't call it irrelevant.. Even working as a programmer, I sometimes have to write down notes, and doing so in the most time-efficient way possible is valuable. That said, typing deserves more focus in schools, since it is a skill that will be more relevant in adult life. But cursive has not become irrelevant. Frankly, I wish my cursive was better. I print some capital letters when attempting to write in cursive because I just can't remember them.... I was born in '83 but have been doing English class assignments on the computer since.. 4th or 5th grade.
Well it would matter because a cursive signature is more personalized. Expert forgers aside, chances are that the average person out there isn't going to be able to copy your signature if you use cursive. If you just block print it, a 5 year old could copy it. What will then stop someone from using your name on contracts? How will you argue that you didn't sign it?
Now you are saying to yourself, "Well who cares? It doesn't matter!" Well yes it does. My late father used to have a VERY distinct cursive signature. About 12 - 15 years ago there were agents from a new utility company in the area where my parents lived going door to door trying to sign up new customers. My parents were happy with the company they were with and told the salesman "No thanks". Less than a month later my dad gets a letter in the mail thanking him for switching to the new company. He called and told them he wanted to see a copy of the contract and when he received it, it was quite obvious someone else signed it. Boy did the sh#t hit the fan when he called them back threatening lawsuits for identity theft, document forgery, etc.
I wouldn't want a printed "signature" any more than I would want to use 16 bit encryption to do online banking.
It teaches the dynamic of the pen (especially if you learn with a fountain pen, or better, a quill). After this, you can pretty much write in print with any pencil without re-learning because the act of drawing lines is embedded in the hand. Whereas, obviously, by the numerous contributions posted here, if you begin by learning handwriting in print with a pencil, you can't properly switch to cursive later on. Being european, I was taught cursive first beginning while I was 6 yo, and I don't remember it being a big deal ; I certainly could write by the end of the year. Print was frown upon until I went to the university, but I certainly can use print whenever I feel like without having been taught to write those shapes.
Is cursive efficient ? In my experience, yes. It can look real good if you take the time to write legibly, or it can be extremely simplified into a personal shorthand in a pinch, while still being readable by anyone. OTOH, many times quick notes in print are a messy jumble not even the writer can make sense of. Print characters require way more movements and strokes to keep their meaning, and even spaces between letters can be confused with spaces between words in some cases I witnessed.
The other question is, do we still need to hand write ? Time will tell, but at the moment, it's still awkward to borrow someone else computer whenever you need to type something, while requesting a pencil and a sheet of paper is no big deal. While I'm all in favour of writing on a computer whenever possible, I would feel "amputated" without the ability to handwrite.
Nowadays, it is both.
I just signed a car loan last week. I had to both print and sign my name at each location in the paperwork.
Developing good handwriting skills is calligraphy, not cursive.
I think that statement says a lot about the current state of your handwriting ... :) I know a few (older) people who naturally write in copperplate cursive (a la the dec of independence), and it's just beautiful to read.
But developing good handwriting skills is a natural part of being able to communicate with others, something which should be every child's right.
Like on cheques and the back of credit cards and everything legal? People don't give you pause? I think the only time I use cursive is when I sign my name and it annoys me every time I do because I have to stop and remember how to make the letters.
Cursive represents certain advancements in technology. Writing without lifing your pen from the page has to be done somehow: cursive. Storing something without the use of a text processing machine: cursive may come back around as an advancement in technological art.
I write for a living and the last time I used cursive was uhhhhnnnnhhh... never? I have (like many people) a 50/50 print/cursive type writing for making notes/etc. but 100% of my real writing is done with a keyboard. Apart from writing thank you notes and nice letters I can't think of a use for cursive as opposed to printing/etc. and a keyboard.
Wow, my country-water school has been teaching touch typing in the fifth grade since... well since they got a bunch of computers with 5-1/4 floppies (I don't remember what they were, just they only had 5-1/4 drives). I know the grade before me used them too, so at least since... 1995
Yes, I am obsessed with ellipses.
An "x" is still a legal signature, with the signature of a witness. But, if people really give up on handwriting, a thumbprint works just as well. You don't even need to be capable of picking up a pen to mark a paper or an electronic document with a thumbprint.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
...is dying with what seems to be the rest of the English language, as we once knew it.
This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible.
Unless, of course, you want your John Hancock to be read by King George without his spectacles.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Cursive is simply a form of quick legible handwriting. The value of cursive is it's speed and legibility which derive from linking the letters and it's standard form. Not teaching cursive is a decision stemming from perceptions of educational priorities (which are usually political decisions, not educational ones.) After all, typewriters were around for the better part of a century and yet they did not displace handwriting very significantly. My grandparents cursive hands were incredibly legible and beautiful. I'm in my late 40's and my own hand is nothing to write home about (ha!) but it is also quite legible. My own cursive training was probably no more than an hour or two a week for half a year or so -- hardly a huge investment in time for the skill I developed. Far more useful then the facile "computer training" they give grade schoolers now like "powerpoint presentation"!? Story telling and narrative development would be far more useful practice for group communication skills, Powerpoint or not. Anyway I still keep several letters from my Grandparents and parents because I enjoy seeing the writing. One of the only pieces I have of my Father's writing is a short list my father wrote to himself but I love it because it is such a personal reminder of him. I can see the slight tremor in his hand (he always shook a bit as he was a 'charged up' guy,) I can tell about how old he was when he wrote it because I saw his handwriting throughout my life (surprising how we subconsciously absorb these tiny observations,) and his character comes through in the letter shape habits and script stress he developed. I never look at old e-mails he sent me and they would not communicate anything more than the content. To me it seems a shame not to teach cursive since it extends our dependance on complex technology for basic communication. Its a tie that connects us to our ancestors (or at least our cultural forbearers) who used pen, quill, or brush that goes back millennia. More of a shame is that it deprives us of this personal artifact of communication that can convey far more than just the syntactical content we write.
-- My apologies if the above facts contain any opinions, or vice versa! --
BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE...
My "signature" is a drawing of a lion. I'd like to think it's harder to reproduce than a real signature ever would be.
I always thought the idea behind signatures was to evolve a way of writing your name that looking almost nothing like your name at all, but you can scribble in less than a second with a dramatic flourish? :/
I agree, these kids of today don't even know how to operate a slide rule or a log book. And don't get me started on trig tables.
Languages aren't inherently fast -- implementations are efficient
Ah, the insight contained in the word "no" is truly astounding. I'm now imagining this future discourse:
"Is evolution real?" asks the questioning public.
"No," replies the creationist.
The public praises the creationist for their insight, having demolished the arguments of science in a word.
That's the way informed debate should happen, mods. Keep it up!
Cursive as a magic agreement that somehow has weight over a printed name isn't really based on anything. Why would it matter if it just became printed?
I would be more inclined to expect AI-enabled software to generate signatures based on degenerate yet connected fonts, just like such evolved for humans.
I don't know just how pervasive your biological uniqueness will be added to although such incursions will be assimilated into our daily life will be our own resistance is futile though.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There might be some inherent value in knowing how to use the underlying skills that make up the essential underpinnings of literacy
There is a tremendous inherent value in knowing how to use the skills that make up the essential underpinnings of literacy. Handwriting is one of those underpinnings. Cursive writing in particular is not.
From its inception, cursive was nothing more than a shortcut, a way to write more quickly than was possible printing block letters. Even before typewriters and computers, shorthand was faster and did a better job than cursive. With word processors for any writing of substance and the ubiquitous cell phone for texting quick notes, it's past time to let cursive retire to the annals of history.
I use a calculator to do all my math at work, why should I learn how to do long division
Because long division demonstrates how division works. A better question is: why should you bother learning fractions when all your work will involve moving decimal points. A fraction is just a shortcut for long division and a calculator is a much shorter cut.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Honestly, who cares? Should we even pay attention? The correct answer is no. Students don't see the value of Maths nor Science nor many many things. They don't see the value because they've yet to have the life experience that is required to see that value. Hell, most adults don't see the value of it even though it's right in front of there faces. In fact, every single Maths and Physics class I have ever taken required assignments to be handed in, in writing. And what about exams? It's just not tractable to setup thousands of computers, non-networked, for exams if students can't write. And if it's illegible, the student gets a zero.
So, yah, writing is kind of important.
To the teachers in the crowd, perhaps instead of bitching that the students don't understand the value, YOU SHOULD DO YOUR JOBS AND EXPLAIN IT TO THEM!
Is that you, Mrs. Stevenson? Look, I still love you after all these decades, but I am NEVER going to learn how to hold that freaking pen like you want me to!!
I wonder though - have you ever field stripped and reassembled a Colt .45 in less than 2 minutes, BLINDFOLDED? I can. See, there's nothing "wrong" with me. I just can't do things YOUR WAY!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You see, we have cars nowadays too. I can't possibly see why I should have to spend all that time learning how to walk, run, hike/exercise when I can just get in a car and get there instantly.
I think you're confusing cursive with the ability to write by hand -- and neither have anything to do with literacy.
There is definitely intrinsic value in being able to write by hand and the death of that would be embarrassing. The death of cursive, however is fairly irrelevant. The point of cursive is that it was constructed to make writing smoother, faster, and less painful for the hand. For anything of great length, we now use computers.
