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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?
You can use cursive writing on a computer, you just have to pick the right font.
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 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
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There's no purpose for it.
They should stop teaching cursive in schools, and start teaching typing instead.
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.
Why would it take ages? I abandoned cursive writing as soon as I could, in seventh or eighth grade, since printing was faster. If nothing else, with printing one can write smaller letterforms more legibly, and smaller forms require less hand travel, thus making for faster writing.
And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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
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.
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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.
> And who composes an essay so fast that the limiting factor is the physical act of writing?
Anyone reasonable writing the SAT essay portion, since time is so limited there and requirements on writing quality so low.
Same with AP history tests, in my experience.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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 that's part of the problem right there: how fast does she write that calligraphy? Probably not very. Cursive-supporters always say how much faster cursive is than print, but if you have to write that slowly to make it beautiful and (more importantly) legible, then it's simply not useful, except perhaps for artistic purposes.
At least bows and arrows actually still have some uses: you can shoot and kill people very silently with them, unlike guns. Cursive is about as useful in the modern world as a stylus, used for chiseling characters into stone tablets.
Cursive deserves to die -- it often results in illegible scrawl.
Drawing tends to result in stick figures, painting often causes people to apply paint outside the lines, playing an instrument results in dissonance, and dancing, well, that just makes people look silly.
If that's your argument, I'd suggest you re-examine your view of the arts. To be fair, though, I suspect you've never seen beautiful handwriting, or its effect on the addressee.
I learned standard cursive in grade school. Typing I learned in high school. Classes in architecture and engineering taught me the value of "printing". In later years, I took up calligraphy (all forms) and modified my own handwriting, moving from "cursive" to an italic.
Throughout all those years, I never questioned the value or the utility of what I was learning, or the work required to master it, typing included. Does that mean I can stick to using a keyboard for all forms of communication? Sure. But I but don't. Life is much richer (for everyone involved) when you don't opt for the lowest common denominator. In that sense, it's a lot like like music. Why learn to play when you can just buy it and have your computer play it?
A handwritten note or letter, irrespective of whether it's to a girlfriend you're looking to woo, a boss you want to thank, an interviewer you want to impress, or to a family member with whom you want to share something personal, is far more effective (and meaningful) than a piece of paper spit out of a laserjet printer.
Are you seriously comparing the WAY somebody writes something and the way a painter paints? I've read a lot of literature, some great, some seriously overrated, and it was always typed. Even Shakespeare, the god damn grandfather of modern literature, was all conveyed to me through text printed in a uniform manor on some time of printing machine of some sort, not by a human being's strokes on a page.
Some writers might prefer to write their novels with a pen, but they don't submit the story to their publisher that way.
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I'm always kind of confused by the argument, which continually crops up, that cursive writing is resistant to technological failure. Printing, as in non-cursive writing, is exactly as resistant to blackouts, viruses, malware, and spyware; and additionally it is more closely related to the skill of reading machine-text. It is also open to some individuality. Also, you need a light source to read even during a blackout :).
Cursive writing may well be an artform, but there are a lot of arts that don't get nearly the attention as cursive writing, and it's unclear to me that it deserves such special treatment. I think I had 5 days where we touched on calligraphy for about 40 minutes each day, in my entire childhood. Meanwhile, cursive was a repeated theme. I think even a non-philistine can argue for something other than slavishly fighting the tide of history to maintain cursive as a national lingua franca. It's not like we're saying we'd rather the time be spent making fart jokes.
And I do, in fact, use cursive writing from time to time. It's a matter of encoding specificity -- if I'm writing long-form paragraphs, I naturally go to cursive, because in elementary and high school you'd fail if you print on an essay or paragraph answer; if I'm scribbling single words or interjections in mathematical sequences, or generally if I'm writing on a whiteboard, I print.
I spent most of my youth writing in cursive, because it was supposedly faster.
It isn't faster, it's easier. They may not have called it anything more than "writer's cramp", but RSI existed much longer than the common medical term of today. Remember that it wasn't the speed with which they wrote that was the problem, but - having fewer alternatives - a clerical job meant you were writing for bloody ever, day after day.
Here's an experiment someone could try if they wanted. Take a day's work, steady writing by hand, and copy it out using printed block style hand print. Do the same thing (after a good rest, or whatever other controls you can add) using cursive writing, connected ascenders and descenders and all. Track each effort with a wristband (or IR thermography, whatever works best) that measures the amount of heat your fingers, wrist and forearm generate over the same amount of time. Add this to subjective feelings - which was easier on you, at the end of the day? Cursive, every time. That's what it evolved for.
However, it's also quite clear that things that evolved from purely utilitarian uses become cultural artifacts, and very beautiful. Check BoingBoing or DarkRoastedBlend sites for some recent photos of restored or old rusted equipment. With the right perspective it becomes art.
I'm a calligrapher sometimes.
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That's only because they didn't have youtube. Imagine getting to see the dorky things did as a teenager. 50 years from now, historical documentaries will rock!
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Well, for the longest time my 'signature' was merely a scrawl of my initials. Now it's simply a series of scrawled loops.
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> Yes, I still write with a fountain-pen (and sometimes even a quill) on paper in addition to using a keyboard.
I just want to throw this out there: Left handed people cannot easily use these implements, nor the common (i.e. right handed) stoke patterns and techniques.
Fountain pens generally only function on 'pull' strokes; when pushing, the nib neds to catch on the paper, and there is minimal ink flow. This isn't a major issue when writing right-handed because the text flows to the right, just making the average stroke a 'pull'. Left handed writers, naturally, are 'pushing' most of the time. There are other problems as well, such as smearing the fresh ink, etc.
Of course, with the proper training (e.g. rotating the paper at an odd angle) and tools (e.g. nibs cut at opposite angles), these can be overcome. However, it is still significantly more difficult for a left hander to learn, and at only 10% of the population, there's not enough incentive to teach them in a mixed environment (e.g. school).
Point being, you can count the better part of all left handers saying "doesn't matter to me" simply because they are ill-equipped, not because they are "philistines".
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.
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