The only times I used cursive was to sign my name on important documents. Now I don’t even do that anymore. I just write my name with normal letters without lifting the pen.
I just use a specific sort of squiggle that only I can reproduce and have used it for decades.
When I turned 18 and had to sign my social security card with my full name, I had to look up how to do the capital letter in my middle name in cursive because the last time I wrote one was in third grade in the early 2000’s
Signing just means write your name but real fast ad sloppy
My signature is anything from a sine to cosine wave. Doesn’t matter as long as it’s sined.
It’s just a phase you’re going through.
Americans why are they like this?
Faster and easier than copying a typeface.
"Omg it’s so hard. It might as well be in Chinese "
"Omg it’s so hard. It might as well be in Chinese "
Chinese Simplified enters the chat
Oh no, this clock has hands, how am I supposed to know what time it is? Why can’t it just display the time?
Ok… 21:35
Wait, not like that!
A great deal of our education system is intended to coerce us into acting a certain way. We are rushed the cursive and told as children that its useless because we can’t use it on essays in school.
We are taught languages slowly, rote, and in a very boring way so that we learn a lot but never become fluent.
Most of all, we are taught that math is highly abstract and useless, because math is one skill that can raise someone working class to being worth a very high wage.
You can’t do essays with joined up writing…? Or is cursive more than that?
Nope, it.won’t be accepted unless your teacher was very old. You either handwrite in print or for the most part these days submit a printed out or digitally submitted copy
Mad.
No essays must be written in print. Not cursive and that’s just standard across academia.
It’s really weird they bring it up, because they teach you how to write in a way that they don’t actually want you to write. In the past I suppose you were expected to write like that if you were doing anything formal (letters to the bank manager) but since no one does that anymore it’s a bit of a moot point.
I don’t remember people ever writing cursive like what I was taught growing up. People just self-servingly turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day. The kid who can’t read our B-movie elvish script isn’t the one with literacy issues.
We either write within the ballpark of standardization, or we don’t. I think kids should be required to put in as much effort into learning cursive, as people put into actually writing cursive. Which is to say, absolutely none at all.
(Sorry to people who actually write legible, clean cursive. I wish I got to read your output in the wild.)
You’re just not old enough. Cursive was everywhere when I was a kid. They should still teach it to children because children learn language and writing easier than adults do. We should be able to read cursive. It is part of our language, and our history. Every old document is written in cursive. We shouldn’t end up with a society that can’t even read its original Constitution. That’s just Idiocracy.
Do you read old English?
On a regular basis? No. Ever? Of course. Shakespeare is written in old English, the original translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and the King James Bible, to name a few things.
Beowulf is old English. Shakespeare is nothing like old English.
The King James Bible is pretty much modern English. Shakespeare too. They actually sort of standardized modern English. Old English, the language,not just English that is old, looks like Icelandic or weird German and is maybe 500 years older than that, give or take.
Edit: Everyone who down voted your comment is dumb. Being willing to learn new things is a mark of high intelligence. Being grateful for the opportunity to learn is the sign of wisdom. Those who downvote you should instead emulate you. If we punish people for being happy to learn, they won’t want to learn.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the correction.
We are all constantly learning. Thank you for participating in this group discussion.
Look at you two fucking learning and being civil and shit.
Love it. Appreciate you both.
Who the fuck understands old english??
People who need to or want to out of personal interest, just like it should be with cursive.
I remember an English teacher when I was at school talking about how he was teaching Beowulf to A level students and that it was very difficult for him as well not just the students.
Pretty much only scholars. JRR Tolkien did, for example. The Rohirrim in the LOTR trilogy basically speak a form of Mercian Old English, if I recall correctly.
Shakespeare is modern English with some old words. This is Old English.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version
Thanks for the example and the correction.
I grew up in a house with a rotary phone and a meticulously maintained phone book (written in cursive.) If I’m too young to have been able to reliable hone my cursive-parsing skills, what can we expect of younger generations?
