
Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016) - lelf
http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/cursive-handwriting-and-other-education-myths
======
autocorr
I'm surprised that I didn't see hand fatigue mentioned, which is probably the
number one reason cursive is actually useful, not that it is fast or "aided in
cognitive development". Business scripts (like Spencerian in the early 20th c)
were developed if you were Clerk or someone who had to scribe stuff out for
hours on end, and it had to be legible and consistent. The mechanics of it are
quite simple. If you hold a pen, pinch it, and write each letter by moving the
your fingers in and out, you will tire quickly or get hand cramps. Cursive
scripts on the other keep your fingers fixed, and you write by moving your
whole arm, and bending your wrist back and forth, that's why letters come
naturally at a fixed angle, because your wrist is going up and down as your
arm moves across the page. It also makes writing legibly easier when you write
large, your arm system is like one of those old line plotters doing big
sweeping motions that you can easily control. Try writing large letters with
finger movements while keeping your wrist and elbow mostly still and it's like
chiselling them out. It's hard to maintain the right movements over large
sweeps and make consistent letters. So this I feel is the number one reason to
learn cursive, if you go to college and want to take notes for three hours a
day while keeping your hand comfortable, it's natural to write through your
whole arm, and the way to write naturally with your whole arm is to basically
flick up and down while smoothly pushing your arm across the page: cursive
scripts.

~~~
kevin42
Unless you are left handed, in which case none of these things are true. I
quickly get hand fatigue when I (try to) write in cursive.

I really struggled with cursive in grade school because very little of the
mechanics of right handed writing work for left-handed kids, and the teachers
didn't have anything to offer other than criticism of the writing I could do.
Most lefty's I have talked to had the same experience.

~~~
rlkf
I know, and it's a shame, because it actually takes very little effort to do
better teaching of left-handed:

[http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html](http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html)

------
3JPLW
Just yesterday the Illinois state senate overrode the governor's veto in order
to mandate that all schools teach cursive before fifth grade. Major arguments
I heard included "reading notes from grandma" and "preventing identity theft"
(via cursive signatures).

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-
illinois-2...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-
illinois-20171109-story.html)

[http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-
illinoi...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinois-
cursive-schools-met-20170428-story.html)

~~~
gruez
>"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures)

lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do
signature checks.

~~~
ghaff
Surprisingly, institutions do at least sometimes check that there's something
on the signature line. I had a car registration renewal returned recently
because I forgot to sign it. Given that my signature is a totally illegible
scrawl, I don't see what good it does but we still pretend that what might as
well be just an "X" for a lot of people actually means something.

~~~
delinka
And it can indeed be just an X. It displays intent. You placed a scrawl on the
line to signify your intent to agree to/abide by whatever's on the paper.
Without that intent, they assume you made a mistake.

I think it's better than blindly taking any paperwork without "signatures" on
them.

~~~
amyjess
What I'd love to have, for this purpose, is a signet ring with a stylized
version of my initials on it.

If I need to sign something official, I'll pull out an stamp pad and a bottle
of ink, soak the pad, press my ring into it, and then slam my hand down on the
paper ring first.

~~~
cooper12
That's the norm in Asian countries like Japan:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_\(East_Asia\)).
They even have different types of seals that are used for just plain
signatures and more important things like loans.

------
novalis78
Reading these comments makes me wonder if there is something wrong with US
cursive or the way it was taught. I learned cursive in first grade GDR and
continued school in Austria where we had to (and enjoyed) writing copious
essays weekly over and over again. It's actually amazing to watch the
penmanship shift over those years and develop into a idiosyncratic style or to
see the speed and form impacted by topic, time and material. The ability to
use basic materials to communicate and express knowledge and civilization
should include a wide array of skills from cursive all the way to tool
classes. When you finish high school the goal should have been to hand over
the foundations of civilization and let you go from there. Rhetoric, grammar,
broad knowledge of history and science, firm skills in math and your ability
communicate seem to me the basics of an enlightened age. A touch typing course
is really not that hard or difficult to add on. But there is something refined
and cultivated in training your brain's neural net to become skillful as far
as mastering the basics of self-education (reading with clear and deep
understanding) and self-expression (communicating clear discursive thoughts)
goes.