It's odd to comprehend a world without cursive, but it has served its purpose. If it moves on to the eventual world of enthusiasts the way caligraphy has, it's no huge loss.
Also, a calculator makes the process more efficient for someone who knows the underlying fundamentals of what they're working through, but is essentially a useless tool if you lack that knowledge. A
As I've pointed out in other slashdot articles. Signing our name is still a huge requirement for solemnization. Doctors will often do it dozens of times a day.
There are also interesting possibilities of teaching this stuff. The Waldorf method of schooling - distributes much of it's materials with the text in cursive. There was one study which concluded that as a result students needed less handwriting instruction.
The death of cursive is a sign of societal progress (replaced with other methods for long-piece writing... like a computer or typewriter), unlike what should be a much greater concern that kids have horrible grammar and spelling and it seems to be slowly becoming more accepted and expected of them.
I'm glad its use is declining. I use to HATE proofreading my classmates papers because of how messy their handwriting was. Printing is just easier to read most of the time. I also noticed that as I progressed through school, a lot of my classmates would be writing in this hybrid handwriting style of print and cursive. Basically, they would write something using both, picking a choosing what was quicker for them to write. It just made reading that crap even more confusing. Did you forget to dot an "i" or is that a messy cursive "e"? I would much prefer people using all uppercase print when they handwrite.
This is irrelevant. Doing ANYTHING _well_ takes practice and discipline.
I think that learning to write legibly is an important skill. I personally dont write in cursive and thing that printing is much more important. However I believe it is just as important as being able to perform basic math problems in your head. Yes you might have a calculator handy but that doesnt mean that being able to do it in your head would be quicker of more productive.
That is just my opinion, it is worth what you payed for it.
We can't all sign with an 'X'
Of course it's a dead skill. Along with copperplate, chancery cursive, Bell's Visible Speech, and Pitman shorthand. Those were all industrial-strength methods intended to solve the problem of getting information onto paper at a reasonably high rate of speed.
It may take longer for the ideographic languages to give in. Japanese and Chinese have the problem that the manual typewriters for a 3000-character font were really slow and clunky, so much business paperwork was handwritten until computers came in. Typing on those things was slower than writing the ideographs. Even today, none of the keyboard input systems are that great. Drawing ideographs on a touchscreen isn't unusual. (There is, incidentally, a neat touch-screen kanji input program for the Nintendo DS.)
Stenotype keyboards live on, faster than anything else. I'm surprised they've never become popular for chat.
Signatures.
No, I'm not talking about those little blurbs of text added to the end of your posts. I'm talking about when you have to agree to a contract or use a credit card or something. You need to be able to sign your name. If cursive writing is eliminated, what are we going to put on the line that's not marked "Print name"?
And if cursive is becoming less and less used, as TFS says, then that's all the more reason to learn the skill and keep it alive. When you pull out that form of writing, you mean business. You mean serious business.
What will we do if we can't sign our names on important documents?
Wait, did I mention contracts and credit cards? Okay, kill it in the US, but keep it around the rest of the world.
Let q be a radix > 1. I am in ur base-q, killing 10 d00ds.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
And what font to you use when you are writing a check out in your checkbook?
And what font will you use when you sign legal documents? Make a bix "X"?
No, no matter what font, you still need a legal signature that is not computer generated?
No you don't. "This application will allow you to electronically sign documents by means of your electronic identity card (eID). First of all, the document you selected will be converted into a PDF document. Then, it will be signed electronically by means of your eID. "
If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.
FTA
That's because "print" is easier and faster to write and more legible. I've never understood why they teach children a second alphabet only for handwriting. It's not as awkward as Sütterlin but it comes close. Good riddance.
Well, for the longest time my 'signature' was merely a scrawl of my initials. Now it's simply a series of scrawled loops.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Cursive is the Morse code of the 21st century. A quaint, but nearly
useless skill needed only to satisfy an outdated definition of proficient.
"Cursive writing is no more a requirement to literacy than knowing how to operate a printing press." so what will signatures look like in 20-30 years? Printed out? "Print name" and "Sign here" will look identical?
X
What does it matter - kids will all have carpel tunnel or other related wrist/hand injuries from typing for 20 years and be unable to hold a pen when they mature. This happened to me, I learned cursive writing at the end of a bamboo stick 50 years ago, and now after 30 years of solid typing day in and day out, i am lucky to be able to print anything legible, cursive or otherwise. Folks should be more concerned about long term keyboard use then use of the pen...
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Some form of handwriting is necessary, and always will be. I view this as non-negotiable.
I don't care if it's any particular form, as long as it's readable by others. Mine is a "joined-together printing" style, I abandoned traditional cursive writing in my teens, but what I write is readable and gets the job done. If Cursive is dying, let it die. Carolingian Minuscule died centuries ago and nobody misses it.
The one thing I would change is the tendency to "illiterate" handwriting. You know the type. There has to be a better way.
...laura
"Place your mark here"
Could be an X, Smiley face, Ink-soaked butt mark, Blood stain (Not recommended), Booger, whatever. If its yours, its yours.
People had to 'sign' documents long before the majority of people could read/write too. Think they all just signed their name?
In fact, mine is a strangle squiggily line. I was using an X for a while too. ... Im going to try the Ink-soaked butt mark next time I go to the grocery store. That ought to be fun
Especially on /.?
50 replies on how a paraplegic rat regained the function in its legs, and 250 replies on how cursive writing is a fading skill. Really -- slashdot?
That aside, I've been writing in cursive since approximately 1986. I've been writing software since 1988 (and thus have spent a huge amount of time typing and staring at ASCII text), and I have no trouble understanding documents written in practiced cursive.
You know a form of cursive. I do, too. The problem is, that's just one form of many.
Some so-called cursive writing is unreadable to me not because it's sloppy or because I don't "know cursive," but because it's a far different style from what I learned. Is that an S or a G? Is that a T or an F? Is that an n or an m? This wouldn't be an issue if people were concerned with function over form and just wrote with standard block text to begin with.
While practice and discipline may be separate issues when compared on the most basic level, they are still sorely lacking in modern education. Schools seem increasingly focused on teaching children the easiest method possible, to the point that calculators are routinely accepted in many elementary school classrooms. As a consequence, I know lots of young high school and college graduates who cannot perform long division.
So? Long division is useless in daily life. You can't do it in your head for problems of non-trivial size; you have to pull something out to do it. At that point, you might as well pull out your cell phone and bring up the calculator. You know, use a tool; our species is pretty well-known for that ability. ;)
Learning to write in cursive provides an outstanding opportunity to develop a skill that is respected among professionals,
Truly, you live amongst the outstandingly easily amused. I have never known a single professional in my entire life who would have been in the least bit impressed by another adult's "knowing cursive." It's a skill right up there with being able to belch on command--mildly endearing in children, worthless in adults.
along with the increase in disciple required to achieve satisfactory results. I find the progressive paring down of educational requirements in this country quite disturbing, and consider this an important piece of the process.
Yes, because if a school stops teaching something, it's impossible for them to replace it with something else.
I have known a few architects (buildings and landscapes) and drafters. These people all took a technical drawing course in college in which they had to learn to print nicely.
I *REALLY* like the way these people write. It is stylish and very legible. I have even asked one to write out an invitation (which I had printed) to give it a more individual look.
Maybe we should be teaching this to our children.
Of course, if you do not teach people how to read cursive writing...
-Todd
Omne ignotum pro magnifico.
Why should kids learn to write by hand? In the words of the late George Carlin: "These are the kinds of things I'm thinking of when I'm sitting at home and the power goes out."
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
I suppose the d'nealian handwriting style I was taught is now even more useless!
... is sick of frikking talking about this. It has so many replies and when you look at them the overwhelming consensus is this:
1) I don't give a crap about cursive
2) I don't use it, I don't need it
3) This discussion is pointless
-------------
People are ranting and raving about it, not because it is controversial by any means at all, but rather because of the sheer fact that its being talked about in the first place.
LETS JUST STOP ACKNOWLEDGING THIS GARBAGE AS "NERD NEWS" --- and discard it for what it is "old useless relics that should be ignored".
In the US, universities are primarily pumping out MBAs, with now bad knees for life who thought they might be jocks, and jocks with big business aspirations after their physical careers are over who constantly get taken by nickle-dime street dealers. Most of the rest are art majors, or people who want government social worker mcjobs. There's a few nerds in there. The smarter ones are learning mandarin as well instead of playing video games so much, but they are also smart enough to realize it is hopeless anyway, so they become professional emos. The ones who wanted to become bankers or lawyers are now switching to being "security contractors", because it is the closest career to their previously chosen path that is still hiring and pays well. You get to "kill" your competition.....
I still write cursive every so often, but it is rare. The good part about becoming proficient is that it enforces the discipline and fine motor skills needed so that even block printing stays very legible and concise. Hard to describe, but it makes you more balanced in critical thinking. It forces you to slow down and explore all the avenues before commitment on a thought or action, rather than just blasting something out like a cockroach reaction to stimuli.
Cursive. It's the anti-twitter.
