Is Cursive Dead? Not on Your Life

http://www.slate.com/id/2292588/

by grellas • 15 years ago

18 23 15 years ago

A kid who has his own illegible handwriting may face some obstacles later on...Bias against poor penmanship can push a score by two standard deviations."People form opinions about the quality of ideas based on the handwriting," he says.

In that case, we should definitely kill standardized cursive. Then everyone will have bad handwriting and graders will be obligated to grade based on content.

makmanalp2• 15 years ago

Actually, I doubt that any cursive standard really applies and I think everyone sort of does their own thing anyway, even the most anal teachers.

aksbhat• 15 years ago

I completely agree with you!

As someone who has dysgraphia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia), I have faced this problem so many time in school. Luckily in India esp. in my state, if you have Dysgraphia, you could use a scribe and dictate your answers at least for major examinations.

I am happy that even though I am in a grad school, I now rarely have to write anything.

jarin2• 15 years ago

Oh weird, my handwriting looks almost exactly like the "motor dysgraphia" sample and I seem to have a good number of the symptoms of motor dysgraphia (pretty much everything except the spelling mistakes and talking to myself while writing). I never realized it might a "thing" before.

I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I was born left-handed and retrained to be right-handed as a kid?

eggnet• 15 years ago

The premise of the article is that cursive is the natural consequence of writing more efficiently. Individuals will write in their own form of cursive even if not taught explicitly.

This completely misses the point that people won't be writing enough to bother optimizing it with their own cursive style. Nor will they be writing in cursive frequently enough to keep up the skill.

How do I know this? Because this is the life I have lived. Moreover, I was taught cursive and have lost the ability to write legible cursive in high school and have reverted to printing ever since when I absolutely have to write with a pen.

Is cursive dead? No, but it is dying.

kiiski• 15 years ago

I agree. I haven't been able to write in cursive since the seventh grade (when we weren't required to use it in school anymore (I'm finnish)), but that hasn't been a problem since I barely ever write by hand anyway.

antiterra• 15 years ago

Since I don't write all that often, my hand gets tired quickly and I start joining block letters after a relatively short number of sentences. The suggestion of the article is that we teach children an efficient cursive style of writing from the beginning. In a lot of cases that's already being done with D'Nealian handwriting.

Even better, in my opinion, would be the Icelandic italic movement, as detailed at http://briem.net (check out "Quick results, easy work.)

HedgeMage5• 15 years ago

D'Nealian is not efficient -- it's yet another form of looped cursive (which I already spoke a bit about in another comment).

Italic is far superior to any kind of looped cursive.

antimatter15• 15 years ago

"In fact, cursive writing is a bit like sex: Youngsters are going to do it whether we like it or not"

I think that's ignoring the point. The question to whether or not to teach cursive isn't top down, based on some ideological desire of some school administrators. No, it's because the teachers and administration are noticing that the students aren't writing in cursive, and it's a waste to be expending class time on improving a skill which will never be utilized when there are more productive uses of that time.

I remember in third and fourth grade the teachers kept saying that by the time we reached high school there was an expectation that everyone was proficient in writing cursive, that all our assignments must be written in cursive. That was the last time I've had to write cursive. Sure the plural of anecdote is not evidence but I've yet to encounter a situation where cursive isn't effectively dead.

There's no way you can ignore printed script, because nearly all the text that anyone will ever encounter is print-style. Writing in print and learning to read is a pretty obvious combination. Expecting to learn to read one way and write another is unrealistic.

I can't imagine the argument that cursive is more _readable_. Certainly cursive is often pretty, and that may lend the claimed aesthetic quality, but readability beats aesthetics for content any day.

davetufts• 15 years ago

When was the last time you crawled? Probably much longer ago than that cursive paper, yet crawling, like cursive handwriting, is an important age-appropriate skill to learn. Sure, you could skip cursive and teach kindergarteners to type, but the motor skills kids learn THROUGH cursive is so much more important. Similarly, children that walk without ever learning the motor skills of crawling often have difficulties learning other things later in life.

jsz0• 15 years ago

If someone forces me to write anything more than my name and/or address on paper I use cursive. I make it completely illegible and unreadable on purpose. It's total gibberish. This way they will never ask me to do it again. Almost always works.

HedgeMage5• 15 years ago

There is a revival of cursive going on -- it's brought up frequently in the writing, parenting, and education fora a participate in.

Cursive is so problematic in the US not because it is hard to learn, useless, or requires a massive investment of time. It is problematic because we are terrible at teaching handwriting!

