The End of Cursive?:
The Washington Post has an interesting piece on the rapidly declining practice of teaching cursive writing in schools. I'm with Kos that this development is a good thing; I tend to think that cursive writing is a fairly silly thing to teach in a computer age, and I'm glad it isn't receiving the attention it once did.
Not that I object or anything... I just sort of doubt you're a regular reader.
One of the perennial bullshit lies told by grade school teachers.
In reference to the lead of that article, as someone who teaches SAT prep, I tell my students not to write in cursive because many of the graders have difficulty reading it and may hold this against them.
If I learn Klingon I'll be able to understand Klingon...
My sample size is, of course, tiny, my perspective is skewed, and so this is largely annecdotal, but many (most?) of the very smart men (and women) I've met have always had horrible handwriting. (Indeed, illegible writing seems to be a badge of honor among high-end professionals, a trait I find pretty repugnant.) Similarly, many of the boys I knew growing up who gave up on school altogether had horrid handwriting and suffered mightily through penmanship courses. (As relevant, I'm 26 years old.)
Like Orin, Kos, etc., I'm pleased to see it taken off the curriculum. I suppose I'd be disappointed if it died as an art, but seeing as how there are still caligraphers, daguerrotypists, etc., I doubt cursive will disappear altogether.
*end rant*
Thank goodness I could still write in cursive. Now I just have to hope that the graders can read it.
FWIW, my BA thesis involved reading a lot of handwritten stuff from the 1800s, and they didn't really use cursive either. It was some kind of cursive, but not the kind I learned in the 1980s.
But then, my grandmother had absolutely gorgeous, 1920's-Catholic-schoolgirl handwriting, and I always wanted to emulate it. When I began homeschooling I begged my mom for penmanship lessons, and now I do calligraphy (once this academic term is over, I'm going to start up with actual dip pens, as the cartridges tend to explode all over my pens.)
I find that little boys (under 9) do much better with cursive (and printing) if you let them do very large letters. As a bonus, if you have them drawing out 1' letters with a big stick of chalk, they also get some exercise. For the same reason, when I teach Sunday School all of our true/false quizzes involve running back and forth across a room, rather than checking little boxes.
Anyway, it's fairly silly to assert that "in the computer age" we don't need paper based communications at all (which is the assumption at the heart of "yay for computers, cursive is silly" arguments, I think.) I used to get yelled at for misreading my stepmother's bad handwriting (most often displayed in shopping lists -- I bought "cottage cheese" instead of "cat food" once, which is... well, really bad.) And whenever we have a sign-up list at church I end out having to call out "who signed up for October 18th?" and write out the person's name next to where they scribbled it down. It's common courtesy, and common sense, to have these skills at your disposal. Moreover, cursive is an easy way to add beauty to one's daily life (though to be fair, I'm also in favor of clean, well-documented codes in programming; there's nothing quite like an easy-to-read work, regardless of the language or medium.)
In the end, I currently don't have kids, and if I do have any they'll probably be homeschooled, and so my hypothetical offspring will do about as much cursive as I can convince them to do, national trends notwithstanding. But still, I think it's a shame, and likely counterproductive, to just abandon skills like this.
The new should sweep out the old when it has something significantly better to offer, but doing away with cursive is needlessly cutting ourselves off from the past. Did so many of you truly find it so oppressive a skill to learn?
Plus, it's just faster than printing. So take that.
Of course, I can still remember 5 years of Catholic grade school and 5 years of Handwriting books. Dear God, was that subject the bane of my existence.
There's also the loss of the sense of craftsmanship and the old fashioned notion that we do things not only for ourselves, but for others- we write so someone can read (theoretically at least). If you write sloppily, you don't care much for the poor schmuck who has to read it, do you?