The Flynn effect suggests people are generally getting smarter, remembering things better, etc. Something is happening to cause younger generations to be generally better than their ancestors. IQ scores have their problems but it’s still a hopeful sign.
Different circles I guess then. Everyone I knew wrote in cursive when I was younger. Regarding your intelligence comment, it’s not an intelligence issue, just an education and exposure issue. Learning cursive is easier than learning to write all-together, but if you’re never taught, and you’re not exposed to it, then you’re probably not going to learn it. It’s such a simple thing to learn that I don’t understand the aversion everyone on this thread has towards it. It’s pretty nice when you have to write a lot of text, like taking notes or journaling.
The aversion in my case comes from seeing time being wasted on that when teachers could use it to teach much more useful things or making sure that kids learned everything else they’ve been taught.
Language changes. Teaching an entire script to be able to read translated documents when there are practical skills that could be taught instead is silly.
We don’t teach old English anymore, even though there’s a huge amount of our cultural history contained in it.
We don’t even teach people about the eras when we used to use “f” in place if “s”, and that’s right in the middle of the constitution.Can you read the original magna carta? America would not be unique amongst English speaking nations in having issues dealing with language drift.
lol mixing up language with its orthography system. Classic error
feels like a lot of older people just use cursive as an excuse to cover up bad handwriting, because it’s harder to tell when it’s all squiggly in the first place
like, there’s a reason we don’t write in fancy serif typefaces, that would result in most people’s writing being even less legible than it already is.
The thing is, it’s easy to read good cursive. It’s just another script. It took me 5 episodes of Last Exile to memorize the Greek equivalents to English letters so I could read all the text without looking up the translation guide. But when their writing looks like Jack Lew’s signature, there’s not a whole lot I can do to decipher it
Yes but really only the artistically minded and those with great manual dexterity have even a slim chance of doing it well. The rest has to write letters hundreds of times while their classmates go to recess.
I used to have really legible, accurate cursive. Someone made me feel embarrassed for still using cursive in middle school, so I stopped using it.
Now I can’t remember cursive well enough to use it quickly, and my print looks like an elementary child did it. ALL CAPS print is a good way for me to make my print more legible
turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day
But that’s cursive, isn’t it? I always considered cursive the script to be written when you just quickly need to write something down,being the style where the pen is raised the least, which happens to be the fastest way to write, at the cost of legibility. So cursive to me seems like the opposite of fancy.
The thing is that back in the day you were expected to hand write all of your college assignments and printing or typewriting were not allowed. Because of that, it took decades and decades for enough older educators to die before people could use a computer for homework.
Right. Depending on how old you are, you may have or did have older relatives who wrote in impeccable cursive. My grandmother, for example, who was a high school teacher from the 1940s through to the 70s, wrote cursive that looked almost machine-made because it was so perfect. But they actually taught penmanship as its own subject back when she was a kid in the 1930s.
Well,my teachers at the least insisted that cursive must be written perfectly, or you had to write it again.
As in, “rewrite the assignment because the arch on this lower case n is too high”.I only had that in primary school, because it’s important to have legible handwriting (so the teachers can properly grade you being one of the reasons), and it’s easier to change behaviours early on in life before they become habits, but after that I never had anyone insist on or expect perfect handwriting.
Cursive was taught separately from print. In elementary school an assignment wouldn’t be accepted in print, and afterwards it wouldn’t be accepted in cursive.
In this thread:
Americans: Why do I need to learn it when I can just type?
The World: It’s literally just writing. You don’t want to learn how to write??
Well it’s not “just writing”, it’s a second, wholly distinct type of writing from our primary form of writing, and its use is usually reserved for writing personal letters, which is something nobody actually does anymore.
If “cursive” has no meaning to you because it’s “just how you write”, then you have your explanation for why Americans don’t like it. We’re taught to write in print for everything important. And that means that everything important that we read is also in print. So cursive is just an extraneous form of writing, that the reasons to use are shrinking by the day.