It is hard to imagine anyone on twitter or a chronic texter who could come up with something like the Gettysburg Address or even something as simple yet as profound as the Preamble to the Constitution.
Oh, yeah..chicks dig it. Check it out, it works. Cheap, too.
Completely untrue. I know several people who write exactly as in the document shown, and it is closer to cursive than calligraphy.
Hell, writing without any spelling or grammatical errors in itself is a skill -- it makes sure that you think through what you're planning on writing before putting it down on paper. But hey, no need to bother with that today, given with our ADD ridden society.
Developing good handwriting skills is part of basic communication - after all, we still take notes in notebooks, write on whiteboards and scrawl on post-its.
Long division is actually a useful skill long term as it is applicable in algebraic expressions, not just arithmetic. I admit to being a math instructor who gave in after the standard sermon of "you won't always have a calculator with you" was disproved for this generation by having a student pull out a cell phone.
Thats what I used to do... well actually I started off with my first 2 initials followed by my last named in cursive, it then morphed into my 4 initials (last name is 2 words) on top of each other... now its just a squigle ~~~~~ is what I sign on electronic machines.. these days..
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
You can sign legal documents "Batman" and as long as it's consistently what you use, it's legally your signature.
After learning the basics of writing Chinese characters both by hand and by computer, I decided that becoming proficient at handwriting was just not worth it. Sure, it's a very useful skill, but it takes a lot of learning (over a thousand hours) and ultimately doesn't give much benefit.
With the aid of a computer, you don't need to remember all the components and stroke orders for each character. You just need to know how to pronounce what you want to write, and be able to distinguish between different characters with the same pronunciation at sight. If you can both speak and read, you get the harder skill of writing for free.
I use my study time for reading instead of writing.
The same argument can be made against becoming a really proficient speller in English. Really you only need the basics, and be able to deal well with homonyms. Your computer will get you the rest of the way to near-perfect spelling.
Cursive replacing the far faster and efficient typing? Insightful? Well I have seen it all.
Graham argues that fears over the decline of handwriting in general and cursive in particular are distractions from the goal of improving students' overall writing skills. The important thing is to have students proficient enough to focus on their ideas and the composition of their writing rather than how they form the letters.
It's interesting because you could argue the same thing about computers themselves. That they distract from the actual process of writing.
No. The focus on cursive writing distracts from overall writing skills because time is being spent teaching kids cursive that could otherwise be used teaching them how to compose. They could learn how to compose using printed handwriting and typing, the two methods they're more familiar with. If the alternatives to cursive are easier, more useful, and more sensible than cursive is--and they are, which is the reason for cursive's decline in the first place--they're not distractions from anything.
I am never away from a computer by more than 20 feet, even when I am 300 feet up on a tower.
This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible. You might make out the first character or so in each name, and the rest is just a scribble.
Hell, you don't even need to go back in history to see that. Look at the signatures of current heads of state (Wikipedia handily has images of signatures in the articles of most politicians). Barack Obama and Stephen Harper both have such signatures, and Gordon Brown's hardly looks anything like his name. Thorbjorn Jagland's (President of the Sorting in Norway) signature is even worse.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Already in place. Look up the Spanish DNIe (e-ID card). The electronic signatures issued with it are considered to have the same validity as physical signatures.
Of course, there's the bit where all you need to sign as someone else is their ID card and their fingerprint (which likely is going to be on the card itself considering you probably touch it often). Whoever thought the idea of ATM-like machines that only need your fingerprint to reset your password should be shot. But other than the implementation failures, the idea is decent.
Now if only they didn't use retarded bin-blob drivers for it... reverse engineering the protocol is on my TODO list.
Apparently not.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I strongly disagree, and would post this reply in cursive were it possible.
In the Diamond Age universe I imagine you would be a Victorian.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
There might be some inherent value in knowing how to use the underlying skills that make up the essential underpinnings of literacy? Gee I don't know, I use a calculator to do all my math at work, why should I learn how to do long division?
I have a slide rule on my desk. I find using it to be good mental exercise.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Has anybody else noticed that slashcode is broken in the top story? Have we filled a disk or something?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
When I was a teenager, lo so many years ago, I had a female friend who had really nice handwriting. On those rare occasions that my friends and I skipped school, she was always the one who'd write our "excuse" notes because her writing made for a believable note from mom. So tell me - if cursive writing is lost, who is going to write the mom notes for those poor children of the future?
#DeleteChrome
My signature isn't in cursive. It's my standard print handwriting. With the "Print name" field though, I take a little extra effort to make sure it's legible.
If you look at the actual shapes for cursive writing, you can see how it's basically just what you would get if you rejiggered printing to pick up the pen fewer times.
Have you seen this document recently?
Developing good spelling skills takes more practice and discipline, it would appear:
The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of Hmerica
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necefsary for onepeople to difsolve...
If you will look at the history of penmanship, the style of writing practiced within a time period is heavily correlated with the technology of the pen at that day. Back when the Egyptians used reed pens on papyrus, the strokes were mostly straight, brisk strokes, because that was the way you get a device with limited ink capacity to write. When quills were used, most of the words were written in Carolingian miniscule, with huge downward strokes, because the quill tip was cut in a manner that scratched the paper when written from down to up. Then came the dip pen and fountain pen which were much more amicable to write with, and because these pens left ugly ink splotches when carelessly and repeatedly coming into contact and going out of contact with the paper, cursive, which minimized this, was favored. Now that we have ball-point pens and computers that lend themselves well to printing letters, it makes sense not to write in cursive where readability is concerned.
As for myself, I was not forced to learn penmanship, but I developed my own cursive style, partially based on the forms of the Spencerian script, adapted (cursive zealots will say perverted) for writing in ballpoint. I like the degree of expression that cursive writing lends me.
A bit off-topic I know, but that makes me ponder the consequences of the eventual death of handwriting. Besides "boohoo lost art" I mean. An awfully long time in the early years of your education is spent learning how to write with a pen. Based on the assumption that learning how to hunt-and-peck would be much quicker (all you have to do is know how to find the letters, and with practice you quickly become faster), and that a child learning that will always write faster than a child learning to handwrite, wouldn't that free up more time for learning things?
Think about it, in the early years, lots of time is spent copying text from the blackboard. If you can learn to type fast soon enough, then I suppose there would be a noticeable positive impact on education.
You just got troll'd!
Script styles follow the technology. Epigraphs are not in cursive. Notes in wax tablets are. Many would classify a13th-century cursive as "block writing" compared to what we have today. The cursive taught thirty years ago in schools was optimized for fountain pens. At the same time, ball point pens were prevalent in the US, and making inroads in Europe.
Fountain pens allow ink to flow with very little surface pressure. Ball point pens require pressure to write. All those loops and ligatures that make sense on a flowing-ink pen take energy on a ball-point. So the benefits of the "fountain-pen cursive" are not so great with different tech. People switch to print writing because it takes less energy and produces a clearer result. That's also why pressure-based touch screens will not be "faster" for most cursive writers. In any case, keyboards are an order of magnitude faster for text entry.
OCR only works better on printed characters because OCR is optimized to look for shapes. The ideal way to read cursive -- or any handwriting style -- is to look at it in terms of motion, as the result of certain movements of the pen. Read the motion, not the static result. That's why many cursives up to the nineteenth century are so hard for us to read now: we're used to reading printed letters, and not cursive ones.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
news at eleven.
Uhhh no, to sign for something you make whatever your unique mark is. Doesn't have to be your name in cursive, or your name at all. An X is acceptable if you are illiterate.
In my case, it is a scribble, more or less. It is vaguely based off of the cursive writing of my name, but it really is just me scribbling in a certain way. That works fine. All that matters is that it is my mark I use to indicate I agree to a contract. That scribble is what stands on the pages of my mortgage, and so on.
so what will signatures look like in 20-30 years? Printed out? "Print name" and "Sign here" will look identical?
* Looks at contract from Chinese customer in front of him *
Yep, doesn't seem to be a problem for them.
People don't seem to realize the history of cursive, that it actually developed from laziness, not style or readability. People scribbling things quickly started melding their letters together. For that matter, some of it was unintentional, the pens of the day would bleed/smear ink. It just became a somewhat systematized way of trying to do that. Then through frequent use, especially for important documents (like say the Constitution) it became this kind of thing that people had some kind of reverence for as being the "real" way of writing.
Well it is now, as you have noted, 100% useless. If you've more than a little to write, do it on a computer. It is faster, easier, can be edited, and will produce characters more perfect than any you can.
When you write by hand, use clear printed characters, so it is easy to read as well.
Maybe the GP spent too much time learning how to write cursive and too little on reading comprehension.
In my opinion, cursive writing has its place in an Art class/course.
Certainly not in "English" or "Literature" classes.
Don't judge me!
A signature is not supposed to be legible. It is meant as a security feature (albeit a poor one).
But how will people learn joined-up thinking if they can't do joined-up handwriting?
Management consultants everywhere will throw their hands up in horror at the prospect.
