6 ms·
Is cursive handwriting making a comeback?
- zzalpha 10y agoSo, maybe, but only because lawmakers won't let it disappear, all based on hazy justifications about brain development and fine motor skills and <insert modern justification for wanting to preserve an old tradition>.
- mordocai 10y agoI'm not swayed by the arguments. I think legible print handwriting and computer typing is what should be taught. However, this article is all i've read about the issue so what do I know about it? My daughter is about to enter school, and i'll let the school system decide whether or not to require her to learn cursive and focus on have her learn more important (in my opinion) things like philosophy, math, computer skills, creative writing, and science.
- douche 10y agoThe most legible handwriting I've ever seen has always been from engineers or mill-wrights, who had to learn and practice a great deal of the block lettering used in mechanical drawing and blueprints.
- mikestew 10y agoMost of what little handwriting skill I have left has obvious traits from the mechanical drawing class I took in junior high school. And in comparison to my peers, I'd say my handwriting is pretty darned good. I mostly can't even write cursive letter forms anymore, let alone use cursive for writing.
- yardie 10y agoI learned block writing in drafting class. In high school. Sadly, with CAD, drafting is a skill that's out of date and with it goes block writing.
- eru 10y agoComic book letterers perhaps also count?
- forthefuture 10y agoWhen I took the SAT they required you to copy a sentence in cursive on the scantron. I don't know cursive so I just scribbled on it. Didn't seem to hurt my grade.
- richard_mcp 10y agoI think that was the sentence where you promise not to cheat.
- pjlegato 10y agoThat is to catch people accused of hiring someone to impersonate them and take the test for them. Where that is suspected, they can make the real person copy the sentence out again in cursive for comparison, on the theory that it's much harder to accurately copy someone else's cursive than their printing.
- dboreham 10y agoBased on what I see in my kids elementary school: nope. On the bright side, thanks to smart phones and the relative crappyness of speech recognition, they are excellent typists.
- overcast 10y agoThanks to smart phones, they are actually pretty terrible typists.
- oofabz 10y agoI write in cursive, and I like it, but I don't think it's important enough to teach in school. There are modern skills we should add to the curriculum; removing non-essential subjects is the only way to make room for new ones.
- microcolonel 10y agoFor what it's worth, the amount of time spent teaching standard cursive is pretty small for kids with decent motor control. If they present it then move on (don't require things be written this way) then I think it can stay in. Though I suppose it is not essential.
- kirrent 10y agoExactly. Kids spend less time being taught cursive than they do attending music class in primary school. Far less. It's a pretty useful skill so I think it's certainly worthy of that basic investment.
- Cshelton 10y agoI hope it. It's an utterly complete waste of valuable education time. Teach them the meaning of money/personal finance, or how circuits/computers work instead.
- recursive 10y agoI hope not. Even if it does stimulate motor skills or learning or whatever, I'm sure there are plenty of other skills that do this, and are actually useful at the same time.
- Broken_Hippo 10y agoThis exactly. Print is everywhere, and so long as folks can write print on paper and get ideas across, that is all that is needed. Motor skills can be learned by arts and crafts and cooking and other such things, which have the added benefit of teaching new skills, overlaps with needed skills (art and music both can incorporate some math, for example) and new forms of enjoyment or stress relief.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jdeisenberg 10y agoI wrote an outline and some pseudo-code today (on paper), and I used cursive. However, my handwriting is terrible and has a half-life of 12 hours or so.
- 2muchcoffeeman 10y agoIs cursive an American thing? Wikipedia says I learned 'casual cursive'. I join some letters. I can't really name anyone that writes in full cursive.
- duaneb 10y agoDefinitely not. It is a pain in the ass to write discrete characters with a quill or a fountain pen, so it's more of a change over time than geography. In fact, I find it more interesting to consider when printing (non-joined letters) became acceptable for an educated person. I'd put money it is directly related to ball point pens and pencils.
- syntheticnature 10y agoI expect drafting plays a role; "Engineer handwriting" often actually is "writing in drafting letters," sometimes in a SmallCaps style for lowercase.
- duaneb 10y agoWell, cursive was always an approximation of hand-inked separate glyphs and then the printed glyphs. small caps predates lowercase.
- syntheticnature 10y agoI expect drafting plays a role; "Engineer handwriting" often actually is "writing in drafting letters," sometimes in a SmallCaps style for lowercase.
- knieveltech 10y agoNo.
- clock_tower 10y agoWho would even think to ask this? It feels like a submarine... and there it is: it's an ad for Handwriting Without Tears, Inc. (http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html for submarine articles, for those not already familiar with the concept.)