~~~
7952
I agree that it is good to learn skills for their own sake. But do you really
think that cursive is actually good at communicating information? If people
find it difficult to write legibly then it is not really achieving that goal.
I found cursive a constant problem at school that made the teacher obsess
about presentation rather than content. And as an adult I find it hard to read
peoples idiosyncratic scrawl. Text should be easy to read, that is the most
important thing.

~~~
novalis78
In a sense that's definitely true. In another it seems to also depend on the
cursive system. I recently went to Freud's museum and was able to read his
letters without problems. Over a hundred years of using the same cursive
system. It's beautiful, elegant and to a degree a form of art - Western
calligraphy, if you will. The synergy of fine motor skills, art, history,
neatness, self-expression and cultural transmission in conjunction with
expressing yourself seem to be worth something. It's perhaps not even the
cursive itself, but the training, persistence and effort that goes into
creating something useful through your own hands that teaches so many valuable
lessons. Easy is not always better - especially patience with oneself and
persistent effort in mastering a skill could perhaps be beneficial for the
next generation.

------
qsymmachus
Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never
even taught how to write block letters.

The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over
block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is
why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why
privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective?

Edit: anecdotally, I write cursive cyrillic faster than I write block letter
English, and Russian isn't even my native language.

~~~
mattnewton
Keyboards eliminated the advantages cursive had for input speed in most cases,
and I find block characters easier to read. Definitely don’t feel cursive has
advantages when handwriting speed is less relevant.

~~~
qsymmachus
People who learned block letters first, and who rarely encounter cursive,
undoubtedly find block letters easier to read. But you might imagine that if
had learned cursive first and used it regularly, you would have no problem
reading it.

The point I'm trying to make is that the preference for block letters is an
accident of how most of us were taught, and not intrinsic to the writing style
itself.

~~~
aquadrop
I've been taught cursive since elementary school and I've seen plenty cases
when people's cursive was almost unreadable for me. Which almost never happens
with block letters. Cursive has only one advantage - maximum speed of writing.
If you need to write down something fast especially in large quantity (like
lectures in university). But readability is usually harmed in that case.
Especially bad situation with doctors, I've never understood how they can
produce such cryptic notes when people's life can depend on it. Anyway, I
don't see a point in cursive today (even though that's the only way I write
text in my native language, but that's rarely needed).

------
woodruffw
I think my elementary school years (early/mid 2000s) were some of the last
years that cursive was taught in NYC. It looks like they're bringing it back
this year[1].

I hated it at the time and switched to block lettering as soon as I was
allowed, but I've noticed that my style has become increasingly (and
organically) cursive ever since I began college and _really_ needed to take
notes quickly.

Cursive may still be slower than typing, but there's a reasonable evidence
that screens diminish in-class comprehension and that writing notes requires
more digestion of the material than typing. Anecdotally, that's certainly been
the case for me.

[1]:
[https://twitter.com/NYCSchools/status/832275877924831233](https://twitter.com/NYCSchools/status/832275877924831233)

~~~
harshreality
The study I remember suggested that cursive increases comprehension and
retention _because_ it's slower. The theory was that because it's slower, you
paraphrase, summarize, and elide more, which engages comprehension and
interpretation subsystems, rather than only exercising the speech-to-text
subsystem of your brain.

It might also/alternatively be that the longer time necessary to write the
information longhand keeps the information in your working memory long enough
that your brain is more likely to automatically start to interpret it.

Then there's the tactile-based theory that writing letters longhand is more
psychologically engaging than typing is. I'm skeptical of that, because once
you learn to type you can feel when you hit the right letter, and feel when
you hit the wrong letter. There's immediate tactile feedback either way, it's
just different. "Did that feel like the motion I remember is correct for
writing that letter" is replaced by "did that feel like my finger was in the
right place for that letter when I felt that keypress". Without some good
studies proving that there is a difference in cognitive effects between
different kinds of tactile feedback, I think it's BS promoted by old-school
teachers who refuse to deal with typed assignments.

~~~
ouid
There seem to be a lot of theories about _why_ there is an effect, but is
there any data to demonstrate that there _is_ one?

~~~
yorwba
Let me just paste the same quote I used in a comment 22 days ago
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506774](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506774))

\------------------------------------------------------------

 _The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed
equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers
performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions._

 _The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap
with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall,
students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less
verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is
canceled out by “mindless transcription.”_

 _“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop
note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their
notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the
researchers write._

[http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-
notes...](http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes-by-
hand-for-better-long-term-comprehension.html)

~~~
ouid
sorry, I meant cursive versus print. I don't really care about laptop note
takers.

~~~
yorwba
All the comments in the thread above you were about handwriting vs. typing. If
there is a difference between different styles of handwriting, it's likely in
favor of the slowest method (if the theories on note-taking and retention are
correct). That would be some kind of elaborate calligraphy where each letter
is adorned with vines, or something.

