

Is Cursive Dead? Not on Your Life - grellas
http://www.slate.com/id/2292588/

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antimatter15
"In fact, cursive writing is a bit like sex: Youngsters are going to do it
whether we like it or not"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is cursive dead? No, but it is dying.

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

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

~~~
HedgeMage
D'Nealian is _not_ efficient -- it's yet another form of looped cursive (which
I already spoke a bit about in another comment).

Italic is _far_ superior to any kind of looped cursive.

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

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

~~~
aksbhat
I completely agree with you!

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

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

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

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

~~~
makmanalp
Interestingly I don't see anything wrong with the 2nd half of the motor
dysgraphia sample. I have tons of friends who write like that. Here's an
example of George Carlin's handwriting:

<http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/04/romantic-mr-carlin.html>

I don't think you can take that alone as a symptom. The pain should be pretty
indicative though.

~~~
jarin
Yeah, I definitely get the pain part. Actually, I should be pretty thankful
because it's my aversion to handwriting that made me spend a lot of time on
the computer, leading to my entire career. :)

~~~
HedgeMage
FYI, writing caused me pain if I did it for more than a line or two, and was
always a slow and laborious process. It turned out I'm predisposed to RSI -- a
load of vitamin B6 plus learning to write cursive italic, plus switching to
fountain pens really improved my writing and eliminated the pain.

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jsz0
If someone forces me to write anything more than my name and/or address on
paper I use cursive. I make it completely illegible and unreadable on purpose.
It's total gibberish. This way they will never ask me to do it again. Almost
always works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

