Why Johnny Can't Handwrite 1356
theodp writes "Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail and IM, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades. With 90 percent of Americans between the ages of 5 and 17 using computers, it's not uncommon for kids to type 20-30 WPM by the time they leave elementary school. Keyboards, joysticks and cell-phone touch pads have ruined kids' ability to hold a pencil properly, let alone write legibly, says the former president of the International Association of Master Penmen, Engrossers and Teachers of Handwriting."
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Back on topic, who cares if kids can't write in cursive? I'd far rather have a kid who can touch type and doesn't know cursive rather than the opposite.
This is people who can't take change whining that their niche is going away.
Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
Evolve or die. Im sorry your penmanship organization is now going to be useless. Continue to teach the kids to print, that won't be going away all too soon.
In fact, one of the next revolutions in comp use is handwriting recognition.
Anyways, my point is. Cursive is useless. I know no one who actually uses it, in a professional common manner. NOT writing letters, notes. Something that REQUIRES it. Or is BETTERED by it.
So what? (Score:5, Insightful)
a) hard to learn,
b) hard to use, and
c) (usually) hard to read.
It looks nice, sure, but how many people do you see out bemoaning the loss of caligraphy? (Which looks a lot better than cursive IMO)
It's good for signatures and the occasional fancy invitation and such but that's about it.
Progress pains. (Score:1, Insightful)
And the telephone has ruined people's ability to write a letter, and mail it.
It was never encouraged (Score:3, Insightful)
So fancy hand writing is a lost art, big deal. All you need is print anyways. Leave cursive up to the artsy folks and hand writing hobbyists. *Handwriting is dying.
Who uses cursive nowadays? (Score:2, Insightful)
Odd attitude (Score:5, Insightful)
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"
I find this attitude strange. I have years of old e-mails saved. I cherish many of them, and rereading them brings back memories. I have the first e-mails I got from my girlfriend (going to be my wife soon) and they're saved in my USB keychain. (We met online, too!)
I know that's hokey, sentimental stuff, but it's true. You can have an emotional attachment to an e-mail. In the end, it's not the media, but (to coin a cliche) it's the thought that counts.
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Insightful)
I had been typing papers since the 2nd grade (on my C64 baby in GEOS Works or something) and could never find a valid reason for me to use cursive other than Mrs. Soandso said to.
Cursive is ugly, useless, and difficult to read.
I think that in the future EVERYONE should be forced to type everything.
AIM is destroying another MORE important part of writing. Grammar, sentence structure, and spelling.
Nothing
like
having this
show up on
your screen every
time you talk to
someone.
Page length requirements on papers are going to be multiplied by 100 due to that
Just my worthless rambling.
And this is a bad thing? (Score:4, Insightful)
When could we ever write legibly? (Score:5, Insightful)
I could never write legibly.
Frankly, I think people are just grasping for excuses. Now, we have people using computers as the reason for illegible writing. What was it before computers were so common? Laziness? Lack of talent? Why aren't those still the reasons?
I am not shocked or disturbed. (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't say I'm surprised such observations can be made. Nor am I upset about it. People will gain the skills they require, and if being able to write by hand legibly isn't a must we simply won't be very good at it. I expect that making words stick will be done by other methods than pencil and paper in the future, and the ability to write will be no more a requirement than it is for us to manouver a horse today.
Perhaps in a few decades writing by hand will be more of an art-form than something everyone needs to do.
Death of Handwriting Immanent, Film at 11 (Score:2, Insightful)
As near as I can tell, Civilization hasn't collapsed yet. Screw handwriting.
uniquely american? (Score:3, Insightful)
buh? uniquely american? surely cursive script wasn t invented here? do other countries have cursive handwriting?
Re:Thumbs (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want kids to be able to write by hand, you just have to force them to do it in school. If you let them type everything, they will.
A good point if it were plainly beneficial, but really, we'd only be teaching kids to handwrite for the sake of handwriting.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
The teacher that asked the 3rd graders if they had any emails they kept is full of it... ask those kids if they have any letters they keep and I bet the answer is also a resounding "No!". I'm sure there are letters their parents are keeping, but the kids don't realize yet what things may hold sentimental value decades hence. I, for one, do have emails still... I still have nearly every email my wife sent me when we were dating. They have value to me. I also have cards she gave me - same thing. Is one more valuable to me than the other? Nope.
Really, these are the same group of people who lamented the passing of reading, writing, and speaking Classical Greek and Latin from "educated" universities. The reality is that it's just not relevant to the majority of people anymore. And it's simply not viable to be educated on everything anymore -- the whole of human knowledge is too vast. We need to pick what we want general education in, and then allow people to decide (whether by choice or chance) what they want a specific education in. And, as you say, touch typing is going to be far more important than cursive.