That’s the point of my comment though. I think most of the world does see it as the primary form of writing. Block letter are used only for the most official documents.
It’s the same in the US for the most part. Block letters are used for official documents, however that is generally the only hand writing anyone in the US actually does. Do people outside of the U.S. write a lot of personal letters or something?
I also wonder what type of writing non-US citizens are using. Because contrary to expectation, people in the U.S. do very commonly use a type of joined-up writing when writing personal notes, in journals, or on like greeting cards, but it is very distinct from what would be called “cursive”.
I feel like I’m going mad with this thread now. I write all the time be it notes or whatever, when I’m literally on a computer too. Weren’t post-its created in the US? What do you do with them just stick them around? Notebooks at school? Do they exist anymore? Or is everyone just using their expensive smartphones as notepads now?
My mind is being blown by how little it seems you guys are using one of the most basic building blocks of society!
In American high schools many have tablets or laptops for school work and note taking. Some American high schools still have you do written reports instead of typed, but you’re not allowed to use cursive, you have to print.
Overall you’re correct that handwriting as a whole has seen a steep decline in American culture, but it still exists in relative abundance, it’s just that the remaining use cases for it preclude the use of cursive writing.
It sounds like the use cases are specifically being reduced because of restrictions on using it within the same school system where it’s being taught. Which is just… odd.
America’s institutions writ large are dysfunctional and falling apart at the seams. Part of the rot is outdated pratices that are continuing seemingly only because the very elderly exclusively tasked with running things insist on them out of pure tradition and nothing else. Cursive is seen in this light by many people, me included, since it’s outdated and useless and for some mildly traumatic
You could say that, although I wouldn’t call it odd. Non-cursive print is more legible across a wider group of writers, so the restrictions make sense. There’s a reason the legal documents in even your country of origin are printed and not written in cursive script. It’s a choice of practicality over elegance which is just kinda indicative of American culture as a whole.
Everything I write with a pen or pencil uses unconnected letters and I don’t ever.think about joining letters up unless someone unearths elementary school era trauma
Just my personal experience, but American kids are taught cursive in elementary school (around age 8) and then basically told not to use it in favor of the print lettering they learned first.
Schools require all assignments to be written in print, and I can’t remember the last time I saw cursive “out in the wild.” It’s just not used in daily life unless you make a habit of using it in your personal writing/notes. The only time it ever comes up again in American schools is where certain statewide exams or college applications or something will require you to write a paragraph in cursive and then grade you on the quality of your cursive. The emphasis is put on the shape of the lettering, not the speed vs readability of the writing. So for most people, their experience with cursive is being taught a skill they’re not supposed to use as a child, and then being judged for not using it almost a decade later because being able to write in it is supposed to make you look better for college admissions or something. Hence the hate.
Most Americans generally write in something with some degree of the style of a cursive script but with clearly defined and separated lettering, like D’Nealian print. But our society heavily favors print writing in basically all facets of life and “true” cursive largely feels like something you pull out for special or formal occasions - like writing the annual Christmas card to grandma, or when you’re printing up wedding invitations or something.
I see some comments of people angrily hating cursive, and that’s something a bit weird to me. Why the hate?
personally i’m left handed so school-taught cursive was much harder for me to write and t never got faster than block-letters (not sure what to call it, to me handwriting means non cursive and i would specify cursive but i know in other parts of the world that’s different so in this message i’ll use “block letters” to specific non-cursive) assuming i ever needed to read stuff again.
but i think the main reason people hate it because a lot of people have terrible cursive handwriting. if it took the writer 25% less time to write but it takes the reader 2x as long to read… that’s fuckin annoying lol. i’m all for people using it for their personal notes but there’s a LOT of people who shouldn’t be using cursive for anything anyone else has to read.
