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?
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.
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
"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.
I also don't care to read or write curseive writing. Yet, it shows up all the time on /. Just mention RIAA, patents, traffic shaping, Microsoft, etc. and you see all sorts of f-bombs and other forms of curseive writing in comment after comment. It makes me sad. I'm glad that you have gone for many years without resorting to such tired-out shock devices.
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.
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.
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.
No problem with learning to write, but cursive is not a useful skill as far as I can tell. Printing will get you through life just fine.
If you want a real writing skill that is of some use, learn shorthand.
As far as doing away with a keyboard in favor of handwriting recognition, this is silly. Typing is far faster and easier to implement across all sorts of devices. With handwriting recognition it is inevitable that you will suffer from varying implementations of the recognition program.
Actually churning butter and forging horseshoes would have been pretty cool to learn and far more useful then learning cursive. Eg, Churning butter would have engaged the students and also taught them a bit about where their food comes from, as whilst we use machines now, butter is still created from the same basic processes. Learning about metallurgy can be useful later in life if you choose to go down that path, boiler makers, fitters + turners are actually fairly highly sort and pretty well paid in the scheme of things. But cursive, well unless informed otherwise, I haven't come across a use for it yet.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of cats. MEOW!!
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.
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
I actually had an 8th grade metal shop class where we had a forge and were taught how to make hammers, horseshoes and various blades. It was a blast. A very popular class back in...mmmmm...about the early 1980s.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
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!"
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.
ASCII Plain Text.
Cursive is fine, but it will never replace Insular Majiscule for grandeur, so important to getting one's point across (especially important if you're 1300 years old or so). I do enjoy the hip-hop trendiness of Carolingean Miniscule with it's clever serifs and ligatures, but nothing will replace Gothic Littera Bastarde for those elegant, impassioned invitations to the A-list on your parties (well, SCA events anyway). But don't skimp on the illumination, either, or valuable content may not be appropriately highlighted.
Apologies for the rubric.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
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.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Or leave a note on someone's car when you scratch it with a shopping cart.
An illegible cursive note on their windscreen, of course. If it's written using a diamond-tipped stylus, there's actually no need to scratch the car with a shopping cart.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
> 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".
While you call this important body of knowledge valueless, I do not and can do the things you describe. So therefor when and if the balloon goes up, my family will eat and be clothed while yours will starve and die naked in the cold. What a pitty.
You... hunt your own food... in Oakland. And tan your own leather? By the light of kerosene lamps. To wear on your horse while you ride to Burning Man. I think you'll be dead long before any of that is an issue. If it is an issue, I don't think you'll feed your family with cursive writing, man.
Easy solution: if you're left handed, write in an RTL language such as Hebrew, then you can use your fountain pen. Problem solved! ;)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
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.