Re:I can't write in cursive.. (Score:3, Insightful)
There are so many concerns about digitizing documents and what format to choose because readers may not be available even five years after the project, let alone 400.
Meanwhile, thanks to the ability to handwrite, we have the Dead Sea Scrolls, Hammurabi's Laws, the Rosetta Stone.
And as the CNN version of this story mentions, which is more significant to you? The handwritten letter that you received from your relative just he or she died, or that quick email saying "Call me" you got and deleted?
Build on a foundation (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks, illogically enough, like a '2'.
who cares if kids can't write in cursive?
It's true that, after grade school, students pretty much adopt their own style of handwriting, which tends to be an efficient mix of print and cursive (rather like the "print cursive" mentioned in the article, I imagine, except far more improvised). I say "efficient" because, as experience has shown, neither pure print nor pure cursive is the most efficient way for writing anything longhand. People tend to write quickly; if either print or cursive were the path to rapidity, they'd be commonly used, don't you think? We do our "print cursives" because our brains have told our hands without us realizing it that this is the quickest way of getting stuff written down.
But the reason people can even read each others' impromptu scrawls (doctors excepted) is because all those "print cursives" have their basis in common foundations: regular print and the Palmer Method. We take the gold standards of penmanship and unconsciously adopt them over many years to whatever speed needs arise--but the standards had to be in place first.
So...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Should they even care? I really fail to understand how this is a bad thing. I learned cursive in school but don't use it anymore, because I can type faster and print more far legibly... the only thing that I use cursive for is my signature. And I don't miss it one bit.
Students today need cursive to succeed in society about as much as I need Morse code to listen to NPR during drive time... They are both skills that will be kept up by small numbers of enthusiasts, and society at large will have only a passing knowledge of the subject, and will be no worse off for it...
Re:Thumbs (Score:4, Insightful)
So if the kids are stuck in a power outage and need to leave a message for someone, how exactly do you propose they do it?
Computers have actually improved my writing.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thumbs (Score:3, Insightful)
Print, in all caps if they have to, you can figure that out just by knowing what letters look like when they are typed (being able to read...).
Just switching to the next unreadable style (Score:2, Insightful)
In other news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thumbs (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, I was never able to learn it to my teachers' satisfaction in grade school. They always told me that my writing was messy and hard to read and that they would take points off for not writing in cursive. Then when I wrote in cursive, they complained even more, so eventually, I went back to my current writing. If my writing is so hard to read, why can Tablet PCs that Iâ(TM)ve never used before get almost 95% of it? My Newton's HWR accuracy approaches 99% now that I've trained it.
I just don't see cursive as being a useful piece of knowledge. I can read it just fine, but I don't see any reason to write it. I can write in my script much faster than anyone I know can write in cursive. Everyone Iâ(TM)ve asked has no trouble whatsoever reading my handwriting; so maybe my teachers were just on crack.
I already use my thumb to ring doorbells and I have never used a mobile phone's keypad. Of course, I use the center of my thumb and they probably mean that the next generation will use their thumb tips, but I really wonder about the conclusions people reach sometimes.
GASP! (Score:1, Insightful)
I can't wait to see my fountain pen in a history museum.
Re:Who Cares?!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thumbs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So...? (Score:5, Insightful)
The concept of the signature as identification seems rather silly to me anyway. My signature varies tremendously, and lately I don't even really bother finishing my name.
Re:So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
Chess sets and pianos also seem to be purchased in quantities far beyond their use. It seems like every family that has made it has a piano even if nobody plays. It looks good in a room. Pens look good on a desk.
I do know a few people that have taken up penmanship but I think their numbers in the pen markets are dwarfed by the people purchasing the image.
Myself, I just got a piano and I'm trying damn hard not to be one of those people that just buys one and has their kid take lessons to justify it. I'll leave the penmanship to someone else.
Surprising? (Score:2, Insightful)
Printed signatures (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point when I had to start signing things, I would just sign printed. It was fine for a while, btu at some point someone told me I had to write it in cursive. I said, "but then its not my signature." They disagreed and said it legally had to be in cursive. I said, "well that's stupid," then proceeded to labor through trying to write my name in cursive (just for kicks, I asked the person to show me how to write a capital G so I could make a legal signature).
After that my signature diminished to my first and last initials with little squiggly lines after each. You know, like celebrities sign autographs...