- mrob 10y agoThe speed advantage of cursive is mostly wasted if you write by moving your fingers. You constantly have to lift your pen from the paper when you reach the end of your range of motion, so you might as well use a more legible style like italic. To get the most from cursive you need to write using your shoulder muscles, and AFAIK this is never taught in schools. I suspect most people never realize it's possible. I certainly didn't as a child, and therefore cursive seemed like a waste of time.
- lottin 10y agoIn many parts of Europe cursive is the standard form of handwriting. Kids learn to write in cursive first and later they learn "print" letters. Books intended for children who are learning to read are printed in cursive too.
- jchin 10y agoCursive with a ballpoint pen feels really different from cursive with a fountain pen. If these schools want to talk about cursive as a form of artistry or individuality, they should get the kids using fountain pens. You might be interested in this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpo... HN discussion: How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141874 Edit: formatting
- shanacarp 10y agobasically true, I didn't really understand my own handwriting and how to write until I switched pens
- eru 10y agoIn Germany they used to use fountain pens in school almost exclusively. (Not sure if that's still the case. It was up to ten years ago, definitely.)
- aries1980 10y agoIn Hungary in the 80s, in the first two years we had to use fountain pens as well. Dodgy ones, didn't like it, but now I have my decent collection and I love them. People still learn cursive writing in .hu, it is much faster writing in that style.
- xbmcuser 10y agoThese days ball point pen have become thin enough that cursive writing is not bad or ugly. But children and teachers should be taught not to use a thick ball point pen.
- LyndsySimon 10y agoIt's not about line width, it's about the amount of pressure one uses to write, and the angle at which they hold the pen.
- Snargorf 10y agoThere's a rule that works very well: If a headline is a question, the answer is "No." It works 99% of the time, including this time. Saved you a click!
- jdietrich 10y agoIf we're going to use precious classroom time to teach an extra writing system, it might as well be Teeline shorthand. Basic Teeline isn't much more difficult to learn than cursive, but it's drastically faster. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand
- CamperBob2 10y agoTeaching handwriting to kids who haven't yet learned keyboarding (or any number of more useful skills) is pretty far up there on the list of the dumbest things ever. Not at #1, or even especially close, but pretty far up there.
- adrusi 10y agoI don't know if the kind of dexterity needed to write can be learned as reliably at an older age. Its also a useful skill for operating in an child's environment you can write a story and draw an illustration for it when you use paper, that's much harder (and not as fun) for a six year old to do on a computer
- CamperBob2 10y agoPoint being, they don't need it at all. They can always print. Cursive writing is a perfectly fine hobby. But make no mistake, that's all it is. It will never again be important as a means of communication or creative expression. As such, it doesn't have a place in primary education where resources and classroom time are always limited.
- jdietrich 10y agoIf you can learn ophthalmic surgery or diamond setting as an adult, you can certainly learn cursive.
- shanacarp 10y agoI hope so, I write in cursive, and I would like the next generation of my family to read my handwriting. I'm not even that old, and my peers sometimes have a hard time with my handwriting I honestly don't get why most of my Millenial friends dropped cursive - it's easier to write with...
- jtedward 10y agoOne thing very few people consider about writing in cursive, is that it is much harder to do if you are left handed. As a left handed person this annoys me.
- superswordfish 10y agoAh, but you get your revenge when it's time to write in an RTL script.
- Tideflat 10y agoUse boustrophedon for equality!
- NolF 10y agoThis is something I don't quite understand. I have a hypothesis (based on observational anecdata) that left handed people generally don't use a dynamic tripod pencil grip, often times there is a fair bit of flexion at the wrist which result in the palm going over the wet ink. Otherwise how are RTL scripts (like Arabic and Persian) not encountering similar issues on right handed people? In fact those scripts require joining, and their calligraphy can get incredibly floral.
- Overtonwindow 10y agoIn 2014 I went back to school for a couple of years, and even though everyone had a smart phone and a laptop, at least half of the classes that I took, the professors forbid the use of electronics in class. I had no problem with this because I have been writing in cursive most of my life. But many of the students around me struggle to keep up printing their notes. I think cursive has a place, not just fine motor skill development in children, but also because there are times when you won't have technology. I know everyone writes differently, but I think there is no harm in teaching cursive. Only benefit.
- charlesism 10y agoAnother win for Betteridge. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- xbmcuser 10y agoWriting in cursive is easier and takes less effort than writing block letters I dont get the antagonism towards cursive writing.