A legal signature doesn't need to be anything
Good thing of that. When my car was held hostage by crooked italian cops, I signed 'fuck you' in a different language on the check in order to get it back at the pound. It never passed though the bank, which makes me wonder if the cops/mafia association still accepts checks.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
No it was me that had an "ask slashdot" article published regarding "is typing ruining my ability to spell" Many people responded to which I am very thankful for and I it was quite enlightening. As with the publisher of this post, it is an issue that is not going to go away. I have been taking personal steps to undue or reverse engineer these issues. I started to practice my hand-writing skills all over again. Wrote some letters to some people on Conqueror Paper with watermarks and posted them in hand-written envelopes. The reaction has been incredible instead of typed words. A hand written letter makes a person feel special. Interestingly enough I also found out that people switch off mentally with a printed or electronic communication. Where am I going with this? Well SAS Special Air Service and SBS Special Boat Service, call in "Air Strikes" manually with manual co-ordinates to get things right. We never trust GPS or lasers. There are only a few pilots who we call in over after ISTAR on AWACS following radio silence, that can override on board weapons systems to hit the right target without electronic intervention. Therefore, doing everything manually has a place in society. We all need some downtime from digital lives we lead. They have benefits, but digital can be a curse. So /MOTD is re-explore your life, go out and enjoy your life and teach your kids you can be creative with manual hand-writing or anything manual.
All cows eat grass!
When I took the SAT three years ago, there was a portion on the answer booklet where you had to write two or three sentences to verify that you were who you said you were. And it had to be in cursive. Everyone in the room took about five minutes to write it out. Much of that time was spent trying to remember what the cursive equivalent of all the letters were.
Cursive is simply a form of quick legible handwriting.
It's not. You can always find a few exceptions, but as a rule, cursive, when used as intended - to quickly jot down notes - is not very legible, nor it's supposed to be. So long as the person who wrote it can read it back, it's good enough.
To me it seems a shame not to teach cursive since it extends our dependance on complex technology for basic communication. Its a tie that connects us to our ancestors (or at least our cultural forbearers) who used pen, quill, or brush that goes back millennia.
Neither pen, quill, nor brush go back "millennia". Since you're so keen on connecting to your ancestors, how's your cuneiform chiseling skills these days? Or, perhaps, clay tablets? Well, can you at least write with a lead pencil properly? Figured - kids these days...
As a side note, I prefer to write in cursive myself solely because that's what I was taught back in school, and I do it well. But I do not delude myself into thinking that it's anything more but an outdated technique made irrelevant by technical progress - like many things before it in the past. It's long past time to move on.
Completely untrue. I know several people who write exactly as in the document shown, and it is closer to cursive than calligraphy.
If they truly write like that, than they miss on all actual advantages of cursive, which mostly boil down to how fast it can be written. But it really is either fast or neat - pick one. And what's the point of "neat", when any computer can do better?
Developing good handwriting skills is part of basic communication - after all, we still take notes in notebooks, write on whiteboards and scrawl on post-its.
For all things that you've listed, plain block letter handwriting without cursive is actually better at doing the job, especially if some other person is going to read it. The only exception may be writing down notes in a notebook for yourself, but that is itself an outdated mode - typing into a notebook (better yet, netbook for compactness) with a good text processor - such as LyX - is faster still, and you can easily correct notes afterwards, organize and re-organize as needed, quickly copy, and print out.
That meaning of the words in the mentioned document has been stretched so much that it is irrelevant today as well.
When I sign those silly credit card receipts I just scribble, I don't even bother trying to form anything even close to letters. I've never signed the back of a credit card, because no one looks (and now a days you rarely hand the card to anyone, you slide it yourself). No one has ever commented on my scribble.
I do make some effort on documents I consider important. Although I can't even remember the last time I signed something I considered important.
http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/
Does this count?
xkcd is not in the sudoers file. This incident will be reported.
My mother was forced to change to right handed writing and they made her practice - the result: beautiful script that was completely unreadable. They tried to make me change as well, but I wasn't having anything of it. Being left handed, cursive was more effort that was it was worth, so I developed a quite legible block print (incidentally, taking after my right handed father, who was an engineer). In short, penmanship is a Medieval art in a modern world.
"Look at it, a 5 year old could forge my 'signature', clearly it can't be used to legally distinguish me."
You could argue it like that?
We ought to have done with it and just make everyone learn shorthand.
I have arthritis in my hands, so it is difficult for me to reproduce a signature consistently. Over the years mine has degenerated into little more than a wavy line, but it doesn't seem to cause any problems.
It was a bit of an issue back when you had to sign things when paying on credit card, but it's all Chip and Pin now.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everyone's on about signatures, but forgetting the hand-written note. I still use the old fashioned method of getting a note card and writing a thank you note by hand, often utilizing cursive (actually my handwriting is a mixture of cursive and block letters for speed) to do so. Thank you notes get written anytime someone sends me a gift. I wrote my most recent one to my parents and dropped it in a mailbox just over a week ago after they sent me a check for my birthday. The rule in my household growing up was we had to write Thank Yous prior to cashing any checks from our grandparents.
I fully intend to make sure this etiquette does not die with my generation. My children will learn to write thank yous. It's the polite thing to do.
this seems to be a pure US national discussion to me, like to the French poster from above.
I work in a German IT company.
We use handwriting to take notes during meetings, write on whiteboards, design concepts on paper and so on. I find it valuable to write fast and readable when taking notes during meetings and presentations, else you may miss something important. I use handwriting daily, and so does everybody else. I wonder why some of the posters above say that they haven't written anything else but their names by hand for a long time. I'm sure it's possible, but forcing yourself to use a PC for every note seems to be quite inefficient to me, mostly because keyboards are good for typing pure text, but when it comes to little drawings it get's difficult. Tablet PCs maybe could solve it technically, but compare their price with that of a piece of paper; too big upfront investment for me to go that way.
On cursive vs printing: we all learn cursive in school and use it permanently there, it's well standardized. Everybody I know over here continues to use cursive handwriting after school. I don't know any German colleague using printing letters for handwritten notes. Printing letters are used e.g. for headings on whiteboards etc. The cursive writing of some is quite ugly and unreadable to anybody else, but they don't care. Daily cursive writing and calligraphy are considered to be two completely different things.
I learnt a little short hand, that's standardized in Germany, too, (not having the choice of different incompatible methods like in English). Took me about 2 hours to get the basics, the rest is learning by doing and daily practice. No big deal, but much faster than cursive or printing. It's not at all popular anymore however, only very few use it.
I often work with US colleagues and know that most of them print and don't write cursive. My impression is that their writing speed is considerably slower on average. Maybe that's a reason why more of them tend to use notebooks to take notes during meetings; that's not popular over here.
With our Japanese and Chinese colleagues, handwriting on paper rules, too. The speed advantage of cursive hanzi is obvious, but I wonder what's the current trend in China: do young Chinese today use cursive writing as much as their parents do?
Students these days don't even learn how to cut their own quills anymore, their knowledge of Latin is practically non existent, and many of them can't even recite the old testament from memory. Kids are just not adequately prepared for the universities of the late 18th century this way.
Now on a more serious note: cursive handwriting is practically illegible. When done with care, it can look classy, but it's difficult to read, and just not serious or business-like. In this day and age, handwriting is for post-it notes, not for anything formal. If you want others to read your handwriting, use print. It you enjoy cursive handwriting, join a calligraphy class.
I'm left-handed. In school, I found that my writing tended to become illegible rather quickly, because of having to `push' rather than `pull' across the paper.
One day, I was browsing in a bookshop when I noticed a facsimile of some of Leonardo da Vinci's notes. Now, everyone knows that he wrote his personal notes backwards, and writing backwards is often a sign of left-handedness. And since da Vinci hacked on just about everything else going in Renaissance Italy, I wondered whether he might have hacked his own handwriting for ease of use. And he must have had to write to other people occasionally --- he couldn't ALWAYS have written backwards.
So I bought the book and with a mirror and a magnifying-glass figured out how he formed his letters. And I found that actually, his handwriting is very easy when writing left-to-right. I think that most of the ease comes from replacing difficult `pushed' curves with straight lines wherever possible. For example, using a small capital N rather than n, using a small captial A rather than a, forming g like a modern cursive z, and so on. Other improvements appear to have been made for speed, such as not dotting i or j. Other decisions appear to have been made to slow the hand down briefly but regularly; for example, writing capitals large, and with curves.
So I adopted his ways of forming letters, and found that I could write quicker, more fluidly, and without much of the hand-cramp from which I used to suffer. A decade later, I still use his handwriting.
Especially on /.?
50 replies on how a paraplegic rat regained the function in its legs, and 250 replies on how cursive writing is a fading skill. Really -- slashdot?
Does that mean that a story about paraplegic rats' fading skill of cursive writing with their legs would evoke 12500 replies?
Ezekiel 23:20
Having lived through poverty and desperation, Literacy skills are based upon your ability, mentally to accept certain things. If you fail you fail, I cannot stress this enough, however some people will look at this post who have never picked up a dictionary. My ex-wife graduated from Oxford University with a degree in English Language & Literature. I have a better IQ than her, but my IQ is exceptionally better than her's hence ex-wife. She was a very challenging individual and good in bed, but I was better. I have spoken to her since our split a number of years ago and she wants to initiate a relationship again as she is unhappy. I tell you what, I am happy on my own without her baggage.
