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Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)

79 points by lelf 9y ago

echion 9y ago
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).
- wruza 9y ago
  I can remember the pain and hand fatigue that cursive writing gave me for around 5-6 years in school until I said fuck it, I’ll write letters convenient way, not “right way”. Teachers could do nothing with it, and I simply wrote letters as you can see in books, but with few shortcuts. All readers say it reads more clear on average than, well, average cursive. We wrote with “fountain” pens back then, if it makes any difference.
  - echion 9y ago
    > I can remember the pain and hand fatigue that cursive writing gave me I remember the pain too, having written a lot, and in cursive, in school; I'm not saying it's easier to write a lot, just that I've heard and anecdotally observed that very young kids have motor skills that seem better suited to the continuous movement of joined-up letters.
- __david__ 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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].
  - CodeWriter23 9y ago
    ...as if that’s a bad thing. I think just about any surgeon would disagree with that assertion.
vim_wannabe 9y ago
Does everything taught in schools need to have immediate applicability?
- ghaff 9y ago
  No. But I'd have a hard time making a case that cursive specifically (as opposed to handwriting more broadly) is some important life skill that warrants careful teaching in grade school. Personally my Palmer cursive skills (such as they were) probably peaked in about sixth grade to the point where they're effectively non-existent today.
  - volkl48 9y ago
    I recall when taking the SAT in ~2009, that you were asked to copy a paragraph (honesty statement) in cursive. That took most people 20 minutes because no one could remember cursive. I recall giving up and writing print with little attaching lines. I don't know anyone under 30 who recall how to write in it. I'm sure there's a few, but for 95% of people it was forgotten before the age of 18.
- notl4wy3r 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      > 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.
3JPLW 9y ago
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-20171109-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-illinois-2... http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinois-cursive-schools-met-20170428-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinoi...
- gruez 9y ago
  >"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures) lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do signature checks.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        That's fair. It is something of an indication that "Yep. This is final." It's a bit silly in the case of a check that you have mailed but it's not a completely unreasonable practice in general.
ggambetta 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - ggambetta 9y ago
    Yes, IIRC it was similar to the one you can see at https://us.123rf.com/450wm/baksiabat/baksiabat1410/baksiabat141000038/32317462-hand-drawn-uppercase-calligraphic-alphabet-and-number-cursive-letters-vector-illustration.jpg https://us.123rf.com/450wm/baksiabat/baksiabat1410/baksiabat... but worse, it had two loops instead of just one.
  - teddyh 9y ago
    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
qsymmachus 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - __david__ 9y ago
      That's undoubtedly true, but I think the more important thing is that cursive is just dead in adult society. Reading other people's cursive handwriting represents a tiny, infinitesimal percentage of the reading in most people's lives. Computers, books, magazines, newspapers all render text as block letters and that's what most people are used to nowadays. Teaching cursive is a complete waste of everyone's time.
    - yodsanklai 9y ago
      I grew up in France where we were taught cursive exclusively. When people get older, their handwriting changes and can be very personal and hard to read (even for other cursive writers). Besides, apart from their own writing, most people read exclusively block characters from books and screens. Actually, I wish I could write block letters more fluently as my (mixed/cursive) handwriting is quite embarrassing!
thatfrenchguy 9y ago
> 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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > the stylings were already becoming archaic Let's do something about that! :-)
crazygringo 9y ago
> 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?
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  ignore all the fancy curly parts that uppercase letters You could be talking about Roman Cursive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive You could make a case for that.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Arguably, if you want people to be able to write quickly, you'd teach shorthand or at least some simplified version thereof. In general journalists, who still often take handwritten notes for various reasons, develop their own idiosyncratic sets of abbreviations and notations to let them take accurate notes/quotes quickly.
- ggggtez 9y ago
  It's impossible to say whether those children would develop their own style of short hand if they'd never seen cursive to begin with. You don't need to spend hours writing in cursive to notice that certain letter combinations appear together often, and coincidentally start smushing those letters together into some sort of cursive-ish mixture.
- 9y ago
plytheman 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
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woodruffw 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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?
markshead 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Why? I mean, if anyone really wants to read the originals, they can learn cursive then. But why aren't transcripts enough for the average person?
- megaman22 9y ago
  I guess we should all start writing those s's that look like lowercase f's again then. Or people in the UK need to start getting fluent in Middle English to read the Magna Carta
phaus 9y ago
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.
- wrycoder 9y ago
  The sample of author Ball's writing at the end of the article looks like Italic Cursive, which I use myself. The whole idea of cursive is to allow ligatures in fast, personal writing, simply to make it fast. That became stylized in roundhand/copperplate script, later in Palmer. I hadn't run across the use of "manuscript" for "printing" until this thread. Apparently this is being done to elevate what is now considered pejorative. "Manuscript" is (was) a general term referring to a handwritten document, not its style, e.g. half uncial. Judging from the posts here, I'd say handwriting is doomed.
- Bromskloss 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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-Handwriting/dp/0876781180/ https://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Program-Handwritin...
Symbiote 9y ago
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/hw4-600x800.jpg http://stanthonys.herts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/hw...
- ggggtez 9y ago
  Are you asking me to Google That For You? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=american+children+cursive http://lmgtfy.com/?q=american+children+cursive
- ghaff 9y ago
  The Palmer method was the standard system taught in the US when I learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method
- torstenvl 9y ago
  Americans are genereally taight D'Nealian cursive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian
- khedoros1 9y ago
  In 1993, I was taught D'Nealian cursive. It's a derivative of the Palmer cursive that the other commenter mentions.
- userbinator 9y ago
  The backward slant ("reverse italics") in that sample suggests the writer is left-handed, or was in an otherwise awkward position while writing that. It certainly stands out and makes for a weird effect...
codinghorror 9y ago
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).
takk309 9y ago
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.
Angostura 9y ago
> 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.
SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago
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.
k__ 9y ago
I stopped writing cursive in 6th grade because no one could read my stuff.
alexasmyths 9y ago
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!
alexasmyths 9y ago
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.
abritinthebay 9y ago
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)
TomK32 9y ago
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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brandonmenc 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > It was arbitrary and unfair Can you expand on why you think so?
  - BearOso 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      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?)
      - 9y ago
jacobolus 9y ago
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.
chis 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - recursive 9y ago
    > Cursive is the most efficient method for writing by hand. I think people only think this because they have the most practice doing it. For instance, shorthand is more efficient.
  - discoursism 9y ago
    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.
novalis78 9y ago
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.
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  They simply do not teach cursive in LA Unified.
- 7952 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
autocorr 9y ago
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.
- bearbearbear 9y ago
  I know zero people who write in cursive. I know very few people who even hand write anything.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    I know few people who read anything worthwhile too, but that's not an argument.
  - BrandoElFollito 9y ago
    I do not know anyone who writes in non-cursive. I live in France where cursive is the norm. Everyone I know hand writes on a whiteboard of a piece of paper. Or when they make a note to the teacher. Or when they use a post-it.
riledhel 9y ago
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.
Bromskloss 9y ago
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?
CodeWriter23 9y ago
> 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.
CamperBob2 9y ago
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.
dabbledash 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
Growlzler 9y ago
If you can't write in cursive I won't hire you.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  That is fine, most likely I will just work elsewhere.
fsiefken 9y ago
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
mwcampbell 9y ago
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!
hoosieree 9y ago
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.
cafard 9y ago
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.

