> And don't come back and say, "it's perfectly fine for them to use print."
I'm going to do exactly that. You having garbage print handwriting and pretty cursive hardly means that everyone is the same way. With the lack of cursive practice that most people get, you're much more likely to find someone with legibile printed handwriting than legible cursive.
> If you can't write legibly unless you're using a computer, how can you be called literate?
How can you even say this, and then go on to say "About 6 months ago, I looked at the piles of jumbled-up notebooks in my closet and was horrified at the chicken scratch on it. I could barely make sense of it. I might as well have not even been taking notes." ?
I can say that because I don't consider myself to have truly been literate until 6 months ago, when I started using cursive. If I had written a letter to someone the way I usually wrote, they wouldn't have been able to read it if they tried. And I considered my own writing back then to be pretty okay, because I made it all the way through high school and college with it. Why all my teachers allowed me to write like that is a mystery to me.
I'm able to say this stuff because I spent about 20 years of my life not using cursive at all, filling whole notebooks with print, then suddenly using it and filling notebooks with cursive. So the difference is very clear to me.
Edit: And plus, you missed the whole second part of my comment where I said that even if they can print neatly, they certainly can't do it quickly, so it's still not as good as cursive in that regard.
Again, you having garbage print handwriting doesn't mean everyone does. My printed handwriting got a compliment just this Sunday, and mine pales in comparison to that of most people's I've seen.
If print, on the whole, was impossible to read and write clearly, it would have died long, long ago. But it hasn't, because it's a perfectly acceptable way to convey information, without pretending that everyone's cursive (which, again, hardly anyone gets practice with--I can't even remember around 1/3 of the lowercase letters, or most of the capitals, like G) is so much nicer, and the only way to 'properly' go about things.
I'm glad that you're happy with cursive. Nice cursive handwriting does indeed look quite nice. But it's fallen out of favor and out of practice, and it's not, and I say this without hyperbole, the one true way that you insist it is.
Your definition of literacy and the popular view are dissimilar. The common definition is just "the ability to read and write." Nothing more, nothing less.
I looked for a definition which contained the term "cursive" and was unable to find one.
That's true, and thanks for pointing that out. I wasn't saying that we should draft a law to redefine literacy. I was only trying to make a point, which was: if I can write, but no one can read what I write except for me, then have I really achieved the goals of learning how to write?
I'm going to do exactly that. You having garbage print handwriting and pretty cursive hardly means that everyone is the same way. With the lack of cursive practice that most people get, you're much more likely to find someone with legibile printed handwriting than legible cursive.
> If you can't write legibly unless you're using a computer, how can you be called literate?
How can you even say this, and then go on to say "About 6 months ago, I looked at the piles of jumbled-up notebooks in my closet and was horrified at the chicken scratch on it. I could barely make sense of it. I might as well have not even been taking notes." ?