I used to do data entry for the post office and the number of people who addressed their letters with terrible cursive was way too high. the OCR could interpret most block-letter handwritten addresses but it couldn’t handle as many of the cursive ones because the characters are more ambiguous. often to read people’s cursive you need to use more context (ex. disambiguating through the words around it) which just isn’t possible for an address.
for people using “block letters” the OCR would only fail on like, cards for grandma addressed by little kids and times when the scan cropped out the edge of the writing. but we got tons of shitty cursive handwriting.
i later delivered mail for the post office and the distribution of block-letter vs cursive style handwriting was very different - more block-letter than cursive. making the overrepresentation of cursive amongst illegible addresses during my data entry time even more significant. it’s not a perfect sample data set but i keyed thousands of letters per day during the data entry job and when i did delivery i’d say dozens of the letters i sorted were addressed by hand most days so it was enough enough to give me strong opinions.
Because it’s impossible to read. Seriously it’s just random squiggles It could be in Arabic for all I know.
If you want to write notes to yourself in cursive go ahead I don’t care but as soon as you need to communicate with other members of the human race it’s inappropriate. Especially if you also have poor handwriting.
You’re explaining why you dislike it and why you prefer that it’s not used, but why the hate towards other people simply because they use it?
My kids are learning cursive and I’m glad they are doing so.
But one of the main point of cursive was to be able to write more quickly, and typing has absolutely replaced that need, many times over. And also you learn print first, so not learning how to write cursive doesnt mean you don’t learn to write.
Ironically, your post is supposed to be insulting Americans for not being smart, but God damn is the point fucking stupid and ignorant.
It wasn’t meant to be insulting to Americans, the hate for learning to join up letters and write quickly just doesn’t really make sense to the rest of us.
You know what’s stupid and fucking ignorant? Assuming everyone has a laptop on them all the time. Do people really not write notes anymore? Handwriting notes is much more conducive to learning than typing and is a basic skill that aids education at all levels.
You can take notes without cursive. Even if it’s technically faster, most people’s cursive is an illegible scrawl, often even to themselves. I can scribble really fast, too, but so what?
This is somewhere between annoying and a minor problem for most things. It became downright dangerous when doctors would write out a prescription, and the pharmacist would misread the dose by an order of magnitude or more.
Also, I like using fountain pens, and I find I have to slow down anyway for the flow to be right. Modern one’s don’t tend to dribble ink the way an old quill pen might, so lifting it from the page is no problem.
Yeah you can also learn shorthand and take notes super fast. But that is a completely different language. Cursive is literally just joining up letters you are already learning at that point in school.
Cursive is not just joining letters, at least how I was taught. Cursive is a completely different way of writing that involves specifically no up strokes. That’s separate from “joined writing” which is a term I haven’t heard before this thread.
I would call that calligraphy, not cursive. The cursive I was taught in the US has many upstrokes and you only lift your pen at the end to cross t and x and dot I and j.
I think this may be the crux of the issue. Nobody was taught a consistent ‘cursive’. We were all taught basically different dialects, without really realizing it, so nobody can read anyone else’s cursive
I mean, that was also what I learned in the UK. We used fountain pens specifically so that it had to be no upstrokes, but the alphabet wasn’t as complex and dated as some people are posting examples of.
I think “joined up” is just the trashy crude way we call it! I think I had heard of the band Cursive before knowing what it was.
You know what’s stupid and fucking ignorant? Assuming everyone has a laptop on them all the time.
You’re right, that is stupid. Thats why most of us use smartphones, the fuck?
Yeah, it’s definitely not ignorant to assume everyone in the world can afford an expensive smart phone for every child to replace a simple pen and paper…
You forgot that kids are taught how to write before they’re forced Into cursive hell
I just don’t get why its such hell to join up the letters! At least when we learned in the UK it was emphasised large versions of the ones we would join up later. I remember the capitals and small next to each other with all the small letters having curly bits before we learned to join them.
Anyone who is actively participating in society in a first world country can afford a cheap smartphone. And if you live in the U.S. and somehow can’t afford one, the government will give you one for free. So it isn’t so much “ignorant” as it is “accurate”
Ah yes, such accuracy. Fuck everyone that’s not in the US.
