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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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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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 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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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).
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.
What rubbish.
Handwriting science is about pressures applied through the stroke of the letter and the directions those strokes come from as a person moves their hand and holds a writing implement a certain way. The shape of a signature is easily copied and has been used by school children to forge absent notes from their parents since forever, how the signature is written is something largely unique to the individual's hand.
If one wishes a "cursive-style" signature there is no formal education required to form a few letters without lifting your pen. For your purposes of producing a unique mark, it's arguably better for a person to do this with no prior training, as they will not conform to the same guidelines as everyone else does. What seems like a natural joining stroke to you may be odd to me and vice versa.
Speed of cursive vs printing is arguable, and handwriting (mine anyway) is always more legible afterwards if I print. Taking notes down fast is useless if you can't read them afterwards.
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.
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
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!"
I have to side with the scumbags, er, lawyers on this one. If you're so dumb that you write critical information in a way that's completely illegible (i.e. cursive), then it shouldn't hold any weight in court, where someone's life or freedom could be at stake. Don't like it? Learn to write legibly (i.e., print).
No one's ever been able to read other peoples' cursive writing, unless they were a calligrapher. All-caps printing is the best for legibility.
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!"
... 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.
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! --
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 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
We can't all sign with an 'X'
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
Something is amiss indeed. You left this out:
0800: Class on proper use of 24 hour clock
Unless after hunting and foraging at 10 AM you wait until 2 AM to have lunch.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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!
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
Next thing you know, they'll be selling desks without inkwells!
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.
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.
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.
Instead of cursive writing, they should be teaching school kids keyboarding, which is something they will use in real life.