~~~
ouid
what do you mean if there is a difference? My question was not to speculate on
what causes the difference, but whether or not it actually exists.

------
phaus
The funny thing is that the grey quotes in the article look very close to
Cursive Italic, which is faster than American Cursive(what we all know as
regular cursive) and Manuscript + it is just as easy to read as
Manuscript(print). If we actually cared about efficiency and effectiveness in
handwriting we would have switched to this a long time ago.

I do calligraphy as a hobby. I'm going to time myself but I'm already 100%
certain I can write much faster with Cursive Italic in spite of the fact that
I spend just as much time writing printed characters.

American Cursive looks very nice when done properly. However, it requires
near-perfect execution to be legible.

~~~
Bromskloss
I never knew that there were all these names for different types of
handwriting. I'm trying to sort them out. What is the difference between
Cursive Italic and American Cursive? And what is Manuscript, except something
written by hand?

~~~
hudibras
I used this book (I see that it's now out-of-print, though) to improve my
handwriting by using italic. You can see some examples inside the book.

[https://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Program-
Handwritin...](https://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Program-
Handwriting/dp/0876781180/)

------
brandonmenc
I went to Catholic school in the 80s and 90s, and was forced to use cursive
the entire time.

Starting in 1st grade, I'd get straight As - except in "handwriting" \- always
a B there - and it kept me from ever getting "First Honors."

It was arbitrary and unfair, and it made me hate school. And cursive.

~~~
Bromskloss
> It was arbitrary and unfair

Can you expand on why you think so?

~~~
BearOso
How do you measure handwriting? Is the teacher grading by taking a caliper and
measuring the exact form of each letter mechanically, or is he/she just
comparing based on what “looks good” to the eye.

Some people might not have very steady hands. Are you going to penalize them
for that?

~~~
Bromskloss
I see your point, and can sympathise. Nevertheless, let's dig further and see
if we can get to some fundamental principle:

> is he/she just comparing based on what “looks good” to the eye.

How are art subjects in school graded? I actually don't know.

> Some people might not have very steady hands. Are you going to penalize them
> for that?

Some are bad at something else, like mathematics. Are we to penalise them for
that? Yes, those students get a low grade in mathematics. Can we motivate a
difference in attitude between handwriting and mathematics by an appeal to
usefulness, saying that it is useful to be good at mathematics, but not as
useful to shape beautiful letters? Is it nevertheless a point in teaching it
(and arts)? Is the teaching of those subjects motivated by other things than
their usefulness? Should they, because of that, be graded differently, perhaps
in such a way that effort, along with performance, can yield a high grade?
(What happens then if someone relies on a grade to see how well someone else
does music?)

~~~
BrandoElFollito
Math, history, geography, the technical part of a language (grammar,
spelling,...) can be learned. It is simply a matter of effort. Some are
better, some are more interested, but ultimately you can learn. I had Spanish
at school (France) and had a hard time just because I did not like it. Then I
started to like it and, miracle, my marks sky-rocketed.

If you do not have steady hands you will never be good at drawing because you
will not be able to learn it. Salle if you have asthma and want to sing (I
guess). You should not be marked dusk because of that. Same if you are in a
wheelchair and cannot run a 100m.

------
plytheman
Personally I (30 years old now) went to Catholic school (K-12) and learned
cursive somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade and was forced to write in cursive
until I graduated 8th grade. Most of the time as a kid I hated it and wished I
could write in block letters and once I hit freshman year of high school I
never looked back. Fast forward through four years of high school and three
gap years when as a freshman in college I realized I really missed writing in
cursive. After a pretty rocky few weeks of abysmal looking script I got back
into the groove and took four years of notes in handwriting and continue to
journal and write notes and letters in cursive.