Last year when I was signing papers to buy my house, I signed the first page and the notary almost had a fit. She said I couldn't sign that way or it wouldn't be legal. I protested for a bit, but she wouldn't budge, and she was the one with the stamp, so i reluctantly labored through it again for a few pages, then slowly reverted back to my regular signature (so many pages!).
Signatures are supposed to be personal, like fingerprints. The way I sign my name is supposed to be unique to me. If Joe Dumbass Lawyer can't read my signature, that shouldn't matter. If someone were to hold up a page with my alleged signature, and I can't identify it as mine (or it doesn't match my signature on other documents), it shouldn't be legally binding. For someone to instruct me that I have to use proper penmanship for it to be legal is ridiculous.
But i digress.
Why Kids learn cursive (Score:2, Insightful)
Her response was that students don't learn it because its useful or because they NEED to know it. It's taught in order to help develop kids' motor skills and hand-eye coordination.
From my experience, there is still a very useful place for hand-writing, but not necessarily for cursive. However, if writing in cursive is helpful in developing motor skills in children, I'm all for it. There's a distinct difference in motor skill difficulty between typing and writing. Writing certainly aids much more than typing in the motor skill development, as it requires quite a bit more concentration and hand-stability.
Re:So...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's on the back of YOUR credit card? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Thumbs (Score:5, Insightful)
Still I don't necessarily agree with you. I wrote individual printed letters, and I never had problems running out of time on tests.
Re:Who cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Leaving aside that Mr. Safire is not nearly the monolithic authority he likes to pretend to be, there's nothing wrong with "diagram that sentence", as diagram actually is a (transitive) verb.
On a larger point, the sheer fluidity of English -- the fact that anyone who speaks English "owns" it -- is one reason for its vitality. Verb nouns all you want -- we'll make more.
Re:A Victory for Legibility and Speed (Score:4, Insightful)
Your legal signature is simply a symbol or mark by which you can be known. Any symbol will do as long as it is relatively unique and you use it consistently.
Look at your average doctor or lawyer... they've got signatures that are nothing more than a squigly line. But when you compare it, the squigles are the same from instance to instance. Mine is the same way, my name is entirely too long to write cursively, so I make a few loops and a few sqiggles, takes about 1/2 second to make my signature for a name with 20 characters (not spelling out my middle name).
Whatever you choose to use as your signature, be sure to get your government issued IDs re-issued with your new signature in case anyone questions you about your it.
Most Americans have been taught that a signature is your name written in cursive, but then again, most Americans are taught that the government is a Democracy and that the seasons are caused by our distance from The Sun. Educators are not perfect, and some of what they teach is for convienence instead of accuracy.
Re:That's not the only problem (Score:2, Insightful)
How many diagnoses of ADD (or ADHD or whatever) are we seeing nowadays? Our problem as a nation is that we don't know when the fuck to say when, whether it's with food, or TV, or computers. I'll admit I was pushing the troll button with the "ban Doom" comment, because I still chuckle when I see these talking heads on TV using that as their strawman for society's ills, but the reason why Johnny can't handwrite is because society could care less about Johnny unless he's a consumer.
Learning for its own sake is frowned upon in this country, as is picking up an Asimov novel or respecting your neighbor. Thinking for oneself has gone out the fucking window because there's no money or self-gratification in it. Our American idols are cookie-cutter pop singers. Our schoolbooks are being revised to be gender/race/creed neutral, and to hell with history. We're so uptight about Johnny forgetting cursive when the phrase "Founding Fathers" is being redacted.
Our next generation is going to be (in aggregate, there are of course a few bright bulbs) our stupidest ever. Mark my words. A diet of intellectual sugar is just as damaging in the long run as swilling soft drinks and cramming super-sized fast food daily. In moderation it's all good, but there's no money in moderation.
Re:And this is a problem ... why, exactly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, heavens! The ability to properly illuminate latin texts is probably dying out as well. However shall we cope?
I know I'm supposed to hold the opposite opinion, since I am by profession and vocation an historian, and spend a lot of my time reading old manuscripts. Even more so, in that I do calligraphic art in my not-so-copious spare time.
However (you knew this was coming, didn't you?), I have to say that this isn't really as big a problem as it seems. Every generation has bemoaned the slipping-away of skills that seemed essential to the previous, at least in the handwriting department. My grandparents had lovely cursive hands, but would probably still have been incapable of reading (much less writing) the old-style gothic cursive that their great-grandparents wrote. Plus Ãa change, plus c'est la mÃme chose, as Karr put it.
It has to be said that these changes are natural - this shouldn't (even in this technologically enthusiastic forum) be regarded as an issue of high-tech vs. low-tech, or of luddites vs. technophiles. It's just change, which is constantly affecting any culture. Some things that seemed absolutely essential to past generations are now barely relevant.