All cows eat grass!
The only relevant use of cursive writing is to send Grandma a letter because she doesn't have or use a computer and now that Obama wants death panels to decide her "end of life" treatment she won't be around much longer so years of training to write her a letter are a futile exercise.
Regular "Print" style is more than adequate.
- A Frog in a pond utters an azure cry. -
Especially if there's only one lion. To reproduce, you need TWO lions. Opposite sexes helps too...
Your next generation won't know how to write ;-) Cool! On a fast track to becoming a country of uneducated bumble fucks! The only problem I have is the inheritor of the king's crown is China - a communist dictatorship to which things like freedoms and human rights mean nothing. Crap!! Learn to write you bloody fools...
A signature is a totally ridiculous thing to base a legal agreement on...
Whenever i'm expected to sign anything, i just make a random mark, different every time... Noone has ever said anything.
It is also extremely common for people to sign things on behalf of others (with their full knowledge and consent)... The idea of using a signature to verify anything is entirely pointless, and nothing more than a minor inconvenience (minor since anyone can make an arbitrary mark to get round the inconvenience).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Next thing you know, they'll be selling desks without inkwells!
Well, I for one welcome the government paying a premium for "Cursive readers" due to all the legal records still kept that are recorded in cursive.
The sooner handwriting dies, the better...
I had to fill out a very long form by hand last week, and my hand still hurts from doing so. Not only that, but there is a high chance the form will be returned or queried because they cannot read some or all of it.
It would have been much simpler, not to mention quicker and cheaper, to fill out this form online...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
but nothing will replace Gothic Littera Bastarde
Back in my day, we used to carve writings into our walls.
A mighty "ugh!" to you all.
I noticed over the last few years that my handwriting was deteriorating as I increasingly used the computer to type up notes and produce documents. Typing is much faster and produces a neater product. But away from the computer I found my handwritten notes were messy and sometimes unreadable unless I printed the letters. I grew into the habit of printing, but that was slower.
I decided to do something about it. I thought back to school days and the pens I used back then and so bought a simple fountain pen and began to use that. I also made myself use cursive writing rather than printing. The result is that I take notes far faster and more accurately now than I did a short while back and I can be productive both with and away from the computer.
It is nothing to do with wanting to retain quaint old skills. It is everything to do with possessing a wide range of useful skills which can be used in a variety of situations. Short hand would be even better. Sadly, I don't have the time or discipline to learn it.
With cursive seemingly disappearing faster than the legal system can keep up with it, how do all of today's kids expect to sign documents?
I doubt digital signatures will be valid by the time they are at an age of majority, considering the snail's pace of the legal system. And last I checked you can't print your signature (lest it be trivially forged)
I was "taught" to write in cursive. I printed then, and I print today. The entire experience was highly unpleasant, not useful, and caused many a painful hour for both myself and my instructors. I'm a 12 on the Dilbert scale and making the loops and swirls just about drove me crazy and did absolutely -nothing- else.
That said, being able to actually write using your hand and a writing implement is still a useful skill. Sometimes there just isn't a keyboard handy, and when someone sets off the nuke in the upper atmosphere creating an EMP that turns our devices to paperwieghts, the ability to write will be more useful again. It's not a matter of if, but when it happens.
Your comparison stinks.
I can see why we might learn what an abacus is and was then never need to think about it again. Cursive writing is not in the same category (yet).
Most of us spend time making notes away from the keyboard in our everyday lives. In those circumstances cursive writing comes in to it's own for speed and clarity.
When a computer is to hand type; If there is no computer available, write - cursively, if you have the skill.
I've got nine computers and use them throughout the day, but I also have noticeboards and notepads. They all serve a purpose. Cursive writing is quicker than printing. If you can't use it, then you lack a useful skill. Don't boast about it.
I think we need to make sure cursive does not die out. When we are without power, it may prove useful. Also how will we be able to read the letters of our ancestors?
I think we need to make sure Cuneiform does not die out. When all we have is clay, it may prove useful.
I think we need to make sure Sanskrit does not die out. We may need a to write with a larger alphabet than we currently use.
I also think we need to keep buggy whips, rotary phones, VCR's, 8-track and large microwave ovens around as well.
We should also make our own thread, chew animal hides to make our clothing and render tallow to make candles.
vi +
Outside of signing one's name to a check, I think that cursive writing has lost all practical value. Most cursive looks like chicken scratching and adds to the amount of time that it takes to convey the message. Look at doctor's writing for an example. I've actually had the pharmacy call the doctor back to find out what the prescription was for because all they could read was the doc's name.
I also have a PC tech over 40, a good 10 years plus over my age, and she only writes in cursive. It isn't bad like a doctor, but I can only read every 3rd word, and I'm always asking her questions like, "is this an E or a C." I also keep sending her back to just send me an email with what she needs done, since she thinks a posted note on the pile of papers on my desk will stand out versus an email that I can literally copy and paste the issue in to a search. Yeah, I might be lazy, but when speed and accuracy are a part of the job, it disqualifies cursive, no matter what they said in school.
Cursive writing, as we know it, is an artifact of now mostly gone writing technologies. The fountain pen, dip pen, and even split-nib quill, had certain technical limitations. For an even line, you needed to avoid unnecessary starts and stops. These pens also wrote almost entirely with downstrokes.
If you have cursive training deep in your subconscious, take out a fountain pen and start writing for a few minutes. Cursive is almost inevitable. And, it's a lot of fun. But, without the technical restriction, it's not necessarily a natural development.
People sign their names in distinctive ways, making it possible to authenticate a document by comparing it to past signatures. At a glance, I can identify my dad, wife, boss and several of my colleague's signature.
In today's society where we are more anonymous and the people we deal with every day have no interest in us as an individual, so it is less effective. But if you interact with a group of people on paper long enough, you recognize signatures. Now we trust a computer to assert identity based on a person's knowledge of a 6-10 character key combination. Doesn't sound like progress to me.
Back in the day, a signature was enough, and a high-value document was "secured" by a signature authenticated by a notary stamp.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Wait ... you still OWN a check-book... ?
I mean, I knew American banks were behind the times but sheez...
I have a current account with full overdraft facility, it is everything your "check account" is, in fact considering I'm a gold-card customer - it's possibly quite a bit more - but it doesn't come with a check-book unless you specifically ask for one (which only old people do).
It comes with a gold card, which happens to work everywhere a credit card does, but unlike a credit card talks directly to my current account, I can spend into overdraft if I need to (as with checks), I can draw cash at an ATM (which checks cannot do) - these days, all check accounts have to come with an accompanying ATM card anyway - banks here in my third-world home country (where they are notorious for lack of competition and high prices) - nevertheless figured out a long time ago that, that being the case- the check-book is now superfluous.
Hardly any shops will accept them anymore because check-fraud is just way too easy - in short... of your examples for why I should concern myself with an outdated technology which as a left-dominant ambextrous person I never did master well (I started simply ignoring the teachers and writing block-letters about halfway through high-school, accepting the mark-downs - within a month they gave me permission to do it on the grounds that they couldn't keep failing an A-student or their own jobs were on the line)... writing is all but an archaic tech now - if cellphone keypads weren't so cumbersome, I wouldn't even own a pocket notebook anymore and that will change - soon... this is a good thing(tm) - if anything it will reduce the literacy barrier and allow more people to actually be able to read and write, even if they don't do it with pens.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
"Wheit in the louse of human euents, it becomw necfsaiy foi oneheople to difsobve Ihe hobtical bands which have connected Ihem with anothei, and to afsume amoung thenoweis ofIhe eaith Ihe fehaiate and equal fIaIion to which the Jaws of Valuie and of Vaturies entille them a decent reshectto the ohinions of mankind ieqwies Ihat Ihey fhould declauie Ihe caufes which imhel Ihem tothe fehaiation . __________"
And so A Nation, is born.
May the Maths Be with you!
But what will I do with my pen collection?
I wouldn't hire someone who's handwriting I couldn't read - I personally prefer cursive, but the important thing is just that it is legible.
My signatures tend to look very different from one another depending on many factors (how rushed I am, how tired I am, etc). The biggest change I saw was when we closed on our house. I must have signed my name about a hundred times. And no, I'm not exaggerating. The first signature said "Jason Levine" quite clearly. The last signature said something like "J__o_ L__i__e." If you took my first and last signatures and compared them, most people would think that they were written by different people.
And even if handwriting experts could verify that my signatures were all done by me, how many handwriting experts are employed as bank tellers (processing the checks I sign) or as grocery store clerks (glancing for a millisecond at the signed receipt). And don't even get me started on those electronic signature tablets that turn my name into "J[illegible scribble] L[illegible scribble]."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
it certainly doesn't have to be externally legible.
Actually, I have come across at least one US government form that requires a 'legible signature'. For even more fun, try calling their help-line to find out what that means.