Having to rely on my government to give me a smart phone, so I can take notes in class, is one of the oddest things I’ve heard to “prove” kids should not be taught a basic skill.
That’s the neat part, you don’t have to rely on the government to give you a smart phone to take notes in class. You can still take handwritten notes without cursive. It’s really very easy. It almost sounds like you don’t even know how to write legibly in print?
Where’s the RFC for Lemmy by post office?
I’ve got a phone on me far more than I have a writing instrument, let alone paper: and I suspect that is true for the overwhelming majority of people.
I’ll even just give you that cursive improves retention and learning and fine motor skills (there are studies that go either way, and my personal experience is that it did nothing at all, but fig leaf): is the benefit worth the time versus just having more time in class for the subjects in question?
You’ll give it to me? Thanks I guess. All I’ve seen are studies that show the brain learns better when using handwriting over typing.
I also tend to have a smartphone on me all the time, but if I’m in a situation to take notes, I’ll always bring some writing implement. I’m not taking notes in an office meeting on my phone for numerous reasons and even when I’m at a multiscreen computer I still want to take physical notes.
If you’re giving the idea that cursive improves retention and learning then I would say yes definitely.
It’s a revision technique you can use for every exam, at the cost of what? a year of lessons once a week or so? (I have no idea how long cursive is learned for to be fair, I just learned to join writing in English while learning other stuff, seems like a weird thing to specifically have a lesson for to me).
My point is you’re not going to learn a meaningful amount extra with that time, you’re already dividing dividing your time by 10 or so subjects, having 10% more learning in each subject for 1 year out of the 11-15ish years in education won’t make a noticeable difference, certainly not more than learning an effective revision method for exams.
Just my opinion anyway. As a kid I used to argue with teachers all the time that I shouldn’t have to write things by hand because I’d be typing the rest of my life anyway. That doesn’t help in office meetings taking notes though and even when I have a laptop the notes are no better honestly. I feel like if I learned to write then barely did it ever again it would be so slow that it would be a genuine disadvantage.
It wasn’t meant to be insulting to Americans, the hate for learning to join up letters and write quickly just doesn’t really make sense to the rest of us.
Lol this is like the best example of pissing on my foot and telling me it’s raining.
You know what’s stupid and fucking ignorant? Assuming everyone has a laptop on them all the time.
And if I had argued that we shouldn’t need to learn cursive because everyone has a laptop all the time, this wouldn’t be a completely fucking stupid argument. Alas, I did not.
I also almost never write in cursive and know how. I can count on one hand how many times in my life I was like “oh crap! I should switch over to cursive to save some time!” and I lost all the fingers on that hand in a freak grenade accident (joking).
This is especially stupid because I actually support kids learning cursive. It’s just a skill that is much less important than it was 50 years ago and so I don’t particularly care either way if kids learn it.
You can just admit you were wrong, its much easier than trying to pile on more nonsense to justify the ignorant insult.
I was wrong about what exactly? My facetious point about American and World views on the matter? I still think it was on point despite not being 100% serious.
It’s absolutely commonplace in the UK to learn this at an extremely young age and not something that “takes up valuable learning time”. It seems weird not to learn it. How about we don’t learn how to paint either because most people don’t have use for watercolours in their daily life?
I think the fact I’m being down voted by the Americans who don’t want to learn cursive is kind of a hilarious confirmation.
There’s no need to learn cursive, it serves no functional purpose that typing cannot match. Other than your signature, which… you have to learn how to do separate to cursive anyway to protect yourself from fraud by making it as unique and as difficult to replicate as possible.
Good luck typing something when you have no electronic device nearby or no power. I know we live in a connected, techno-cebtric world now, but it’s wild to think that this simple skill is no longer valued at all by some.
Also, your signature being the thing protecting you from fraud is quite hilarious from a European perspective too!
