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.'"
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.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/09/07/26/1922239/26-Years-Old-and-Cant-Write-In-Cursive?from=rss
You can't take the sky from me.
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.
I know many people, from my great-grandfather's era up to mine, that were taught cursive handwriting in private schools. Have you got a source to substantiate your claim?
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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
The thing with "doesn't matter to me" is that opinion on cursive writing is always going to be polarised. On a forum like Slashdot there's usually no point even raising the issue. The forum is largely populated with philistines who couldn't give a fuck about anything as individual as handwriting. OK, I guess I made my own position clear enough in the last sentence. Yes, I still write with a fountain-pen (and sometimes even a quill) on paper in addition to using a keyboard. There is still a lot to be said for a low-tech approach that is not vulnerable to power blackouts, viruses, malware or spyware.
That's what non-cursive writing (printing) is for. It's much more legible to people other than the writer.
What does writing in cursive have to do with power outages or blackouts? Do power outages cripple your hands? You can't write using standard hand writing? I find this cursive-worship a lot of people have to be completely arbitrary and silly. 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?
Of course not. There is no inherent value in something simply because it is old or because it is tradition.
Cursive is intended as a smoother, quicker, easier-on-the-hand form of writing. If you write a hell of a lot by hand, it can be very necessary to speed things up and keep your hand from cramping. However, it has been a couple of decades since most people actually needed to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write reams of content in a single sitting. Writing is largely for notes and lists these days and we use devices -- computer, etc -- for anything of great length. It's faster and less stressful on the hand (I say this as a person who grew up wanting to be a writer and therefore producing hundreds upon hundreds of pages of sheets full of cursive-written material and frequently had a very pained hand as a result).
If we were talking the death of hand writing, that's one thing. It's a fundamental necessity to be able to know how to, among other things, write your damn name. Or leave a note on someone's car when you scratch it with a shopping cart. Or write a thoughtful note to a loved one. But the death of cursive? Meh. So what. What about short-hand? Morse code? Olde English?
And yes, this whole article already appeared on Slashdot like a month ago.
Cursive has a very specific application, it's a continuous script that keeps spotting to a minimum when using an ink stylus with minimal or no regulation (think quills and fountain pens). That makes it obsolete from a technical standpoint. It's not supposed to be more legible, and it makes flourishes a bit easier to incorporate because it looks like they belong. Printing is pragmatic and it's faster. Cursive script would be best taught in an art class these days. When speed writing (such as taking notes), I either type or print. While I still can write in the cursive script I learned in elementary school, even I can hardly decipher my own cursive if I've scrawled it down fast. Print writing, at least in my case, is far more legible even if hurried.