I've always been somewhat artistic and take a lot of pride in my handwriting
as I would a drawing. I look at others' writing to see how they draw letters I
like and try to incorporate it into my own style. I take my time writing each
letter and word and try to make it as consistent and beautiful as I can (and
while others compliment me on my writing I'm always a bit dissatisfied) and
generally take a lot of pleasure in the simple act of writing. For me it's a
means of expression for myself.

Despite all that, I've tried really hard to come up with defenses for teaching
it in schools much like I was taught and I generally come up pretty empty
handed. Other than reading some random bits of cursive here or there in our
society there really is little need for it. I'd like to think that its
artistic merits are enough to justify it, in giving kids a chance to express
themselves, but I doubt most kids appreciate it for that - even I hated it as
a child. I'd like to say it will help improve people's writing, but frankly
most people's writing I see, cursive or otherwise, looks like, as Sister Anne
back in 7th grade would say, chicken scratch. As a piece of tradition which
unites us as a thread through previous generations I do like it, in a way it's
a cultural link to my parents, grandparents, and beyond, but that doesn't
necessarily stand as a great argument against more practical skills that could
be taught in that time. If the opportunity cost of teaching it can be ignored,
though, it doesn't seem otherwise harmful to keep teaching it for the sake of
tradition. Maybe keep teaching it but not spend as much time on it to satisfy
all camps?

~~~
omegant
I write in block letters since the senior year of highschool. I need it to be
able to understand my own writting. I didn't like it then, but now with my
sons I see the use of it. It teaches them attention to detail, observation,
patience, fine hand dexterity, spatial references. Even if they don't ever use
it again I find is an extremely useful and powerful tool for a 5 year old.

~~~
megaman22
Ever since I took a technical drawing course the sophmore year of high school,
I haven't wanted to write in anything other than draftsman's block letters. I
always had atrocious handwriting, cursive or otherwise, but at least now I and
others can read what I write.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
I do both: Cursive for my own notes, because it's faster and more comfortable,
and block letters for stuff I need others to read.

------
chis
It seems like there's value in rote practice of tasks for improving focus and
discipline. I'd argue that's part of why learning piano helps kids so much.

I can't name any specific reason to practice cursive though.

~~~
JPKab
Cursive is the most efficient method for writing by hand. Also, for many, it's
much easier for them to write in a readable fashion with cursive.

My son is 11, and was never taught cursive in public school. His print writing
is legible, but not neat. He just learned cursive (it took him less than two
weeks at the private school we just put him in, where all the other students
learned it years ago). His writing is much neater, and more legible.

~~~
discoursism
I don't understand why so many people in this thread are making claims about
cursive's efficiency, when the article cites scientific investigations that
say it isn't.

------
mwcampbell
Now that capacitive touchscreens are widely available, I think we should teach
children how to quickly and accurately input text on a touchscreen tablet,
using a Swipe-style keyboard or whatever current method gives the fastest and
most accurate results. Note: We should teach them how to input eloectronic
_text_ (as in Unicode), that can then be read in whatever font and size is
good for the reader, or through alternative methods such as text-to-speech and
braille. Universal access! Of course, such text is also searchable, which is
also something we can't practically get with handwriting.

In other words, let's teach kids how to input text in a way that's optimized
for _this_ century. And while we're at it, let's teach them to make their
written output universally accessible by default. No more handwritten notes on
whiteboards during meetings, excluding blind (or low-vision) participants.
There should be a way to input electronic text that's just as convenient (or
more) for a typical sighted person, but also accessible.

Death to handwriting as we know it!

------
alexasmyths
We should condense the alphabet and get rid of nuisance letters as well as
standardize phonemes so that letter combinations must sound the same.

Also - words may only have a single, pre-defined meaning.

While we're at it, everyone go to Esperanto.

Also - this must be enforced globally.

We should have a single, global educational standard for language and math.

While we are at it, we should merge Math and Esperanto into 'Mathsperanto'.

Think of the efficiency and productivity!

Think of the GDP gains!

Forward!

------
abritinthebay
Maybe US cursive is taught differently but I write _much faster_ in cursive
than otherwise.

I grew up in the UK, if that matters.

I also think it looks prettier (but that's a penmanship/caligraphy thing, and
purely aesthetic)

------
codinghorror
Oh man how I _HATED_ cursive writing. I was so bad at it, my Dad had to give
me special lessons and penalties, which was an awful experience.

You know how much cursive I've written in the last 30 years? Zero. ZERO.