I should be much more concerned if we were stagnating, trying to ensure that our children neither more nor less than what we ourselves learned ("If'n it's good enough fer mah grand-pappy, then it's..." etc.).
I'd really be concerned if our spelling and math were slipping. Um, hold on a minute....
The current decline (or rather, what most of us agree to perceive as a decline) in orthographic and mathematical understanding among the general population are a different matter, since these aren't just skills - they're fundamental tools necessary to understand a whole slew of other subjects. Now, in these cases, I think there is reason to be concerned.
Re:Nothing Wrong... (Score:1, Insightful)
Must be an American thing to feel the need to use one particular style when you write a *check*.
For my part, I stopped using the "cursive" ("attaché") I learned in primary school early into secondary (when i started taking notes), for the simple reason it was slower to write (for me) and harder to read. The choice seemed trivial.
I handwrite almost as much as I type, and though I have somewhat of an interest in calligraphy I do all of this in a style which might be described as a quick uncial, or just print
AFAIM, it is very useful mostly to teach children coordination and precision with the hand at an early age.
Graphologists will doubtless agree that hadwriting
loses nothing in expressivity by not being "cursive"...
damn denelian (Score:2, Insightful)
My family moved to another school district that taught regular print, and I was suddenly failing my handwriting classes because I was writing my letters with curly-cues!! So, I suddenly had to re-learn how to write in print. I never really learned cursive very well, because I was still struggling with printing! Thankfully, once I reached Junior High, I was allowed to bring in typed papers instead of writing them in cursive. I've been typing since I was 5, and we were always one of the few families who actually had a computer growing up.
When we had to do essays in class, I was screwed. I was marked down all the time for my handwriting up through high school. I haven't used cursive since. For quite a while, I even printed my name instead of signing in cursive. My print is STILL horrible by most people's standards.
So damn you, Mr. Denelian!!
Re:So...? (Score:2, Insightful)
I know what you mean... I have a friend who has framed calligraphy poems on her wall. The words are special to her, but it is also a form of art, in my opinion. I guess it's a bit like a computer font, but when you know it is drawn by hand, it becomes more special. Choosing a font for a letter these days is like choosing a pre-printed birthday card. Sure, both were picked by you and therefore special, but other than that not much effort goes into it.
Re:Why I Prefer Both Cursive and Typing (Score:5, Insightful)
I have the opposite reaction, actually. My handwriting runs at approximately 15-20 WPM (for maybe a half-hour to an hour before serious cramping), while my typing can go at a sustained 90+ WPM (for hours at a time).a rly
Now the important part: my thoughts, particularly when writing, run in spurts of much faster than the 90 WPM... Probably (for a guess) closer to 120-150 WPM - I think faster than I speak, and being a New Englander, I speak fast. When typing, I can do a pretty good job of keeping up to my thoughts (only having to slow down slightly to allow my fingers to catch up) - when writing by hand, it becomes an
agonizing
and
halting
process
partic-
ul
with
long
words.
I find it much easier to be creative when my thoughts can flow onto the paper at close to the same speed they flow from my mind - the only possible improvement I could see is if perfect dictation software comes out... but even then, I'd tend to get dry mouth before I get to the point that my hands cramp.
While yes, the nice wide loops of cursive are awfully pretty, and that sure puts you in an artistic mind, it's just too damn slow for putting coherant thoughts down on paper.
-T
I have to agree. (Score:2, Insightful)
a) I'm lazy, and didn't care
b) I don't have a natural aptitude for it
c) They didn't teach it in a way that interested me.
Now, they can just blame it on computers.
A year ago I started studying penmanship. I can sit down and slowly write some half decent spencerian. It takes effort and concentration, and some hand muscles and movements I'm not used to.. but it looks great. And it shows up in my normal writing now, too.
So really, if you want kids to write well, teach them to write well. Pretty simple.
School needs to be more integrated. We had classes where the teachers demanded handwritten assignments, not typewritten. THe idea is that in one class, you practice skills from another.
It's dumb for, say, math class to give you problems to solve that relate to nonsensical things like "If a blue star is 5000 degrees C, and a red star is 3000 degrees C, how many degree is 3 blue stars and 4 red stars?". Sure, anyone can derive a forumla out of it.. bu tother than the pure math, the question is nonsense.. you don't add up temperatrues like that, it has no meaning in the real world. Why not ask a question about somethign MEANINGFUL, related to chemistry, or physics.. even if you haven't taught the concepts yet. School needs to tie together more closely, handwriting included.