Beyond that, most people have adopted some mutant form of cursive. Even people taught in the "good old days" didn't necesarily have good writing. My mom's cursive is inscrutible. My grandmother's was better, but not by much. My [scientist] dad writes using a block scrawl. I commonly use something in between (I learned that when I wrote really fast in cursive, even I could read what I just wrote.)
With my children in elementary school, I find cursive to be very useful in writing notes to teachers -- it's clear that a parent, and not a student, wrote the note. The rare times I write an actual ink-on-paper letter I try to go all the way and use a proper cursive. (I went to public school in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so the teachers mostly gave me "Needs Improvement" in penmanship and went on, but eventually my eye-hand coordination caught up and it's not so ugly now, though it's not as nice a proper library hand, or the proper Palmer that my parents learned, or whatever JB's authors did with dipped pens.)
Drafting was a required course in my high school, and eventually I learned a proper block print. It's moderately slow, but folks can generally read things that I print -- now if they'd only stop crossing the 'l' in my last name for me.
FWIW Massachusetts is in a "back-to-basics" mode in education (thanks in good part to John Silber and his MCAS) and my kids are still learning cursive. My left-handed boy is having particular trouble, but my wife is also a southpaw, and I've found that when I have to forge his writing and I use my non-dominant left hand, which lacks the muscle memory, not only does it look like his writing, but I also trace some of the forms "backwards".
I've always found orthography interesting, especially the relationship between block and script in non-Latin alphabets. There is usually some sane explanation for how strokes and pen-up movements in the block became the script such as in an aleph or a Cyrillic н.
My 2nd grade teacher couldn't remember how to make a cursive capital Q (it looks like a numeral 2) and used a cursive capital O with a tail -- I've usually used that form, and it's what my children are taught.
People who refuse to learn to write cursive are only hurting themselves. A note written in nicely-written cursive can be far more effective than a typed memo. An emailed or printed thank you note just looks wrong. In a business context, it's easy to email an atta-boy, but a hand-written note shows that the writer really meant it.
Also, with email or typed correspondence, you don't know who really wrote it (did the boss write that emailed attaboy, or did his secretary?). By contrast, very few people can copy someone else's cursive, so you know that a cursive note came from the hand of the person who signed it.
I don't often take the time to write a cursive letter, but when I do, the recipient can tell it was something I thought was important enough to do right.
Cursive is a useful communications tool. You may not use it every day, but it's just stupid to deprive yourself of that tool.
(Sorry for the double post.)
It strikes me that the cursive advocates have a threefold fallacious argument. (1) The ad hominem attack that people who do not write cursive ARE stupid, which is put to lie by the fact that most high-level professionals write in shorthand, not traditional cursive. (2) The conflation of education with intelligence that claims that people who write in print APPEAR stupid when, at most, they would appear uneducated. (3) The argument from tradition that since we've always used it, we should continue to.
None of these is remotely persuasive. The cursive students are taught to write in school hardly resembles the script used in the 18th century. I can read the Constitution -- or a Shakespeare folio) far better than could the beautiful penmen and -women I've met over the years. Cursive opens no new avenues of learning to you, regardless of how elegant an art it may be.
Second, regardless whether it's faster (which is debatable), most students now take notes with computers (or, if not, by shorthand), and encouraging verbatim notetaking is silly anyway.
Third, and most importantly, teaching cursive wastes valuable class time and turns students off to learning. If you want to teach them another means of communication, teach them a foreign language. If you want to teach them an art, make it an elective art class that gifted students can skip to learn how to use computers. While the cursive writers are illegibly scrawling their way through time, smart kids can stretch their minds, not their hands.
I had poor marks in handwriting as a child, and continued to have awful handwriting through most of my life. Every time I had to write an inscription in a birthday card or a thank-you note this would bother me, until I decided to practice writing until my penmanship improved. This paid off because it occurred at exactly the time in my life when I met my wife and suddenly wanted to start sending love letters.
Actual writing is becoming rarer with the continued expansion of computers and email, but that just makes a written letter all the more special. Why wouldn't you want to be able to send one?