We will not be teaching our kids this, and I will encourage them not to learn
it (unless they want to, for some odd reason).

------
echion
Seems to ignore the fact that picking up and putting down the writing point is
actually harder for small children than just sliding the writing implement
along the paper. Also consider the popularity of "Swype"-style keyboards,
since continuous sliding a finger across a surface is, for many, easier than
discrete screen presses.

Sources: personal experience and anecdotes from teachers of 4-6 yr olds (an
age range not given the most, if any, time in the article).

~~~
__david__
I didn't "ignore" that, it directly refuted it. The article sites studies that
claim cursive takes far more fine motor skills than non-cursive and was harder
to teach to younger children.

~~~
echion
Which studies? "Fine motor" appears exactly once in the article:

> And every time I hear of a young child turned off writing because he lacks
> the fine motor skills needed to master cursive [...] I see [confirmation
> bias].

------
crazygringo
> _So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of
> all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed
> spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade. Even in France, a
> quarter of the French pupils who were taught cursive exclusively and were
> still mostly using it in the fourth grade, had largely abandoned it for a
> mixed style by the fifth grade._

I was shocked at how cursive could be slower than block letters... but then
realized that, yes, if you're doing all the curly things on Q's and Z's and
F's then, yes it could be slower.

But nobody does those! A "personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript" is
how I write, I just call it cursive, or "partial cursive". But it says that
_is_ faster, and presumably students wouldn't learn that if they hadn't
learned full cursive at first?

So seems like teaching cursive _is_ useful because in the end students _do_
write faster. Except that maybe we should focus on teaching just the "fast"
parts of connecting lowercase letters, and ignore all the fancy curly parts
that uppercase letters tend to have?

~~~
amyjess
> But nobody does those! A "personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript" is
> how I write, I just call it cursive, or "partial cursive". But it says that
> is faster, and presumably students wouldn't learn that if they hadn't
> learned full cursive at first?

I ended up developing something like that in 2009. By that point, I'd long
since forgotten everything I was taught in elementary school and just wrote
everything in all caps. But I was starting to develop an interest in
typography, and I wanted to improve my handwriting. So I started studying
italic serif fonts to see how I could do something similar by hand, with the
restriction that most letters should be written in one stroke. I found out
that my attempts at replicating serifs in handwriting without increasing the
stroke count actually had a technical term: semiserif.

What I came up with looks kind of like D'Nealian, but with some significant
differences. The biggest one is that I put semiserifs on the beginnings of
letters and not just on the ends. Another is that I use a two-story g (and I
wrote it with an ear for a while before eliminating it). And my z is
particularly swashy.

------
CodeWriter23
> But imposing cursive from an early age is another matter.

Once she saw some cursive writing, our daughter demanded we teach her. I
attribute that to our choice to greatly limit screen time. She’s fantastic at
it. And even though she now spends a healthy portion of her screen time budget
FaceTiming and texting friends and grandparents, she also sends handwritten
letters and notes.

------
dabbledash
It's as if a large chunk of people have values the author can't process at
all. "Sure it's beautiful and traditional and ties us to a shared past and
culture, but what's the POINT of it?"

Maybe I'm overreaching here, but it feels like the kind of lack of
understanding that underlies some of our political difficulties in the US.

~~~
ghaff
I actually favor a classical Western core curriculum in the US. But I don't
really see simplified cursive handwriting as a particularly important part of
that relative to the amount of time and effort it takes.

------
thatfrenchguy
> Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or
> institutional norms

Yeah, it always is, that’s just how human societies work.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
I remember learning how to write official letters at school.

Dear Sir. Dear Madam. Yours faithfully. Yours sincerely. Your obedient
servant.

In the classroom, we were told it was so very important to get the language
right.

In fact it was a complete waste of time.

I used the language a handful of times - the stylings were already becoming
archaic - then email conventions took over.

Now we have "Hi", or maybe "Hello", and "Kind regards" \- if email occurs at
all, and the entire exchange isn't an informal collection of short text
messages.

The Guardians of Culture in schools seem reliably clueless. I suspect their
opinions are so definite because they have so little else to offer, and
appearing to be right about _something_ is better than admitting the truth
about that.

