Conservatives are trying to prevent kids from learning history and sex ed, and we’re still hearing this bullshit lamentation about CURSIVE?
Schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid and overworked, students are graduating barely able to read and with no critical thinking skills.
Who in their right mind is actually concerned about kids learning cursive?
Things I’d rather schools focus on:
Typing, Personal finance, Current events, Technology literacy, Graphic design, Human Computer Interaction
Or maybe practical skills related to trades or how to fix things: CAD, Cooking, Electrical, Plumbing
Literally ANYTHING but this cursive crap. It’s useless, it’s dead, move on.
Now I may be a bit biased, but it would be nice if people could read my hand writing. There are just some people that write in cursive despite it not being taught. It was mentioned once in 2nd grade for me and for some reason it stuck.
My tiny quibble with your post is that I wish you had included critical thinking in your first list. Other than that this is spot on.
That being said, my kids are learning cursive and I’m happy for it. It’s not something that requires years of in depth study to learn. My third grader is only a few months into school and can already read and write cursive after just starting it this year.
But if it were gone, I wouldn’t bat an eye.
How to pay taxes and make a budget. Media literacy. Nutrition. How to drive a car. Coding. The list goes on and on.
When teaching how to drive a car they need to teach the skill of actually looking and processing what’s happening rather than just the mechanics of how to operate the vehicle.
Most people seem to drive along without any real awareness of what’s happening around them which is what causes most accidents. Sure, that car shouldn’t have pulled out in front of you from a side road, but if you’d been paying attention you would have been able to see they were doing it, and avoided the crash.
Absolutely they need to teach finance. I remember when I had to get a mortgage for my house and it was a complete slog because I had absolutely no idea how the whole process was supposed to work. The thing is its actually not that complicated, but because I didn’t know what I was doing it took forever and was stressful.
Schools teach academics. Parents teach life skills. Teachers already have enough to handle, I don’t understand this recent push to make teachers teach shit that parents should be explaining.
I somewhat agree that you can’t expect teachers to teach kids everything. A professor explained to me once that school should teach you how to learn and a degree is a demonstration of your ability to learn.
The issue I have with what you’re saying is that we know that not everyone wins the birth lottery and has two parents with the time to raise their kids properly.
Public school should be an equalizer and it shouldn’t matter what kind of family you were born into. And yes, that probably means smaller class sizes, more teachers, more specialization of teachers, or just plain giving the teachers the resources they would need to teach some of these critical things. I know teachers and know that they are underpaid and overworked, we can’t ask more of them without addressing that first.
I’m just very concerned about the long term impact to our civilization of leaving too much teaching up to parents who themselves are uneducated. There are no qualifications needed to become a parent, unlike being a teacher. Some parents that I talk to, you can’t get more than four sentences into a conversation with them before they start spouting off conspiracy theories or justifying racism and if schools aren’t allowed to teach these kids anything to the contrary then I fear for the future.
I’m also concerned about the perverse incentive that corporations have in a capitalist economy to ensure that kids aren’t properly educated. Kids who aren’t taught anything about finance are more likely to be preyed on by credit card companies, student loan sharks, etc. Corporations are constantly working to deceive us on all matter of topics and kids need to have at least a baseline of understanding of some of these things or they will get screwed over really easily.
Im kind of with you. It’s going to come off as arrogant, but in HS and college I feel like learned how to learn new things. I was never taught how to get a mortgage by my parents…nor any financial stuff for that matter. I learned it all myself. I read up on investing, when I went to get a mortgage I read up on that and learned the ins and outs. I learned the basics of retirement planning all on my own…because I grew up in a wealthy area where they could focus on these things due to socio-economic reasons.
On the other hand, other people are not so lucky and these are vital life skills. If we aren’t going to be able to teach everyone how to really learn, we should probably be teaching them some of these common and basic life skills.
To be fair, it’s trivially easy to learn cursive and it’s basically always been an extension of penmanship.
Why is penmanship anything that we care about now? Who writes things outside of notes?
But why do children need to be required to learn it when there are more pressing skills that they need?
I’ve never been in a situation where penmanship mattered. Typing skills on the other hand are abysmal across the board and hamper my coworkers constantly.
It’s an easy way to teach fine motor control.
It really isn’t. Some people have a talent for it, most don’t.
So is something useful, like typing.
Or disassembling electornics, which ice used way more than fucking cursive.
I’m really confused by all of these not being on the curriculum. I went to secondary school in the 90s in the UK. I had learned joined up writing in early primary school (which was what you used to write essays and coursework) and I had both an electronics class where we soldered circuits and IT class where typing improvement games were available.