I remember writing back in the pre-computer days. (For me, early 1980's.) I hated it. First of all, I'm left handed so I'd always wind up with smeared ink on the page and on my hand. Secondly, my pen could never keep up with my brain. So I'd have to slow down thinking to put it all on the page. Third, if I wanted to move a word, sentence, or paragraph, I needed to cross out (messily) the offending sections and rewrite them. Alternatively, I would need to make some kind of note to myself (e.g. arrows) and then rewrite the entire page. In short, writing a paper was a horrendous experience.
Then I got my first computer. All of a sudden, I had no ink stains, I could type much faster (and this was back in my "hunt and peck" days), and moving words/sentences/paragraphs was a breeze.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Tangentially, I haven't used long division since learning it in primary school ~20 years ago, even with all my courses from then to university being math / science based -- does anybody use it?
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
As we've seen recently, front line staff are frequently accountable for the number of blank forms filled, not the quality of what or who does the filling. At the retail level, signature fraud on a transaction is not the cashier's problem, it's their supervisor's. And then it's the problem of the merchant account provider. And then the clearing house, etc. There's not really much in there to protect the end user.
There are 1.1... kinds of people.
I laughed...then considered what my sig looks like after working in a school where I had to pump out dozens of signatures a day. It started as my name, then became two initials with scribbles after them, then, as you said, a series of scrawled loops.
I think the next step in its evolution is to get rid of the pesky loops, and just go with a squiggly line.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
I'm sure the students would argue that they don't need to learn algebra or even calculus. Why spend years learning mathematics when you can just have Maxima or Mathematica give you the answer....
No, this change is coming directly from the administration. Probably from people who don't know how to write themselves.
To paraphrase the The Curse of the Flying Hellfish - not everyone can sign with an X.
Bart's lack of knowledge of cursive writing or "script" put him in the remedial class with that Canadian kid.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I don't understand why we even bother with signatures, anymore? Apparently, the only thing standing between me, and someone doing crap in my name, is them scrawling a signature which nobody is ever going to bother to check to see that it's legitimate, until it's far too late. The other problem is, I'm not even terribly consistent with how my signature looks. I've just never had the fine muscle control to get a very consistent signature, so I'd have a terrible time proving in court that any signature which looks remotely similar to mine, *isn't* mine.
Add to that the fact that, nowadays, most signatures are 'collected' on electronic signature pads, which I always find awkward to use (usually they are angled up at a funny angle to write on, and often times the calibration on them is so bad that the actual pixels which 'light up' are 1/4 inch away from where they stylus is actually touching the screen), and my signature comes out looking like *trash* on those signature pads. So, how am I supposed to prove that *this* sample of trash *isn't* my signature, but that sample of trash *is*?
There's also the problem that even if the signature comes out decently on the digital signature pad, someone could potentially snag a copy of the digital signature from the database, and use it somewhere else.
Signatures just strike me as completely useless.
Yes, cursive should die. There is no point, it is about as relevant as how to use a fountain pen and how to do Calligraphy. Kids should be taught how to print proper letters so they can communicate without any digital gadgets like phones, pda's, IMs and email. They should also be taught grammar and spelling so they don't sound like idiots to people over 30 (or grammar nazis on the intertubes).
But cursive? Besides it being useless, different schools within the same COUNTY in my state can't agree on the SAME STYLE of cursive. I think it's continued existence is just to satisfy tenured English teachers who haven't retired yet.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
In reality, studies have shown that most adults who learned the cursive script adapt it to their own style. Most people who still write long-hand write with a combination of cursive and printed block letters (e.g. a block letter "A" followed by cursive script). To me, the issue is not the demise of cursive per se, but rather the decline of legible handwriting, cursive or block letters, as a whole.
My eldest child is almost 16, and as each has gone through their elementary years, teachers have de-emphisized fine motor development and good penmanship. I have two children, in particular, who write in a barely legible chicken scratch (which is sometimes even unreadable to them). While many comments note that keyboarding and online form completion is on the rise, we're not there yet, and there will always likely be some situations when handwritten language skills will be necessary.
First and foremost, since we have not completed the transition to a paperless society yet, there are still many examples of forms that need to be filled in manually, from job applications to travel expense reimbursements. Join a large civic organization, and they might yet require you to fill out an application that makes copies in triplicate, for various offices or levels of the organization. Hit someone's car in a parking lot? You leave a handwritten note since most cars don't have the driver's eddress emblazoned on the sides (and don't get started on crappy handwriting keeping you from needing to pay for the damages--yeah, you left the note but nobobody called...).
Then there's the scenario most people forget about: when the power goes out. Sure, laptops and portable devices will have battery life, but they won't last indefinately. Also, have you ever been in a restaurant or a retail store when the power went out? What happened? Likely one of two things happened (if it lasted more than a few moments): they either asked everyone to leave their merchandise and leave the store, or they manually tallied orderd by writing down the items and totalling the purchase. I worked retail for years, and we woudl always write out physical slips if we lost power. These were later entered into the POS system once power was restored. It took longer, but it was better than losing all sales during those hours.
In the end, I don't care if my kids can write only block letters or cursive script, but I do want them to be able to write legibly. I also believe they should be getting regular instruction in touch-typing, even in the earliest grades (where games would teach the keyboard layout). [On a related note, if we are going to teach touch typing, perhaps it's time to reconsider returning to the DVORAK layout.] Keyboarding skills are absolutely necessary for the future, but kids should still know how to write things out on paper for those times when technology is not an option.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I used to sign with an "X", but someone from Alabama accused me of forgery.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I own a checkbook. I write checks to the guy who mows my lawn, and I wrote a check to friend for a birthday present. I probably write less than a dozen checks for the whole year, but they're not dead yet.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
"Anyway this article doesn't really ask any interesting questions, doesn't cite any interesting research. It's less valuable than water-cooler talk."
-- That's because it's from the Times..
MOD FLAMEBAIT/TROLL please!
Well, I dont rmemeber anyone caring when I sounded the alarm that stone tablet carving was a fading art!
HA - you see where you guys are now.
There's more to cursive than simply writing rapidly. Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
Proper masturbatory technique also requires practice and discipline. Most people, however, are happy to suffice with whatever gets the job done and see no need for schools to correct their behavior.
Less than a dozen a year... that equates to less than one a month... sounds as close to dead as make no difference to me.
None of the samples you showed could not have been done by bank-transfer or cash for probably less hassle.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
A VERY poor one. It's not really that hard to duplicate my signature, especially if the forger has been drinking.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
I've heard the main use of a signature isn't to prove if it's you or not, but to prove intent in cases of fraud. It's one thing for a crook to say he found a credit card and put it in his wallet and then accidentally grabbed the wrong one while paying, but it's really hard to explain away "... and then I accidentally signed someone else's name on the slip."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
No no no. If it was handwritten in cursive and his writing looks anything like mine, it'd look like:
Uuin uniuuwln wn, uiwum iu Ounu uwvunm oulnny.
I took drafting in high school in pre-graphics-computer days. There was an emphasis on precise block printing in those classes. I knew of some hiring managers in blue collar jobs that would not hire people who had sloppy printing on job applications because that meant they hadnt mastered drafting.
Cursive is usually less readable than print because people slip into it when they are in a hurry. I find that when writing cursive, I can't read it myself if I look at it more than a couple of days later. That's why I've given up on cursive entirely and write in print. It's possible to write passably fast in print and most importantly it's possible to read hastily written print most of the time. Printing forces you to take at least enough time on each letter that it can be deciphered. In cursive, I find myself skipping the entire middle of a lot of words, reducing them to wavy lines that look like a dying patient's heartbeat readout. Once I tried to teach myself shorthand. Not possible for me. I will never learn that even though it sounds enticing, I could just never ever do it.
However, you need to be able to read cursive. You will be presented with legible cursive papers in life, and be ridiculed if you can't read them.
But as long as you can print at a highish rate of speed in a manner that people can read, you will be able to take notes, and do hand written essays. Those are the only things you will ever need handwriting for.
...
My friend lives in another state. Mailing cash isn't a good idea. And if the mow guy comes when I'm home, I'll pay in cash, but often that doesn't happen. And neither of them are set up for "bank transfers" (I don't think my friend even has a bank account).
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Removing yet another method method for encouraging the development of discipline from schools is only furthering trends to dismantle education and teach children the path of least resistance at every available turn.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
In my country (Poland), legal documents like acts prepared by a notary are required to have a "readable signature", which means your real name hand written legibly. Technically, that means you could sign with block letters if you like, but they have to be able to read your name.
My signature within the bank is my signature. The signature on all of my debit / credit cards is CHECK I.D. written with a permanent marker.
My driving license has a photograph, and a copy of my signature on it (UK license) so they can verify it's me. Nobody else can use the cards by signing ("Uhhh the chip doesn't work, can I sign?" is a common scam).
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
This doesn't speak highly of your history education. The terms you've listed were accepted as correctly spelled for the period. In addition, what you've perceived as a capital "H" is actually a capital "A." Note the vertical slash through the crossbar; the heading is written in a different script style.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
I believe you need to study accepted spelling for the period.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Fat lot of good proper penmanship did them--they couldn't even spell "Hmerica" or "necefsary" correctly. :-)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
You're assuming there will still be printed forms in 20 years. That's the mistaken conclusion. Everything will be online, and your digital identity will be verified, so there will be no need for anything more of a 'signature'.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
In France everyone still writes cursive. Hello America meet the rest of the world
That's an interesting question, but not really an argument against the death of cursive.