Since the invention of the smartphone I haven’t been without an electronic device nearby for a single moment. And if by some chance I find myself in this incredibly unlikely scenario, a power outage that’s long enough to outlast my phone battery, and for some reason desperately need to write something down, I could just write it down in print. That is, if I can even find a piece of paper and a writing utensil. I just don’t think the few times over the course of my life that this incredibly unlikely scenario happens, will make it somehow worth it to learn and remember a second form of hand writing when the first will do.
those who never learned
FTFY
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What’s the advantage though? What benefits does this have besides being able to read book covers written by people out of touch with their audience?
The advantage of learning it is being able to read when other people write with it.
I’m not saying it’s common, but it’s not hard to learn to read and I’m sure you will come across it at some point.
being able to read when other people write with it.
They can write legibly if they want me to read what they write.
It’s not that someone is going to write something they want you to read.
It’s more about someone wrote something and by chance you want to read it. The only problem is that it’s in cursive, you can’t.
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To start, I’m pro teaching/learning cursive. To respond, my brain barely works fast enough to have letters for print, speeding up the writing isn’t the bottleneck.
You know what’s faster? Taka Taka on my keyboard.
Fair point, but if you’re worrying about speed more than anything else, you’re probably writing quite a bit and you’re more than likely taking notes of some sort.
The motor skills involved in writing things down by hand seems to aid memory more than typing it out does. Taka taka’s fun, faster, and not nearly as wasteful, but I’m choosing to stick with my 9,000 pens for retention
My RSI will take taka taka any day.
For you personally? Probably not much. For us as a society? Well, being able to read our laws and history in their original form is pretty important.
Since when did you have access to the original writing of some law? If you want to find out a law today, you go on a government website.
Not really, they’ve been transcribed and the people who need to be able to read the originals can learn just like people learn Latin if they need it, not as a mandatory language in school.
Transcriptions are easy to alter. Kids learn reading and writing, and language in general much faster than adults. You can spend an hour a day for a few months with a kid and they’ll have it down pat.
You really think people are gonna go down to the basement in DC and reason.the original documents and failure to read those is how we lose our rights? Stuff like the patriot act are bigger threats
Future legislatures will. I don’t like the idea of nobody in our government being able to read our laws in a generation.
Average people can view the original Constitution when taking a tour, and it’s pretty neat to be able to read the original. Like a lot of things in education, knowing them won’t necessarily be very useful, but they can provide for a richer, more fulfilling life.
It’s easy to learn cursive and compare if you’re that paranoid about it (although being extremely good at reading cursive doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to read all documents written in cursive), it doesn’t mean everyone needs to learn it.
I use it when writing text along side math or diagrams, to differentiate it. I write cursive notes and use print to add emphasis. It’s also much easier to write legibly at a higher speed, which I’ll admit was more important before we typed as much as we do now. My cursive is at least as legible as my printing.
You can read other people’s signatures, the constitution and notes from your older lawyer.
Signatures, not so much.
Lots of completely illegible signatures out there lol
You can read other people’s signatures
Why would you want to
the constitution
Plenty of verified print versions floating out there
notes from your older lawyer
If I’m paying someone 100$/minute, they’d better be able to write in print upon request
You could have your doctored and not be able to read my signature.
Every lawyer I’ve worked with has used email for everything.
z doesn’t look like that in cursive, nor do most of the capital listed you listed Better to just post an image of the correct versions
That is how z looks in cursive.
They’re the same thing.
I literally linked to an image showing exactly what it should look like.
That’s just a different font.
I hope you know what fonts are.Edit. Apparently not, lol
Well I’m pretty sure you don’t, since handwriting doesn’t have “fonts”.
I am so tired of Americans like you thinking that the whole world revolves around them.
That moment when you find out fonts are older than the printing press.
Stay in school, kids.
That’s the only “font” taught as cursive to Americans. I’ve never seen anything like yours referred to as cursive
This is so puzzling to me, here in Brazil everyone writes in cursive, we all learned fine as children, it exists because it’s easier and faster to write with it and you are going to write a lot during all your school life.
One thing I’ve picked up from these threads over time is that different places mean different things by “cursive”.