Y’all don’t use whiteboards?
How are you supposed to do any of this when your brain hemispheres aren’t connected? If you don’t link your letters, you ain’t wire your brain cells. /s
I once saw a post on Facebook claiming this unironically. I learned cursive (or a simplified version I think) in school and thought it’s still the standard until I saw the Facebook post and was like “so what”. How can people get so emotional about such details? Teach your kid cursive at home when it’s so important for you! Oh, you don’t have kids but a strong opinion about education? Share it on Facebook! I’m not there anymore and for a while now.
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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
lol mixing up language with its orthography system. Classic error
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.
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.
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.
Beowulf is old English. Shakespeare is nothing like old English.
Who the fuck understands old english??
People who need to or want to out of personal interest, just like it should be with cursive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We learned cursive in second grade, meaning that when I was eight years old I knew how to write in cursive. Now I can still read it, but have very little idea of how to write it.
The only time I ever use cursive is when I write my signature, and it’s mostly just loops and squiggles.
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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
That’s the only “font” taught as cursive to Americans. I’ve never seen anything like yours referred to as cursive
Well I’m pretty sure you don’t, since handwriting doesn’t have “fonts”.
Stay in school, kids.
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.
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?
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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.
You can read other people’s signatures, the constitution and notes from your older lawyer.
Every lawyer I’ve worked with has used email for everything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hate cursive.
Agreed.
I had to learn it in elementary school, and for some extended amount of time, all schoolwork had to use it. Then for a while after that (a few years) some teachers would still require it. Best part was when they’d critique your handwriting too, so it was an aspect of your work that you didn’t gain points for, but that you could certainly lose points. I remember one poor girl that came in to our district in like 6th grade, after we’d already had all our training in it. She turned in a paper and I guess was just supposed to know not to print. The teacher made her redo it in cursive…and then didn’t like the way she drew a certain letter (different than how the school taught it), so she started subtracting a point for each time that letter appeared or something, so this girl ended up with like a -2 out of 10 or some shit. I guess the issue was worked out somehow but I remember even as a kid thinking “wow what a dick move”.
As soon as the requirements from teachers stopped, I quit using cursive and have never once ever needed to use it since (aside from my signature).
Not once.
It’s something interesting to learn and I think it’s definitely worth teaching kids how to read it and how to write with it themselves…but it should be something that’s like…a few weeks of instruction per year, from grades 3-5. Not all year, not required in all subjects. Just “a few weeks each year, we teach the kids this skill and then give them a refresher”. Maybe require it in “cursive month” each of those years, and certainly accept it anytime. But way less emphasis than my school put on it.
I hate “formal” cursive, but the concept is solid – economy of motion, or time, or whatever. In fact, I’ve realized that some of my printing looks like cursive if I write quickly. Cursive that just looks pretty can go fuck itself.
I was taught how to do joined up writing I. Primary school (no idea if that’s cursive though) as soon as I was told in secondary school that I didn’t have to write joined up, I stopped. I’ve always struggled reading cursive, if I play a game and it has it for journals then I can’t read it at all. Especially when it’s older style cursive like from the 1800s or early 1900s.
if I play a game and it has it for journals then I can’t read it at all
I greatly appreciate all the games that have the feature to see the text of these types of things in a standard font. I appreciate the design/immersion of using cursive or handwritten text, too, but allowing me to consume it in a much more legible format is a very welcome feature.
That’s so weird. All through middle school we were expected to write in cursive so that’s all I write in.
I thought cursive was the American word for joined up handwriting, but reading this thread I don’t really get what it means.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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?
Where’s the RFC for Lemmy by post office?
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…
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I see some comments of people angrily hating cursive, and that’s something a bit weird to me. Why the hate?
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?
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.
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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Yes. We are taught to “Print” first, and then taught cursive but reassured its not that serious or important to know how, because we will be expected to write in print on everything academic.
To me that sounds like not learning how to write.
You can scoff but back in the old days before computers were that common academic papers were required to be printed not in cursive because it was hard to read cursive.
So academia has always used print.
Seriously go look at scans of research papers written in the 19th century, and tell me that you can understand a word of what they’re saying.
That makes sense, I used to use printed small caps for my revision notes for the same reason.
Interessing. In France, you are expected to write cursive until you are 11 years old, when you enter collège (junior high).
Wow, I love that. American education did the same thing 50 years ago, but we made this change towards forcing students to write print. Nowadays they probably type a lot more than write, but there are still some brutally long written essays.
I believe it is a small wax tablet, where the letters are chipped out with a sharp tool.
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The key to zero waste is to eat the wax shavings.