Re:So...? (Score:3, Insightful)
The quote you selected seems to be the montra of those that know nothing of motovation. I do agree with you that cursive is not that big of a deal to waste so much time on. I am examining a different angle of the statement.
For one thing, the statement assumes that the under-performing teachers are truly some evil folks. People that will sit around and hold the intellect of children hostage until their demands are met. Sorry, I have met many teachers and none strike me as this sort of person. Well, okay, one, he is now Dr. David Spiceland and he once taught public speaking at a Big Orange University that will remain nameless. GO VOLS!
Some that wish to fix education keep tossing this 'idea' out, as if by paying more money these 'uncaring' folk who have decided to teach sloppily, if at all, will somehow transform them all into highly compitant "superteachers". Or their teaching slowdown will end, or some miracle will occur, etc.
Will someone tell me where this has ever occured before? I don't mean creating new salary tiers to attract better teachers, or takining down arbetrary barriers to allow highly skilled people who's degrees are in something other than education. I mean just taking the same people, who are not 'getting anything done', shoving more money at these same people and their performance improves.
We saw, in a different industry, where salaries for the most mundane positions skyrocketed, then burst. Giant salaries for folks who spent their time playing computer games and ICQing each other certainly did not produce super-compitant
The quoted statement is just a copout at best, or extortion at worst. If someone wants to bring up hiring better teachers, changing the beurocracy, etc. fine, but as any educated observer of a RiceBoy knows, dumping more money on something (different color mirrors? stickers? wing on the back of a front wheel drive car?) that doesn't run to begin with might make it look 'better' but it ain't improving performance. Same with the job market, whatever the profession
Re:Thumbs (Score:3, Insightful)
Cursive is an antiquated bunch of aristocratic bullshit. It has little or no use in moden society, except for perhaps signatures.
Printing is much easier to read. It is also even more easy to read something typed up, and alot quicker to type it up. Why waste time writing or printing a report when you can type it?
Good Riddance (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, with a nearly universal advent of computers, there's little need for 'cursive', as you can type many, many times faster and more legibly than you can write in cursive. Cursive is an anachronism.
Personally, I'm glad cursive is on its way out. In grade school, I always hated it - I could write faster with my handwriting (which was more of a script anyway, but it wasn't "cursive"), and would cramp my hand like a mofo. As soon as they stopped forcing us to use it, I was done and through with it. Now I use it for is my name, relegating any handwriting to either palm grafiti (on paper, yes - at least something closely approximating it) for my own personal scribblings, or simple engineer's lettering (those of you that don't know what that is, it's basically blocky, all-capital letters).
If you need something fancy, that's what laserjets are for. Sure, there's still room for things like caligraphy, but that sure as hell isn't cursive.
Re:So...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Besides, most of the time people want you to print. Whether filling out a tax form, job application, or writing a college essay, they almost always explicitly ask people to print, because almost everyone's cursive (whether 50 years old or 15 years old) is absolutely horrid.
The only people who really care about cursive are 3rd grade teachers and pedants. My 3rd grade teacher actually went so far as to make fun of me in front of the class because my cursive was so bad that I often just gave up and resorted to printing. After that, just to spite her I wrote everything in print, even when asked to do it in cursive.
And even if cursive makes writing faster (and I'm still not convinced that it does), it reading it is slower. My theory is that our brains become trained at a fairly young age so that they can recognize a letter in block form fairly quickly, because 90% of the time that's how we see it (in print, on signs, on TV, on the computer, etc.). Our brains don't learn how to recognize the cursive form of that same letter until several years later. Add to this both the fact that cursive letters usually have only a small resemblance to their block counterparts, and that we see things written in cursive a very small percentage of the time (for handwritten notes, mostly). Then, compound it with most of the populace having bad handwriting, and that because cursive is mostly just a bunch of (very similar) loops it's harder to distinguish between them, and it's no wonder that people read cursive at a much slower rate than print.
Re:Cursive is great! (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope not (27 here too). Yeah, I had essay questions, and I always printed. For me it was faster than cursive and I don't recall significant discomfort.
Cursive was specifically invented to allow people to write entire words without lifting the pen off the page. You have nice fluid motion that really is much nicer on your wrist and hands. And it's much faster to boot.
It wasn't faster for me (perhaps it could have been had I done it more), and I question the motion benefits. The pen stays on the page, but you have to make lots of tiny and relatively precise loops and curves. Meanwhile print is mostly straight lines and circles (and therefore usually much more readable), and I don't see why it's so bad to raise the pen slightly between letters.
Cursive really is much faster than printing. Same when I take notes at the physics seminars here at my university, cursive note-taking is really much much faster than printing. and much easier on my hands.