Almost all US schools have standardized on forms of looped cursive (e.g. Parker Penmanship, Zaner-Bloser) -- a set of letterforms designed not for handwriting, but for the movable type printing press! Looped cursive was made to be attractive with the fewest unique joins possible so that printers needed to stock fewer pieces for their movable type presses. Looped cursive is slower, less legible, and more difficult to learn than forms of writing actually made to be written (such as cursive italic).

Additionally, almost all US schools not only require that young children learning to write use pencil, but a relatively hard lead (HB lead). These pencils require too much pressure to use, and catch on the paper too much, making it much harder to learn to write properly -- especially in cursive, which has fewer lifts.

When I began using fountain pens, and learned to write in cursive italic, my handwriting became effortlessly quick and neat. My RSI even improved! This is how I taught my son to write, and he has arguably the best writing in his first-grade class, despite a severe speech disability which caused a delay in his learning to read and write.

We aren't the only family who have figured this out -- almost all of the home-schooling families we know use the same cursive italic my son and I learned, and I've seen a couple of private schools adopt it. Right now, it seems that the "cursive revival" seems limited to education-focused families with young children, writers, and doctors, but I think that if more people became aware of exactly how kludgy the writing they were taught is, they might give real handwriting a try and love it as much as we do. :)

Note: The italic and cursive italic we learned was Getty-Dubay italic -- I used the grown-up book "Write Now", and my son is learning with the first-grade book. Their web site is: http://handwritingsuccess.com/

pnathan• 15 years ago

very interesting.

I shall have to investigate at some point!

mikepurvis• 15 years ago

+1 to italic handwriting.

I used and found helpful this book: http://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Self-teaching-Handw...

HedgeMage5• 15 years ago

That's the same one I linked to -- but it's much less expensive on the authors' site than on Amazon. :)

blahedo2• 15 years ago

As a compromise between pencil/ballpoint and true fountain pens, I've recently discovered that gel-based click-retractable pens have the easy inkflow of a fountain pen—hence permitting a much lighter touch on the page—but the convenience of a ballpoint. (Strictly speaking, they are ballpoints, I think, but without the solid ink that requires so much pressure in a typical ballpoint.)

HedgeMage5• 15 years ago

My most-used fountain pen is retractable. It's called the Namiki Vanishing Point. The Pilot Fermo and Pilot Decimo also retract. (Namiki and Pilot are different divisions of the same company.)

Even a $100-$200 fountain pen is far more cost-effective than gel pens in the long run due to their longevity and how inexpensive bottled ink is.

I actually kept track one year. I went through $418 in gel pens my first year of college. That's more than my four favorite pens and my entire ink collection combined, despite my penchant for exotic and limited edition inks. It would take me about five years to use up all these inks.

adriand• 15 years ago

Cursive is like vim. Hard to learn, doesn't feel natural, requires that you train numerous small hand motions until they are reflexive, and in the end makes you faster and more productive. So it seems like it would be a natural fit for hackers, but the many negative comments in this thread would seem that it is not.

Perhaps the problem with it is that it is too beautiful. In that it is quite unlike vim.

I just wrote cursive for the last hour or so, since reading the article. I haven't written it since grade 6 or so. It was an absolutely bizarre feeling to find that it just came out of my brain the way it did, and when I looked at the page of text I had written, it was covered in what I honestly think is quite beautiful calligraphy.

It's a rather unusual and incredible feeling to learn that you still retain a skill you have not used in decades. Try it, it's pretty neat.

blahedo2• 15 years ago

When I need to write comments on student work, I can't really type it. (Maybe in a few more years, but the technology for introducing your own markup to an electronic document is still clunky, awkward, and bad at letting you draw arbitrary connections between things.) So I write it, and I do occasionally and increasingly get comments from students that it's hard to read despite being a basically conventional and legible cursive script. I don't really have any alternative (because printing would be a lot slower and grading already takes up more hours than I really have), and it's not really anyone's fault; it's just that they're out of practice reading cursive.

Of course, they're also out of practice reading anything, but that's a separate problem.

For the people that suggest that cursive is dead and students don't need it: how are you proposing that they take notes and take tests? Computers are still not quite pervasive enough to assume that everyone will have one with them at all times, besides which there are good reasons to keep them out of the examination room if you do sit-down exams. You could tell them to print instead, but why would you force them to slow down like that? Non-calligraphic cursive is faster.

Is Cursive Dead? Not on Your Life

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