Interestingly, when I learned Russian, they made us write in cursive, and I had no problem picking that up quickly. Our prof emphasized that "Russians are proud of their penmanship", and thus graded us on ours.
Also, I can write comfortably, quickly and legibly in cursive, which I learned in grammar school, but prefer print, which I can do more quickly. I'm glad I learned cursive, and still use it for style on, e.g., business Christmas cards. I don't really care what they teach in school, because if I deem it important enough, I will teach it to my kids myself. Anyone who relies heavily on (public) schools to teach their children anything is deluded. They are essentially state-sponsored day care.
I'm sure everyone has anecdotal evidence on both sides, your (or mine, for that matter) experience isn't normative. By all means teach how to write, but teach how to do it legibly regardless.
My hand-writing has always been bad, and I was sometimes forced to print my exams as far back as high school.
A number of years ago, a good friend of mine lost her pregnancy. I searched in vain for a card expressing my thoughts and gave up and bought some stationary. After about seven tries, I composed a thoughtful hand-written note that met with my satisfaction. That note would have looked juvenile if it had been printed. So I equate cursive writing with good manners. You can get by without it, but you shouldn't.
Nice to know lawyers take it upon themselves to forge signatures on a regular basis.
...but whether there is some other skill that students should possess and that is not being taught because the time is used up by teaching cursive writing.
Surely we can all imagine instances in which cursive writing may be tremendously useful. But is cursive writing more useful than other things that could be taught instead?
Ah, the simple but always useful concept of opportunity cost.
Hey, other people's checks don't sign themselves.
The point of the article is that something is being lost by NOT teaching cursive:
Perhaps one could argue that there is a better way to develop these fine motor skills and cognitive abilities, but it seems clear that keyboarding skills should take second place to writing at the early ages.
But there is something about a form of written communication that is both formal (more formal than block printing) and personal (more personal than a typed note). It is valuable to learn that style for the times when you will want to, say, write a thank-you note, or send a condolence card.
Just as there is a literary style between what is highly appropriate for IM culture (even though I avoid it myself, I recognize something like "how r u" to be a legitimate style of communication) and a business letter, there is an intermediate penmanship style.
And someone else said that if you don't learn it, you can't read it. Enough people who speak and write the same language still use it with enough regularity that it's worthwhile to at least understand it.
More interesting perhaps is that modern cursive is really a 20th century creation. Most schools teach "American Standard Cursive" which dates to the 1920s.
This is why--in case you've wondered--why many only cursive documents are nearly illegible.
Bob: I assure you I'm also opposed to teaching all that other stupid crap. I'm surprised by the vehemence in favour of cursive, which realistically is never essential anymore, and in practice is almost never beautiful, since the vast, vast majority won't care and don't keep in practice. Unless the entire educational system requires beautiful cursive, there's no incentive for the vast majority to put that sort of effort into it... and I don't think such a requirement is going to happen.
Jeek: Nothing in that study seems to indicate that it's the cursive nature of the handwriting practice that made their speed and other benefits accrue. I submit that an equal amount of time spent on making their block-writing faster and more regular, or teaching them shorthand, would most likely have a similar effect (time for a new study).
(Those who favor cursive for its speed should favour teaching shorthand, no? [Full disclosure: I know no shorthand at all, so I'm not pushing it as a convert or anything; it just answers the objection well.]
The main strength, that I can tell, of cursive is that - if done very well - it's quite attractive. The problem, of course, being that in practice nobody but a dedicated few do it very well.
I don't see that as a great reason to require everyone to spend time learning and practicing it, any more than I think everyone should be required to learn calligraphy, even though I did so for fun, and quite enjoyed it.)
... . -- .- .--. .... --- .-. . / .. ... / ..-. --- .-. / .-.. --- ... . .-. ...