Use whatever works for you. I find the opposite is true for me, and as the article points out many people use a combination of print and cursive.
The real losses are grammar and spelling (Score:3, Insightful)
What is disturbing is the steep decline in actual language skills. Most of my coworkers are unable to spell properly or form grammatical sentences. Many of them are unable to think clearly enough to communicate effectively even within the context of the pidgin dialect they speak. Granted, I work for a rather small and idiosyncratic company, but this was no less true when I was an Intel contractor.
Personally, it doesn't matter to me that my coworkers are semiliterate clods; it's actually an advantage for me. On the other hand, the general decline is making it harder for me to ensure that my daughter gets a decent education in the public schools, and I shudder to think that these people are voting, driving, and registering handguns.
As far as cursive is concerned, if you do plan to write with pen and paper, it's worth learning. Provided you practice enough to be good at it, you can write much faster in cursive than in regular script, which is why cursive was invented in the first place. I'm inclined to note that manual writing has a number of other advantages, but I doubt that they would appeal to anyone for whom those advantages are not self-evident.
Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is rediculous bullshiite. That's about as valid as saying that listening to rock music diminishes one's ability to appreciate classical music.
It's not that typing hurts their writing skill. It's that they type instead of writing, therefore one gets better and the other atrophes. I can't even state in good faith in a passive context that "typing and cellphones have ruined my ability to write legibly." If I can't write legibly, it's because I don't try to.
Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
R.I.P. -- Cursive, Zapf Chancery, and Tekton
"Cursive" writing should be abandoned (Score:5, Insightful)
The Curse of Cursive (Score:3, Insightful)
The best handwriting was (and still is, IMHO) from the renaissance. Various forms of "italic" hand were developed by people who's names later became typefaces, such as Palatino.
The interesting thing is, if you write with an italic hand, even with a monoline ballpoint, your writing becomes a bit more angular, but a bit neater and easier to read, and (alors!) faster. It *is* faster to write italic than palmer, because there are far fewer strokes involved.
I'm as much of a computer geek as the rest, but I also have a passion for calligraphy. It is an amazing practice that should never die.
RR
Why not worry about what matters? (Score:5, Insightful)
Just to put some perspective on my background, I've taken calligraphy courses, both for Roman alphabets and for Chinese. I admire beautiful, clear handwriting as much as next person, and I believe that writing letters "the old fashioned" way has something to be said for it in terms of "romance".
But we don't send kids to school to teach them to write because of the "romance" of hand lettering. We teach them it because it is a valuable communication skill.
First of all, let's examine the legibility of cursive writing. I'm sure we have all got a relative whose writing is absolutely illegible, and odds are they were writing cursive. Cursive is simply harder to read. That should be evident by its near total absence from any kind of print media. If cursive writing were easier to read, you can bet that all the paperback books that you see would be typeset with cursive fonts. You don't see that, and the reason is obvious: you'd take a dull spoon to your eyes and gouge them out after only a few pages.
So if it's hard to read, then why bother learning to write that way? Well, the justification is usually that it is faster. The reality is that most people can only write cursive letters about 10% faster than they can print them. I know that I can print very nearly as fast as I can write cursive, and more importantly, you can decipher my printing, even when I am in a hurry, even when you have to read pages of it.
If we really were interested in teaching children to write fast, we'd have them learning any of a number of shorthand systems [riverusers.com].
You want to do kids a favor? Get them typing. They will have neater work with less effort and fatigue. They'll produce work faster. They'll have more time to concentrate on what they write rather than how they write.
Traders of Obsolete Knowledge... (Score:5, Insightful)
I too fail to see what the big deal is, although the source of the moaning, as well as some button-pushing (since when is calligraphy a "unique form of American expression"?) tells me this has more to do with certain teachers afraid to lose their jobs as the skill they teach becomes irrelevant, than with the real consequences this could have.
Notice the lack of studies of any kind. There's a lot of "some say", "few statistics", "many adults", etc. No numbers, and no solid source.
Nor are there any quotes (much less trace of concern) by someone in the position to deal with this as a "problem". It's not that the Department of Education has to go out and say something about it, it's that it's interesting that no one asked anyone but a "teacher fighting the trend" and "a 54-year-old artist" who's former President of an Association of People Who Make A Living Writing And Teaching Cursive.
The only other people complaining apparently "parents who pride themselves on their penmanship", "bemoaning" that their kids don't write as they do. The tone is the same the mother might use to "bemoan" their daugther not taking the same piano lessons, the same ballerina classes, or perhaps having the debutante ball she had at X age. All that was so "character-defining".