Likewise with cursive. Kids today benefit more from YouTube editing and social
media skills - and by the time they start getting jobs, those will probably be
archaic skills too.

~~~
Bromskloss
> the stylings were already becoming archaic

Let's do something about that! :-)

------
takk309
I was taught manuscript print first and then cursive. I went through grade
school in the 90's so keyboards and computers where not common. We did not
have a keyboarding class until 6th grade. As far as handwriting went, I had
very sloppy handwriting. If I really focused, I could make my handwriting
legible but it caused me wrist pain from over gripping my pencil. Later in
life I realized that a thicker pencil was the solution.

Now days I write almost exclusively in cursive. Through school I found that
cursive characters were easier to differentiate from numbers in math (a five
and lowercase "s" look very similar when I write them, for example). After
that I just stayed in the habit of writing in cursive. I don't believe it is
superior or inferior, it is just what I like.

------
riledhel
Somewhat related but do you guys know good resources to relearn cursive
handwriting? I remember having handwriting notebooks as a kid that came with
figures and steps to do the letters but I don't know if there's a better way
now, years later.

------
alexasmyths
For all the years kids spend in school, wherein a good deal of it is not very
efficient, this is a cultural epitaph that has merit upon it's own, there's no
reason to find any other reason than that. It's at least as useful as
printing.

------
ggambetta
Reminds me of the long battle I had with my teachers trying to make me write
the weird cursive "4", when I was trying to write the "4" I had always seen up
to that point in the keyboard of the ZX Spectrum :)

~~~
pavel_lishin
There's a cursive 4? I didn't even realize numbers _had_ cursive forms.

Next you'll be telling me that I should have been capitalizing the first
numbers of my addresses.

~~~
teddyh
Well, technically you have probably been writing all your digits in all upper
case:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures)

------
Symbiote
Can an American give an example image showing a child's cursive handwriting,
as is it taught there?

The picture at the top of the article is only about 50% like the handwriting I
was taught in the UK.

I was taught something like this [1] (11 year old, England) except without the
curly bits before the first letter of each word.

[1] [http://stanthonys.herts.sch.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2015/06/hw...](http://stanthonys.herts.sch.uk/wp-
content/uploads/2015/06/hw4-600x800.jpg)

~~~
torstenvl
Americans are genereally taight D'Nealian cursive.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian)

------
vim_wannabe
Does everything taught in schools need to have immediate applicability?

~~~
notl4wy3r
Of course not, but some non-zero eventual utility is a desirable trait. There
are a variety of _actually beneficial_ things children could spend their time
doing, which are currently being displaced by being forced to learn a useless
handwriting style.

~~~
ghaff
For that matter, I'd have zero issue with more classroom time spent on art,
music, or other subjects of that type. But the fixation on an aesthetically
pleasing copperplate writing style has about the same justification as
universally teaching ancient Greek because it's part of a traditional Western
upper class education.

~~~
Bromskloss
> part of a traditional Western upper class education

Such reasons have actually started to become a bit compelling to me, and might
lead me to learn Greek, though I might do Latin first. It places you next to
others who have learnt the same things through the centuries. Joining the same
learning tradition grounds you in a common language and a common literature.
It helps you understand intellectual conversations from today and from past
generations. So I imagine, at least; I'm still just an ἰδιώτης.

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SAI_Peregrinus
I find cursive very difficult to read, let alone write. Ever since I took
drafting classes I've used single-stroke gothic lettering for anything I want
other people to be able to read.

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cafard
The question for cursive should be, Can the intended audience--yourself next
week, your friend when USPS delivers-- read it? Some of the older generation
of my family wrote a cursive hand that was regular, even handsome, but very
hard to read. My own is not so handsome, though I think about as legible as my
non-cursive lettering, but I don't use it much.

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TomK32
I did learn cursive writing in school, might still be able to do it, but I'd
very much prefer my kids to learn a wider array of skills including
calligraphy and of course modern typography. They need to see (not master) the
wider picture that ranges from art to crystal-clear communcation. Cursive
handwriting is just a limited piece of this and killing curiosity through the
miserable learning experience.

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Angostura
> But the teachers declared he wasn’t ready because he can’t yet write in
> cursive.

> To me this symbolizes all that is wrong with the strange obsession shared in
> many countries about how children learn to write.

That sounds like absolutely what happened. By all means write an article on
the pros and cons of cursive, but don't the article with a ludicrous straw
man.

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hoosieree
I was watching out for a quote from Karin James, and found it! I recently
collaborated with her and others on an fMRI-compatible touchscreen, which has
been used for studying handwriting in children. Her lab is doing good work.

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fsiefken
If writing in manuscript is faster why do the most used shorthand systems
(Gregg, Teeline or Pitman) use cursive? I can't believe it's just because of
an supposedly erroneous cultural habit

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Growlzler
If you can't write in cursive I won't hire you.