That simply isn't so. Perhaps in the middle class of America, it is going that way, but we still have a ways to go. Even at my old job as a lawyer for the gov't, the judges would write notes in the margin of my memos. It's very efficient, and better than having them type out something.
Someone mentioned medical records being written. This is also true.
But what about people who don't have access to computers all the time? Yes, Virginia, it's true -- some people don't use or even like computers. Go around the world sometime, and you will find that the majority of people don't type, and still handwrite their words.
Teaching cursive is an important part of learning hand/eye coordination, and I'm not sure that merely typing achieves the same effect.
I'm all in favor of the old fashioned arguments that people think are silly, but it's really the practical ones that I'm concerned about. What do you do when the electricity goes out? Do you really want to type out a note, print it out, and then post it on the fridge for the wife to see? How much simpler to just write it!
People have grown up with the notion that anything on the computer must be better, faster, easier, more effficient, more accurate, whatever. In some cases, that's true, in other's, not.
One thing I have found, though, is that writing in cursive is slower than typing. I think that's a good thing -- it forces me to think more carefully about what I'm writing. Any idiot (and we've seen that countless times on the VC) can type out sentences that go on and on. But the intelligent writer composes his thoughts carefully while committing them to paper.
(The above statements should no doubt prove that my typing falls into the 'any idiot' category. Oh, if only I could cursively write out my invective! Then you'd all be convinced beyond doubt.)
I do far more typing than writing, but there are plenty of times when typing is impractical.
I think handwriting is too important a skill not to teach.
Nick
All through college and law school I took notes directly into the margin of the textbook (or on the handouts). It saved me from writing down things that were already printed there (highlighters worked well for that), and
Yeah, but I listen better if I take notes - taking notes tends to prevent the mind from wandering.
I submit that an equal amount of time spent on making their block-writing faster and more regular, or teaching them shorthand, would most likely have a similar effect
Oh sure, I don't think cursive is necessary to improve neuromotor skills, just "writing by hand" of some sort or another.
What do you do when the electricity goes out? Do you really want to type out a note, print it out, and then post it on the fridge for the wife to see? How much simpler to just write it!
The lights are out, so it's too dark to write. =)
At least some of the hostility to cursive comes from those of us whose natural manual dexterity is abyssmal and who struggled through cursive instruction and required cursive throughout school.
I can't speak to anyone else's experience, but submitting papers and exams in cursive was required through high school Only the word processor rescued me from the slow and frustrating effort required to produce a scrawl so illegible it became legendary. Teachers actually warned each other about my writing. Reading this thread reminds me how much I hated writing in cursive, as I find myself wanting to descend into profanity to describe it.
My cursive cannot keep pace with my thoughts, and is never, ever legible. Print may be just as slow, but at least I can read it the day after I wrote it. "Cursive is more expressive"? Feh. The English language is expressive, not the hand that records it. Furthermore, lettering offers more tools for expression than even well-executed cursive does. Just try using uppercase for emphasis in cursive, and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not opposed to cursive itself -- though I do find American Standard unlovely compared to Hebrew cursive or Suetterlin -- but I'd prefer students do the rope climb each day over requiring cursive for schoolwork. I'd have found that just as painful and humiliating, but I might have actually acquired a useful skill.
I challenge any of the people saying that writing in cursive is faster than printing to a duel. How could it possibly be faster to include a bunch of superfluous flourishes and loop-de-loops?
I don't know if you simians can't move your hand and pick up and put down a writing implement at the same time, but I can. Oh yes, you'll get your comeuppance.
A funny codicil to this is that when I went to close the mortgage for my first house, I signed, as I always do, with my first and last name. The escrow person told me I needed to include my middle initial as it was on the mortgage docs. I had to ask how to write that letter ;-)
JohnAnnArbor, it's not forgery, so long as you clearly note that you're signing on their behalf, and you have the authority to do so. It's standard practice, and accepted by the courts, and there's no funny business.