I can create quite attractive and legible cursive hand writing, but it is -slow- compared to block printing. When I block print notes, I do find myself falling into a half-block half-cursive style as you describe, but I make an effort to avoid that as much as possible. When I actually fall into full-cursive while writing notes, the results are often hard for ME to read later.
Clean block printing is IMHO going to be more readable to more people as the population continues to abandon cursive. And, it can be nearly as fast as cursive so it's fine for rare note-taking on paper.
I am not some recent product of the public school system. I'm an old fogy who went to Catholic school and was taught Palmer Method by nasty ruler-wielding nuns. I'd rather not have my children wasting any of their limited school time learning cursive.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Throughout all those years, I never questioned the value or the utility of what I was learning...
Wow, what a great way to go through life.
When I purchased a home, I was informed in no uncertain terms by the lawyer handling the transaction that my legal signature was first, middle and last name written out in full. I don't know what he would have done had I printed instead of tried to fake cursive. (I've forgotten most cursive capital letters).
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
The importance of cursive practice is in the wonderfully organizing effect it has on the brain.
(true of any language). The importance is one of many brain effects discussed in the book
"The Brain Than Changes Itself" by Doidge.
It's on page 41. The cursive practice changes your brain.
No, I have no financial interest in the book...
It's not about the writing itself, it's about the brain.
The handwriting experts don't come into play until someone alleges fraud and your case goes to court. The handwriting expert would be used as an expert witness.
I have never been called on to use cursive script from grade 8 onwards... I graduated back in 92.
For the last 20 years or so they've pretty much only been teaching it so that we'll be able to read it.
Want to know the best way to discourage kids from engaging in practice and discipline? Try to make them do repetitive tasks to develop a skill that even a 3rd grader recognizes as archaic and inconsequential when compared to other subjects. I also remembered being annoyed that I was getting Cs in Handwriting while getting As in the other subjects (obviously your grades in 3rd/4th grade don't matter not, but at the time it was important to me).
Steal my band's record! Seriously,
If you're going to teach kids practice and discipline, wouldn't it be a good idea to teach them a useful skill at the same time? Learning to juggle requires practice and discipline and I don't see anyone advocating mandatory juggling classes.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Why would someone want to learn an archaic form of spelling that is no longer in use?
I understand its use if you are studying period documents but unless one has a genuine interest in such things its simply a waste of time.
Indeed. This signature of Kurt Vonnegut featured an illustration of his own rectum. Perhaps the best signature in the history of all literature. I'm not sure if that qualifies as cursive.
... Do you hunt and kill and butcher all of your own food? Do you make and can all of your own fruits and vegetables and preserves? Do you skin and tan your own leather clothing? Do you use kerosene lamps? Do you own a horse instead of a car for transportation?
Yes,yes,yes (ich liebe meine lederhosen), no... I use whale blubber, thankyouverymuch, and no, pack llamas are much more efficient.
What about short-hand? Morse code? Olde English?
I chisel my notes into stone tablets, or if Im in a hurry, charcoal on my cave's walls works well
Tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
Signatures are for two purposes, identity and "The intention (will) of an individual with regard to that document". 95% of the things you sign are for the second reason. Making sure you intend a legal agreement seems perfectly reasonable. It's the face that you only think about the identity that's ridiculous. An X is perfectly fine most places and I've used it on faulty signature pads.
If his signature is an illegible scrawl he wouldn't have to sign the true cardholder's name.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
The LSAT (and I presume some other, similar tests) requires cursive for the essay portion of the test.
So if those kids ever want to go to law school, they need to learn cursive.
I have taken some blue-book exams, and considering their structure [read: time limits] and my knowledge or lack thereof of the material, even the small speed boost I got form writing cursive came in handy for getting *some more* information out to the professor.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
The two aren't related. Cursive reduces fatigue and improves fountain pen performance due to the same property: reducing the number of times the pen must be lifted from the paper. Has nothing to do with pen pressure.
@shutdown
"Neither pen, quill, nor brush go back "millennia"."
Perhaps you should do a bit of research before you make ridiculous pronouncements about the history of graphic communication.
I was indicating progressive technologies of writing instruments. Obviously pens do not go back millennia - they are a recent technology in western written communication that mostly replaced artificial and actual quills which mostly replaced brushes, etc.
However the letter forms of the ancient Greeks and Romans (yes the ones that are chiseled in stone) are brush forms (note the serifs and stressed strokes.) At that time most signs were painted (with a brush.) When letter forms were written in stone they were first painted, then the painted letter forms were chiseled. The same is true in Asia where brushes are still used quite a bit and the brushed characters go back uninterrupted for millennia.
Interestingly modern Chinese characters, long influenced by the use of the brush, evolved from forms that were previously evolved from the use of quills. Unlike western quills, Chinese quills were cut square and wrote without the stress inherent in western quills (like Rapidograph pens) producing a mono weight character. Even Phoenician letters and Egyptian Hieroglyphics evolved from the use of brushes.
Clearly your education is lacking since you appear to have never heard of Google or Wikipedia, so I assume that terms like serif, stroke stress, and letter form are lost on you anyway.
-- My apologies if the above facts contain any opinions, or vice versa! --
I sit here, and I watch one element of earlier human civilisation after another, slowly die. Every time it happens, there is always some ignorant, barbaric, bombastic American who revels in his own supposed intelligence and sophistication as he cheers the continued cultural erradication on.
Yet nobody sees it. Nobody, apparently, can imagine a time when the only thing left, will be the dark blue and steel grey of utterly sterile fascism.
Everything is being removed, one small piece at a time. From the environment, from human knowledge. It always looks so innocuous, so harmless. The spectators cheer that society is being made more efficient, by having less irrelevance, less redundancy.
This is how Hitler will ultimately win. Perhaps 70 years after his death, perhaps 200. The precise date doesn't really matter.
The point is, that these days, the fascists have learned. Their victory will not come through a series of rapid, bold assaults. That is far too blatant, far too visible; and it would be repelled, even now.
No. It is done slowly, quietly, delicately...inevitably. One small piece is removed, and then another, and another...and it is never done so rapidly, so overtly, that it is seen for what it truly is. This way, it is done in such a manner that the spectators, the atheists, those who revel in their own intelligence; they will not see it.
Developing good handwriting skills takes practice and discipline, concepts I find grossly underrepresented in modern education.
The essence of vast majority of arguments against teaching cursive... Admit it, this is the real reason why cursive is "irrelevant" - students won't have the discipline to learn it, and teachers won't be able to enforce it.
Let's get rid of art and other "useless" subjects that only a small minority will need directly while we're at it, too (or did we already?)
Thanks for your correction. Let me reformulate the question, then: how are your brush calligraphy skills?
Sure, when looking at original copies of historical documents you'll have to learn their writing style. Just looking at that copy, to make sense of it, you'll have to know that internal s's are written to look more like modern f's than s. But this is nothing new, the greater barrier than puzzling out the writing style is most important historical documents aren't even written in English. So if you can handle learning French or Latin or Hebrew in order to study history, I think you can also handle learning how to read cursive script.
Really you can get these same skills learning to play an instrument.
Which would you rather do?
love is just extroverted narcissism
"I am not sure students have a sense of any reason why they should vest their time and effort in writing a message out manually when it can be sent electronically in seconds."
Take away all of their devices that they shouldn't have and watch the handwriting begin anew.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
710 messages, so nobody will read this, but yes, studies showed that actually writing words by hand (not necessarily cursive) does contribute heavily to word ability.
Whether a same or similar thing will happen with "typing mostly" remains to be seen. It's quite an experiment.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
No. The lines hold legal meaning, and have nothing to do with the way in which one writes on those lines.
"Print name here" means "indicate the person to whom this form is pertinent"
"sign name here" means "indicate that you agree to these terms and make a sign that verifies your identity"
For example, If someone is being all nice and ritzy and filling out a form for me (someone selling me a car, insurance, etc.,) they can write my name on the "print your name" line. But only I can sign on the "sign your name" line. It has nothing to do with the font that is used on those lines.
I hate cursive. I've never been able to write it "properly" and it takes me three times as long to read the stuff. (This might have to do with me being left-handed, I don't know.) I'm constantly talking about what a waste of time cursive is in writing when computers print block letters and so do I.
My kids are now in second and fourth grades. The fourth grader argues the same - he's been on computers for several years and already uses Tux Type to learn typing.
I hope cursive goes the way of Latin.
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
Instead of cursive writing, they should be teaching school kids keyboarding, which is something they will use in real life.
Pretty good actually. I studied Chinese in Taiwan and brush calligraphy is still taught throughout Asia. They see it as as an important part of the culture and essential to its continued good health. I have also done some western calligraphy. It's impossible to understand or create credible fonts if you have not studied calligraphy.
As I alluded to in my earlier post, here in the US schools are eliminating anything that has to do with art, music, performance, or anything that is not easily quantifiable and replacing it with "relevant" curricula, like "Powerpoint Presentation."