In some places it’s treated as “how to write legibly by hand quickly” and in others it’s more of a formal writing system designed for signatures and the like.
For example, we were required to use it while learning it, and then told not to use it for handwritten assignments once we left elementary school. It was preferred that things were written using print or typed was strongly preferred.Kids now don’t even have to write by hand as much, because typing is a vastly more practical skill.
In the US, my kids have done most assignments online since middle school. They’ve never needed cursive except for the brief refresher every year, and the occasional legal thing, such as a signature card to get a bank account.
Although, I’m amused that my kid in 11th grade now has to hand-write some assignments for the first time, as a reaction to generative ai.
Eh not really. I write with the same speed using both cursive and normal writing.
And both look terrible when you are forced to write under pressure and time limits.
That’s probably because you’re more experienced with one. The whole point of cursive is more efficient writing
For me I was taught cursive in elementary school, but it felt like I couldn’t keep up writing assignments so i just stuck with printing which evolved to chicken scratch notes.
Or…people can stop being catered too because they are uneducated. I’m sick of things being dumbed down to suit the lowest common denominator.
to*
Blame phones. Again, catering to the lowest in terms of function
Normally I’m totally on the side of the younger generations as I see how tough things have been made for them- this however, I have no sympathy for.
Why should they be forced to learn an idiotic, outdated system of writing, so they can communicate with a bunch of stubborn boomers?
My 80-something grandmother went from writing a letter in cursive to us to simply messaging us on Facebook, she found it so much easier. What’s your excuse?
What my excuse?
I’m not you.
Cursive is a pointless and outdated system that needs to die.
Oh yes. The horrifying and terrorific oppression of…writing while lifting the pen less often.
Writing by hand is an outdated system in general, the only times I write by hand, it needs to be print writing anyway.
There is absolutely no need for me to write in cursive, and the time investment to learn would never pay itself back.
Because everything needs to have ROI. Else it isn’t worth doing. Trigger warning for you, the next information might be too shocking and disturbing. Some people write by hand just for fun. I know, the horror.
If I’m required to learn something in school, there had better be a use case for it.
Yeah, fuck art! I say we haven’t banned enough books. Who needs to read fictional tales. Acquiring perspective and experience on a wide array of human endeavors is for woke pussys. Writing cursive is gay.
/s
One could argue that expecting everyone to “cater to” you by learning your preferred writing system shows the most entitlement.
They can make the book covers however they want to, but they can’t force anybody to pick up their book.
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I hate how way more school districts (at least in North America) insist on teaching kids cursive than the ones that teach kids how to touch type.
Which skill do you reckon they’ll find more valuable in their adulthood?
But does touch typing really require teaching? I learned to touch type just by typing. Gained my muscle memory naturally during regular usage.
I will say I hated being told to use home row in school, think that was only in one class though. Luckily the teacher only ever walked around every now and then. My hands were too big for home row placement.
This was slightly less than 2 decades ago, so computers were only in the computer lab and a few computer classes. This was mid aughts.
Touch typing does in fact require teaching. In the UK alone, only 20% of people can touch type fluently (https://touchtypeit.co.uk/just-how-many-people-can-touch-type). In the US, I saw a stat somewhere that was even lower at 10%, but I can’t find it again. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s accurate though.
As in, joined-up writing?
Fuck cursive. Being forced to write in that was absolute torture. The forced use of specific esoteric hand-cramping illegible scribbles is asinine.
There surely was a use for penmanship before the proliferation of ballpoint pens and typewriters, but the way it was taught while I was in school was completely backwards. The intent of writing in script is to quickly flow from one letter to another without needing to lift the nib of a quill; rote learning of individual hieroglyphs with full disregard for the writer’s natural hand movements is at best asinine, and at worst cruel.
The fact that we were tormented decades in the past doesn’t justify more torment now. Be better.