I submit that marking letters on a page is "writing", no matter the letterforms used. The Romans wrote, and did not use cursive.
I agree, but apparently some people get all worked up about that distinction. (I thought printing is what you do with movable type. And is "block printing" sans-serif all caps, or is it [as used in this discussion] just the type of writing, with minuscules and majuscules that aren't connected [except for a few ligatures]?)
Also, I'd say that many or even most people don't sign their name in cursive. It's more of an abstract insignia, or one legible capital letter followed by a squiggly line, at best.
Yup. I can write my name in cursive, but my "mark" is a squiggle based only vaguely on those forms. I often print my name somewhere near the signature. I ran into a problem with this, which I reported on the 'net in 1990 -- follow the link for the entire affair, and thankfully I posted that before I started using "x-no-archive: no" which Google (unlike Deja) treats as though I'd meant to say "x-no-archive: yes", back in 1983:
I think I ran into that on my mortgage also, having to sign my middle initial, and my ux had to sign as maiden-hyphen-married, a form she almost never uses otherwise.
You aren't "offending" anyone by writing in block letters. But block letters don't have the elegance of a well-written cursive.
Block printing isn't the end of civilization as we know it, but the ability to write in cursive gives you the ability to add a little elegance to a communcation when needed.
At least some of the hostility to cursive comes from those of us whose natural manual dexterity is abyssmal and who struggled through cursive instruction and required cursive throughout school.
I am one of those people, too, but I consider that a weakness.
Actual writing is becoming rarer with the continued expansion of computers and email, but that just makes a written letter all the more special. Why wouldn't you want to be able to send one?
Exactly!
The written letter is special to whom?
Rare things aren't necessarily special. Beautifully legible cursive handwriting is rare because few value it. I don't value having it and I don't admire good handwriting in others. Send me a typed letter anyday.
Now that's just silly. Good handwriting (especially cursive handwriting) is a skill. I admire people who can make beautiful music, create beautiful artwork, or make delicious meals. Why wouldn't I admire and appreciate a beautifully handwritten letter? Why would I not value the fact that someone went out of their way to make a point.
And, as I said above, if I get a handwritten letter, I can be pretty sure who wrote it. If I get a typed letter, the only thing the author may have done is scrawl his or her name at the end. And a secretary or signature machine might even have done that.
I guess my analogy is playing piano. It takes a lot of work and dexterity to learn to play with two hands simultaneously. Some people get it without a problem, others with a struggle, and some never, no matter how hard they work at it.
So to force those who can't do it would probably fall under the new guidelines for torture.
But for those who can do it, why not teach it anyway? Just because some people can't play the piano doesn't mean we should destroy all pianos for everyone.
How is it silly to say rare things aren't necessarily valued? It's simply true.
The fact that something is a skill and requires practice to do well not only doesn't cause people to value that skill, it shouldn't.
Playing the bagpipe well is a skill. Shooting clay pigeons is a skill. Alligator wrestling is a skill. Walking on stilts is a skill. Winning at video games is a skill. Who values everything that takes skill?
For the most part, people value skills only when they value the product itself. When people don't value the product, they consider time spent developing the skill wasted.
You have, however answered my question "hand written letters are valued by whom?" You value them.
Peter Quinn who was a technical consultant for the movie "Gangs of New York" writes in longhand on yellow legal tablets. It took 1000 pages to write his latest book, Hour of the Cat. He tried and failed to adapt to a typewriter. Even though his specialty is History his books are fiction. Asked if he had trouble writing fiction he said no, "most of my previous experience was speech writing for politicians"
I enjoy reading letters in long hand. Well written ones are strangely moving.
Maybe it is in a cycle and will return to favor. Or maybe we'll adapt to reading minds.
You say you would not appreciate a handwritten letter? You are the first person I've heard say that. And failing to appreciate an effort someone makes to show you consideration would be, well, downright inconsiderate.
The skill of writing such a letter may be waning, but that only increases its value.