This is a "social interest" story with no substance, not even as little as would be expected from the subject.
Considering the deficiencies in basic math and language skills present in US education (not to mention geography, history, literature and all that useless "general culture"), I would think there are more important things to worry about in education than whether Little Jimmy pens or types his homework. For example: whether he can actually do his homework, and learn something from it.
If they want to teach children an artistic skill that shows "your inner being, your core" and "it's not translated into dollars, like computer skills", I'm sure private lessons could be accomodated somewhere between tap-dancing and archery.
It proves nothing, shows nothing, says nothing, except that some people like penmanship so much they forgot why schools teach the Palmer Method of Business Writing in the first place: as a business skill.
Re:Thumbs (Score:1, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cursive is great! (Score:4, Insightful)
Faster and more fluid to write, but quite a bit harder to read (in most cases I've encountered).
Since the ultimate goal of "writing" in any format is to communicate, wouldn't the easiest to read be most important? Wouldn't it make sense that the harder to read a given medium is, the less popular it would become over time?
Survival of the fittest.
Re:Thumbs (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally, I had bad handwriting long before I used computers regularly and stopped using cursive as soon as possible (they make you write things in cursive in elementary school and sometimes in middle school; but I didn't hvae to at all in high school).
My point? Only that good penmanship and the ability to remember how to write cursive may be dying, but not because of computers. I hated cursive and it actually was slower for me than "plain old" printing.
Cursive is "uniquely American"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Any non-USAsians want to question this claim? I was under the impression that people in Europe knew cursive too.
Shoelaces (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was in grade seven a friend of mine could not write but instead printed everything. That was in 1977. I thought it was interesting, particularly since he printed faster than most people wrote. I thought I'd give it a try and found that I was much more legible. Twenty-six years later I still print or type everything, and like my friend of long ago, I am pretty fast at it. I have no regrets.
What really freaks me out, though, is the number of teenagers who have probably never tied shoelaces. Young kids wear slip-ons and shoes with velcro straps. Older kids have coiled elastic laces. Then there's the floppy-skateboard-shoe stage where the shoes have laces but they are permanently knotted loose enough to just slip on and off. Now basketball shoes come with zippers and skates all use cantilever or ratchet fittings. I guess they'll get Mom to tie their dress shoes when they graduate from college.... :-P
Cursive and joined-up handwriting are not synonyms (Score:3, Insightful)
"Cursive" handwriting is not the only form of "joined up" handwriting. 100 years ago everyone learned a different type of script, and I had to struggle to understand anything written by my late grandmother. Once educators get a clue, our current cursive will be just as alien to our kids.
The key issue with "hand printing" is that young children are taught to write letters with only downstrokes. They don't have the fine motor control for making well-controlled motions in both directions, and pushing kids into "cursive" too soon will result in a lifetime of poor penmanship.
But there's absolutely no reason why teens and adults can't do "hand printing" in both directions. That means an "A" is two strokes, not three. More importantly, you can start a lot of letters with either an up or downstroke - "B," "n," "m," "r," etc. You'll lose the small serifs, but the letters are still easily recognized.
It doesn't take long for letters to flow together - they're still "printed," but the pen either never leaves the paper or is briefly lifted just off the surface. With practice you can print just as fast as another person can write cursively... and it's a hell of a lot easier to mix in equations, foreign and mathematical symbols, chemical notations, etc.
My cursive story (Score:3, Insightful)
The school made a *big* deal about this. Said, I would not be able to write a check, sign legal documents and other things. They said my writing would be slower. Nothing but FUD directed at preserving something that does not need to be preserved.
I did not agree and decided to do a little research. Found out that we didn't need cursive then. We sure as heck don't need it now.
The appearance of ones handwriting has a lot to do with their internal wiring. How we all do it depends on how we are built.
I spent the better part of that year learning about handwriting in all its forms in my spare time. Looked at writing from famous people, read their bio. Looked at different styles and related the use of same by different types of people. Looked at documents and fonts. The proper use of these can convey many things not directly contained in the actual words used.
I reached the following conclusions.
- There is no need to handwrite anything using a cursive script. --Nothing.
- You can extend this to the lower-case characters as well. Not needed for anything.
- Knowing these two things makes learning the art of writing a lot easier. (I had not yet used a computer or typewriter at the time.) Less hassle. The effect on me was a better ability to focus on what it is that I was writing instead of how it was written.
For a young child trying to understand the use of language, this is huge. Good educators should be encouraging this instead of clinging to the old ways. Why spend years working hard at a manual skill that one is not well adapted to? That time could be used to better the use of language and structure.