I was taught cursive and I do not remember it being anything like that. I am sorry for your experiences but I assure you they are not universal
I find cursive is very useful when writing notes that only I will ever need to read. Reading and writing another persons cursive has never been easy for me and it has never impacted my life with one exception. I cannot read post cards from my aunt. Oh, and that time a decade ago when I had to fill out the “I will not cheat” pledge on the back of the SAT.
Turns out if you need to write something with speed we have these things that are like typewriters, but they don’t even jam!
Can you read the original constitution and will your kids be able to?
I have heard of this argument many times and it never made any sense. Is it really a big deal that kids these days might have trouble reading the original 1787 hemp copy, The one they keep in a climate controlled room in dc? Even the Supreme Court Justices use print transcriptions. This always seems like a purely sentimental arguement
Found the weird ammurica fetish guy.
You mean the one that starts with “congrefs” because the long s was a thing at the time and the letter f had a different meaning?
How much time should we spend teaching school children about 200 year old antiquated orthography?
I didn’t realize that such an easy thing to teach would meet such controversy, lol. Why wouldn’t you teach such an easy thing to learn?
Because it’s a waste of time, and a lot of people were taught in a way that wasn’t the easy, quick way you seem to think it was.
The way they taught me was to write the alphabet in a new script over and over for about an hour a day twice a week for several years. If you had poor handwriting you had to do it more, and you could fail lessons based purely on “didn’t shape your cursive S correctly”.
Then you leave elementary school and teachers immediately switch to saying they won’t accept assignments in cursive, and then in highschool and college they won’t even accept handwritten.
Slide rules are also easy to learn, but we don’t teach them because there’s no point to it.
Oh no imagine not veing able to read the slaveowners manual
Voicing pride that you’ve never read the constitution of a country you don’t even live in is weirder 😬
Never tried. Apparently yes, but I sound like a child reading each word like, “yeah, that’s definitely’vested’ I’m sure!”. I doubt the next generation will except a few people.
I see your point, but I’m not sure I believe somebody could lie about it’s contents even in the distant future with how many legible copies there are.
On another note, this website exists which is super cool! https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/downloads
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I’ve never once encountered such a book. The only times I see cursive are stuff from older relatives, and they all write differently to each other so it’s just a matter of familiarity, and on headings or labels trying to look fancy.
Sometimes it comes up in old stuff for academic or personal interests but “knowing cursive” is often secondary to understanding those. Letters or papers intended for others are often perfectly legible, personal notes are a total mixed bag. (Looking at you, Charles Darwin.)
Oh, and that time a decade ago when I had to fill out the “I will not cheat” pledge on the back of the SAT.
One of the hardest sections of the SAT, right there
How the hell can be people so illiterate??
The ruling class made it a priority to bring back facism it’s way easier when you don’t read. The ‘Well do you want your starbucks person to do a good job’ doesn’t apply when you only select train your 3rd cousin to be your personal chef.
So why fund education for the peons in the mines? They can choose their choices with fear, as is tradition.If you look at the actual education that fascists are getting rid if, it’s books about race and LBGT, not cursive
Outside of being embarrassed at a restaurant and apparently books, there is very little disadvantage.
Me thinks the billionaires are probably focusing in on different items.
Are there actually restaurants that have menus in cursive? I’ve never seen one in person.
the word “menu” on the top will be in cursive, and everything else in whatever font looks fancy
Not being able to read cursive is not being illiterate
Shit, I was taught it and sometimes go “wait what’s that letter again”
How hard is it to read it???
If someone cannot read it then yes, that’s pretty much the definition of illiterate, especially given the fact that a book has well written cursiveCursive is almost exclusively used in handwriting when I come across it and the wide variety of ways people were taught to write letters + general handwriting quality issues make cursive a mess to read sometimes at no fault to the reader. Some cursive fonts have absolutely awful keening or too much noise and can be hard to read as well, which is an issue with the font and not the reader again.
I personally write in caps print because I know my handwriting sucks and I actually prioritize readability over fanciness or “not lifting my pen a lot”
How can you no read cursive? It’s just regular letters!