In are first year in the 90s we were taught block letters - plain text. In our second year we were taught what England would call “fancy”, only we were taught it as if it were a different language to plain text, named cursive, which is really only used for signing your name on checks. In the 00s this switched to typing, so no one after the 90s learned how to read it.
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What about when they want to read an old letter from a relative, study notes from a senior, archive document, manuscript of work of literature they love or a fancy font ?
Ask ChatGPT to translate and summarize it.
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Cursive is dumb anyways. Let’s have a second way to write that’s harder To do, less legible, and designed for old school fountain pens no one uses that have difficulty with upstrokes
Harder to write? It’s easier and faster. I take it you don’t know how to write cursive?
It takes significantly more effort and has poor results.
It certainly wasn’t in the 3rd grade and it isn’t now
It’s way faster and super easy…
It was painful, tedious, and slow.
It sounds like your school sucked.
Seems like we all had the same experience
I use fountain pens on the daily and would never dream of trying to do cursive.
Let’s all go back to learning shorthand!
This is what my arthritic handwriting looks like anyway…
Weird they call it shorthand. That looks like a lot of writing just to say “Gregg.”
Shorthand is pretty badass. My mother knows how to read and write it, and I envy the speed at which she can take notes. A bonus for her was that she could write stuff down when we were kids and nobody could read it.
I always wanted to learn, but the farthest I ever got was professional level typing. My mother in law is a paralegal and says she rarely ever uses it anymore.
wait, that’s an actual script? I thought it was just slang!
Court reporters learn it. They can transcribe conversations by hand. It’s pretty wild. From what I understand of it, each symbol is a word, or combination of words.
Its more just writing the sounds with othet short cuts.
Harder to read, but easier to write.
And not that it matters but there are still fountain pen users, makers, influencers and all that, it’s a niche hobby now.
So, so much harder to write. Painful, tedious, and unnatural.
I mean I don’t see how? it’s the equivalent of swiping vs typing on the phone
Maybe I’m weird, but I still prefer to type vs swipe too. Swipe is super inaccurate and I spend more time fixing errors than typing
And you make more errors with swiping than if you had a physical keyboard.
I have 20-30 fountain pens. Negative on the cursive.
Unrelated, what’s your EDC?
What’s an EDC?
Also enjoy how that commend apparently made people sad lol.
Every day carry?
Im cursive myself but to each their own.
I have a Procyon Platinum, but I stopped carrying it because it would run dry if not left flat. I have not yet found a fountain pen that will work for me if carried vertically in a pocket or backpack.
As far as my preferred daily users, it’s the TWSBI Eco–they hold a whole lot of ink and flow very well. I have rolls full of pen after pen I have acquired over the years. It’s always the Eco that I go back to. I should probably focus my collection there!
Decent choice, and very collectible, I recommend the twsbi VAC mini and the diamond 580 series as they both have decent capacity and are wet writers, a bit more $ mind you but not astronomical
Harder to do? The whole point of cursive is for easier writing. Writing print by hand is what makes no sense. It’s more legible, but print is called print for a reason.
On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a standard for cursive in the US. When I learned to write in 1st grade in my country, there was an official cursive alphabet and everybody learned the same one. But my daughter started learning cursive now in the US (3rd grade) and because the letters she’s learning are very different from the ones I learned, I looked up what American cursive looks like. Every single source I found on the subject had a different alphabet.
Whichever cursive my (US) schools taught all those ages ago was cumbersome and nonsensical. Nothing about it was easy.
Going by the feedback from Americans in this thread, cursive is “fancy-pants writing” so yeah, if your teachers were of the same mind they probably prioritized teaching whatever they thought would pair well with a powdered wig (basically calligraphy) rather than whatever would be quick to write and easy to read.
As someone who lives in a country where cursive still dominates handwriting styles, I find all these discussions… curious. As a country you managed to lose the ability to handwrite efficiently, and as far as I can tell it’s because of conservatism missing the point of cursive.
Well, it’s also not like we have to hand-write anything these days.
We don’t hand-write more than Americans, yet we use cursive. And today’s young adults still spent their entire childhood/teenage years hand-writing at school (and even though kids today have more computers in classrooms, they don’t use a keyboard for everything, nor do I think they necessarily should).
So at least for that phase of life, writing quickly and efficiently is still a worthy goal. You can write however you want of course, but so many people choosing to let go of cursive tells me that it wasn’t taught properly.
But yeah once you’re out of the school system you might as well write everything in capital letters (that’s definitely my go-to on paper forms to spare others the chicken scratches I use on personal notes).
That was my experience too