~~~
tomjen3
That is fine, most likely I will just work elsewhere.

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markshead
There is probably some value in being able to read the original founding
documents of your government. In the United States those are written in
cursive.

~~~
grzm
Reading and writing are two different skills. I can read a variety of
different calligraphy styles, for example, but would be hard-pressed to
reproduce them well.

~~~
markshead
Normally the way people learn to read cursive is by having some exposure to
writing it. Most kids who haven't learned to write cursive can't read it. But
I agree with your overall point. Kids could probably learn to read cursive
with significantly less effort than what is required to write it.

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Bromskloss
It was the only way to write that I can remember being taught (until we had
typewriting classes). Do we need to teach any other way?

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k__
I stopped writing cursive in 6th grade because no one could read my stuff.

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jacobolus
Folks interested in the history should read Rosemary Sassoon’s book
_Handwriting of the Twentieth Century_. It mainly focuses on England, but is
quite comprehensive and America and other countries writing in Latin scripts
are also discussed.

(a) The particular “cursive” styles taught in American schools are often
pretty crappy and overly ornate and slow/difficult to write, evolving out of
writing which was intentionally slow for the sake of uniformity, ornament, and
legibility, because it dated from an era when all business communication was
handwritten, later simplified so that it would be easier for children. It also
was originally designed for quills or dip pens, which are pretty much never
used today. Students are seldom taught that the writing style appropriate for
a 6-year-old student just learning to hold a pen is probably not appropriate
for a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student.

(b) No instruction in handwriting should rigidly force students to all exactly
follow the model instead of allowing for individual variation and comfort. In
particular left-handed students need very different instruction than right-
handed students, but everyone has individual anatomy and preferences. Much of
the handwriting teaching materials from decades past was aimed as much at
enforcing discipline and punishing unruly students as at writing per se.

(c) The most important aspects of teaching handwriting are to teach a
comfortable posture, help students find a comfortable pen/pencil grip, and
help students learn to produce writing which is fluid and legible and fast
enough, without too many strokes per letter and without too many awkward
movements, but also which matches the student’s own personal style.

(d) What type of pen students learn to write with makes a big difference. #2
pencils and ballpoint pens are not very good tools for learning to write, IMO.

But with that said, teaching “print” writing (i.e. strictly separated letters
that look like printed letters – usually except for a and g, which are more
like upright versions of italic letters) is pretty stupid. It’s slow, usually
devolves into something uncomfortable and illegible in adulthood, is typically
not taught in a way such that students understand where the beginnings and
ends of strokes for letters should be or have a sense of the logical
construction of their letters, and usually isn’t taught any better than
joined-together writing styles. (For example: I was never really taught
handwriting, and we were mainly encouraged to write with a strictly separated
letter style. My pen grip was uncomfortable and my writing was slow and not
terribly legible all the way through school. After every long written high-
school exam my hand would hurt. Some judicious instruction and better practice
at age 5–8 could have saved a lot of grief.)

There are a wide variety of efficient and legible handwriting styles based on
italic or cursive writing. Students should aim for joining letters together in
groups of 2–4, putting joins and breaks where comfortable (not strictly
joining every letter, or strictly separating every letter). Students should be
allowed to tweak whatever writing style they are taught by their personal
preferences, and not graded or punished on how strictly they can follow the
model. Handwriting teachers need to have great powers of observation and great
empathy, to see what kinds of posture, pen grips, letter forms, etc. are
working for students vs. which ones are causing problems which will plague the
students throughout their lives.

~~~
rcthompson
As a left-handed writer, I hated being forced to learn cursive and resented
the teachers that forced me to use it, especially on timed writing, since I
was always much slower at cursive than print writing. Although to be fair,
none of my teachers had any specific advice for left-handed writers.

I think the overall difficulty and pain of left-handed writing was part of
what pushed me to computers at an early age.

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CamperBob2
Either classroom time is limited, or it isn't.

Which is it?

If the question is "Should we continue to teach cursive handwriting," well,
there's your answer.