- Trying to make someone write in perfect copy book style who is not pre-disposed to doing so is a direct assult on their being. Could that assult do harm to a young person who might otherwise enjoy the art of writing?
It almost did exactly that for me.
So, the end result?
Some yelling, punishment and poor marks for another 6 months until I was able to better articulate what made me angry about cursive writing. My parents were told I would have problems later in life. I was told, I was not working to get a good education. Bullshit. I could tell them more about writing then they could tell me!
I never wrote that way again and am *way* better for it. Humans tend to evolve. We are seeing this now. Cursive will never die because there are people out there that are well adapted to its use.
Schools will eventually understand the things I learned long ago. They will learn to classify and improve their students writing strengths and provide them with good tools to improve them rather than force everyone into a style of expression that does not fit them.
What about other languages? (Score:1, Insightful)
While Japan probably has the largest percentage of people using cell-phones and the such to type, only the older part of the population still hold the skill.
A skilled calligraphist(?) can easily make a fortune out of just working just producing piece after piece of philosophical and wise statements about life. Each piece can be from a rather small A4 sheet to a massive piece that can cover your whole wall. Those large pieces can easily cost more than a grand, depending on the style, and the words used. Each symbol/word can take as long as ten seconds for each one, so imagine trying to write an essay like that
I usually type whatever I can myself, as my cursive is illegible, and my handwriting in general is ugly. There has been times when I lost my train of thought because I was crossing out my last sentence
Don't fight evolution (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps its time to move on.
Or put another way, not many people really know how to make fire with two sticks, or a piece of flint. Should we lament the loss of archaic skills, or look forward to the next leap?
Ummm (Score:2, Insightful)
Bullshit and brainwashing (Score:2, Insightful)
"'They've got good handwriting now, and they love cursive,' Bolton says as her students filter in from recess."
--I haven't met a child that likes cursive. That's a load of crock.
And the brainwashing:
"The truth is, boys and girls, even if you write a lot of e-mail on the computer, you will always need to write things down on paper at some point in your life," Boell says. "The letters you write to people are beautiful, and they'll cherish them forever. Have any of you ever received an e-mail that you cherished?"
The students eagerly shout, "No!" and return to loops and curves.
--Hey; I have e-mails saved from years ago that I cherish. I have them in an imap folder or printed out.
A better conversation, perhaps, is how kids can't spell anymore becuase spellcheck (and particularly autocorrect type things) make it unnecessary to do so. If I type nieghbor instead of neighbor and it gets automatically and invisibly changed each and every time, I'm not a slave to the red wavy underline and have no reason to realize or correct my false use of the i before e rule. What should be done about that?
Perhaps a plug in into Word and clones that proactively helps correct the spelling of the user not just the document. I'm serious about this.
Re:In other news... (Score:2, Insightful)
Cursive was created as a faster way to write back when people wrote a LOT because you didn't have to pick up your pen between words. It was a shortcut. However, cursive isn't that much faster and usually is very difficult to read. No one in any type of work environment would ever be allowed to submit or do anything in cursive because it's difficult to read, nor should they. The purpose of the written language is communication, clear, effective communication. Cursive no longer fills that role adequately.
What is the reason to learn cursive in todays age? What benefit does it provide? I do my signature in cursive but that's about it. Why waste years of education on it? If someone really wants to learn cursive, there are plenty of books out there on it. Don't shove it down their throats. Instead teach something useful, like typing. My 2 typing classes in High School have probably provided me with the most utility out of any High School course (except things like English and Math). I still type 100+ words/minute and the skill will become more important not less. With everything in the world going digital why shouldn't we replace cursive with typing classes?
School isn't supposed to be some old stuffy academics way of burdening us with their views on life, it's supposed to be a place where we learn skills that will prepare us for interacting successfully in society.
Don't get me wrong, yes I agree handwriting can be beautiful. I practice Gothic Calligraphy for just that reason, not only is it peaceful but I love the way the characters look - I think that old manuscripts have much more charm and characters than any book printed in the past 60 years (I'm also a bibliophile).
However, this doesn't mean I expect everyone else to have to be just like me.
This is similar to the thread slashdot had up a couple of weeks ago about 'base technology' and slashdot readers. Yes, I like researching old technology. I'm even planning on purchasing the AT Library just because I think it's that cool. But that doesn't mean I think all students should have to learn how to make brick and spin thread or operate a cotton gin.
I put cursive in the same light, imho the skill no longer returns the benefits that the effort to learn it takes, for the majority of people. Take it out of the schools and use the time to teach the kids something that will provide more value.
There are still plenty of ways to learn cursive if you want to, and I don't think anyone will argue that it's really a vital skill anymore.