How are your Powerpoint skills? (Not nearly as good as they could be if you haven't studied story telling. )
-- My apologies if the above facts contain any opinions, or vice versa! --
I did both in school. It's not an either/or proposition. Since you mentioned it, music programs are also getting the axe across the country, a trend I strongly disagree with.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
As a person who knows cursive and shorthand, I think you are all mentally deficient. Of course students should still be required to learn and use cursive writing in school.
A big part of developing discipline is learning to do things that you don't consider important. I strongly disagree with your assessment of cursive practice being inconsequential; the development in fine motor skills alone makes it seem worthwhile. That aside, good penmanship is still a trait that is widely respected among professionals.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Cursive practice develops fine motor skills and produces individuals capable of decent penmanship, a trait that is respected among professionals. As far as discipline goes, this is just part of a larger trend toward teaching kids that they don't have to do something if they don't fully understand its importance. That doesn't fly in the professional working world. I suppose is your life's aspirations are to flip burgers this would be of little consequence.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
You don't need to learn an archaic spelling system, unless you're going to criticize the spelling of a period document instead of sticking to the primary point of discussion.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Cursive practice develops fine motor skills and produces individuals capable of decent penmanship, a trait that is respected among professionals.
What professionals communicate by handwritten letters anymore? Besides, real professionals appreciate competence in their profession above all else.
As far as discipline goes, this is just part of a larger trend toward teaching kids that they don't have to do something if they don't fully understand its importance.
Learning to do things that you don't fully understand the importance of is important, yes. However, if you learn later in life that the skill is completely unimportant (like cursive), you will tend to think that other skills that aren't of obvious important are also completely unimportant. This does not help kids develop discipline. Kids trust in their teachers that what they are learning is important. Violate that trust too much and they won't learn at all.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
wile_e_wonka wrote:
Concerning roman numerals, I borrowed a video from the library called "The Story Of 1." It featured Terry Jones of Monty Python and told the story of how the number 1 developed into its current form (at different points in history it was a scratch on a stick, a small token, a mark on a clay envelope, a ruler, a roman numeral I, and the current hindu-arabic "1" and the digital "1"). Besides being informative, it is a very funny video.
Per that video, roman numerals weren't used for calculations. People would do their calculations on a counting board (an early version of the abacus), and then record the final result in roman numerals.
A legal signature doesn't need to be anything, though. It doesn't even have to be your name, for goodness sake (mine, for the longest time, was not my name at all, in fact) and it certainly doesn't have to be externally legible.
You're so self-important that a symbol is reserved for you? Work in the medical industry by any chance?
It's a good way to separate the upper class from the lower class. Not everyone from a council estate wears a tracksuit so sometimes they can filter into areas where they shouldn't be.
This is nothing new; you can go back centuries and look at historical peoples' signatures, and see that many of them are not very legible. You might make out the first character or so in each name, and the rest is just a scribble.
Hell, you don't even need to go back in history to see that. Look at the signatures of current heads of state (Wikipedia handily has images of signatures in the articles of most politicians). Barack Obama and Stephen Harper both have such signatures, and Gordon Brown's hardly looks anything like his name. Thorbjorn Jagland's (President of the Sorting in Norway) signature is even worse.
It's a sign of laziness.
Yeah, first they came for cursive, and I didn't write in cursive, so I didn't say anything. Dude, seriously. Overwrought much? Writing systems have managed to change quite a few times over the course of history, but I'm pretty sure that didn't have anything to do with the rise of fascism. But I'm just a barbaric American, so what the hell do I know.
A symbol? What are you talking about?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
IMHO we are talking about basic skills which have to do with culture and also with engagement in it. It also has much more individuality than writing in block letters.
Maybe I'm an anachronist but I beleive that handwriting does tell you something about the personality involved ans also has a much more personal touch.
Even spelling can be taught via writing on a computer and using the spell checker.
Eye no it wats a suck cess four me! Eye owl wise spill core wrecked.
Free Martian Whores!
It amazes me that nobody has mentioned how editing impacts this topic. A nicely hand written document may be impressive, but how many of us can actually finish a lengthy document in cursive without wishing we had said something a little differently? A hand-written letter to a friend is infinitely more personal than one from a printer, but here again we may have mis-spelled words and/or grammatical constructs that we may wish we had caught before laying our pen to the paper. The point I'm making is that even for those times when, for whatever reason, we want to produce a hand-written document, it would behoove us to use a word processor or text editor initially for the sake of checking our spelling and editing for proper grammar and context. Print it out or read it directly from the screen, transcribing in long hand to the paper.
Heard any good sigs lately?
Way back when, I started my professional working life as a draftsman and had beautiful handwriting, either cursive or lettering. My signature was copperplate.
Enter the '89 stockmarket crash, several years of confusion, a change of professions to work in the computer industry, first as an office manager for a computer reseller. I used to sign multiple purchase orders and delivery dockets daily. All office correspondence was computer generated.
Over a single year my signature declined to an illegible scrawl - the bank asked me 3 times over the course of the year to lodge a new signature specimen for my checking account.
These days if I really concentrate I can manage an ok script, but as a geenral rule, my handwriting is appalling - by my standards anyway.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Feh. I don't care. I'll just stick with my REcursive writing. It's more useful for geeks like me anyway.
1.Netcraft confirms:In Soviet Russia all your base welcomes a beowolf cluster of CowboyNeal overlords. 2.? 3.Profit!!1!
Because computers can do a better job at printing, I urge you to consider the day when the same argument is proposed for spelling.
...so what will signatures look like in 20-30 years? Printed out? "Print name" and "Sign here" will look identical?
Are you seriously trying to make a valid argument? What does it matter what a persons signature looks like?
With the internet and digital signatures, do you really think people will be signing things in 20-30 years? Even now, people who sign a LOT, usually get a rubber stamp made.
If you want something unique & guarantee that that "mark" belongs to that person, a thumb print would work MUCH better!
If you haven-t read this, it's gold: http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/
Liked the grid...
I would submit that students have no idea what they should be learning, or why, or why it is important. They never have, and never will. THIS is one of the jobs of real educators -- also a dying breed, since our society wants more politically correct, "sensitive" educators.
Have you ever admired the beauty of someone's cursive and wished you could write like that? Some things in life are not "all about" convenience, and good handwriting skills is an example. As long is there is paper and pen, some will do this better than others.
Sadly, I have never had a really beautiful style -- though it is no fault of my teachers. Heck, I cannot read my own handwriting half the time, and age is making it worse. I envy those who can sit with pen in hand and write beautiful cursive, and I cannot but believe we are losing something that is very important for our own pleasure.
In short....no. I'm 45 and have been printing since I was in the fourth grade. Back then it was a big deal. I remember many meetings with school administration officials and my mom. Her point is the same as today. Why does it matter? He gets his information across clearly and legibly probably better than most. Eventually they relented as it was not a specifically graded area in the curriculum and essentially teacher preference. Writing is simply a means to relay information. It's one of many tools to do that; voice, typing, printing and skywriting for example. The particular type of tool chosen is dependent on the situation and preference of the writer. I don't know about you, but I'd hire someone with immaculate prining before someone with sloppy cursive any day.
~NavyWings Senior IT guy and no kidding rocket scientist....
Another overblown debate about a false choice. People tend to develop their own script/block hybrid. You need to learn the basics of cursive so you can develop some familiarity with writing continuous letterforms.
People who don't think it's important to be able to write fast and at length--have you never needed to take notes on paper? Do you take notes on a laptop while reading a book? (ugh.) What about exams--did your entire education consist of multiple choice tests? If I tried to fill my blue books with micro-printing--at high speed for two hours--my hand would fall off.
The comments above about Leonardo's handwriting were insightful. When you put some time into developing your own hand for extended writing, you stumble onto some of the same tricks he used: modified strokes to avoid 'pushing' and fatigue, enlarged caps and loops to rest the hand, abbreviated crossbars and blotted dots on ascenders to avoid having to return to complete the line, use of small caps in place of some undercase letterforms and vice versa, etc.
Handwriting is immensely personal. I've never understood how people make it into adulthood with Crayola penmanship and think nothing of it.
as long as sentence diagraming in English class gets dropped first. I write most of my notes in a kludgy mix of print and cursive as it is, but I have yet to find a use for all that time the english teacher made me spend diagraming out sentences.
Here I come to save the da... *thud*
I gotta get me a shorter cape.
Nope, they don't "give you pause". There was this guy who wrote anything he liked on the credit card bills. The only time he got stopped was when buying a very expensive TV (or a few of them actually) and he used NOT VALID as a signature. That raised a single eye-brow and he could not pay for the TV's that way. I presume though he wasn't what the sales people thought a risk.
I dispute that a cursive signature actually IS more personalized. Sure, if you're trying to print really neat block letters you're going to lose most of your unique markers, but that's not what "handwritten" means to most people. Non-cursive, non-block handwriting, which is what most people write in, has just as many personal touches as cursive.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I bet you can recognize their name written (not cursive) in their own hand, too, though.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
So you sign using the same ineligible scrawl you usually do with your own cards, the cashier won't check and the transaction will complete just fine, and you can still try to claim you used the wrong card by accident.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!