79 points by lelf 9y ago

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).

wruza 9y ago
I can remember the pain and hand fatigue that cursive writing gave me for around 5-6 years in school until I said fuck it, I’ll write letters convenient way, not “right way”. Teachers could do nothing with it, and I simply wrote letters as you can see in books, but with few shortcuts. All readers say it reads more clear on average than, well, average cursive. We wrote with “fountain” pens back then, if it makes any difference.
- echion 9y ago
  > I can remember the pain and hand fatigue that cursive writing gave me I remember the pain too, having written a lot, and in cursive, in school; I'm not saying it's easier to write a lot, just that I've heard and anecdotally observed that very young kids have motor skills that seem better suited to the continuous movement of joined-up letters.
__david__ 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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].
- CodeWriter23 9y ago
  ...as if that’s a bad thing. I think just about any surgeon would disagree with that assertion.

vim_wannabe 9y ago

Does everything taught in schools need to have immediate applicability?

ghaff 9y ago
No. But I'd have a hard time making a case that cursive specifically (as opposed to handwriting more broadly) is some important life skill that warrants careful teaching in grade school. Personally my Palmer cursive skills (such as they were) probably peaked in about sixth grade to the point where they're effectively non-existent today.
- volkl48 9y ago
  I recall when taking the SAT in ~2009, that you were asked to copy a paragraph (honesty statement) in cursive. That took most people 20 minutes because no one could remember cursive. I recall giving up and writing print with little attaching lines. I don't know anyone under 30 who recall how to write in it. I'm sure there's a few, but for 95% of people it was forgotten before the age of 18.
notl4wy3r 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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.

3JPLW 9y ago

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-20171109-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-illinois-2... http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinois-cursive-schools-met-20170428-story.html http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinoi...

gruez 9y ago
>"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures) lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do signature checks.
- ghaff 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      That's fair. It is something of an indication that "Yep. This is final." It's a bit silly in the case of a check that you have mailed but it's not a completely unreasonable practice in general.

ggambetta 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
- ggambetta 9y ago
  Yes, IIRC it was similar to the one you can see at https://us.123rf.com/450wm/baksiabat/baksiabat1410/baksiabat141000038/32317462-hand-drawn-uppercase-calligraphic-alphabet-and-number-cursive-letters-vector-illustration.jpg https://us.123rf.com/450wm/baksiabat/baksiabat1410/baksiabat... but worse, it had two loops instead of just one.
- teddyh 9y ago
  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

qsymmachus 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
  - __david__ 9y ago
    That's undoubtedly true, but I think the more important thing is that cursive is just dead in adult society. Reading other people's cursive handwriting represents a tiny, infinitesimal percentage of the reading in most people's lives. Computers, books, magazines, newspapers all render text as block letters and that's what most people are used to nowadays. Teaching cursive is a complete waste of everyone's time.
  - yodsanklai 9y ago
    I grew up in France where we were taught cursive exclusively. When people get older, their handwriting changes and can be very personal and hard to read (even for other cursive writers). Besides, apart from their own writing, most people read exclusively block characters from books and screens. Actually, I wish I could write block letters more fluently as my (mixed/cursive) handwriting is quite embarrassing!

thatfrenchguy 9y ago

> 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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > the stylings were already becoming archaic Let's do something about that! :-)

crazygringo 9y ago

> 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?

HarryHirsch 9y ago
ignore all the fancy curly parts that uppercase letters You could be talking about Roman Cursive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive You could make a case for that.
ghaff 9y ago
Arguably, if you want people to be able to write quickly, you'd teach shorthand or at least some simplified version thereof. In general journalists, who still often take handwritten notes for various reasons, develop their own idiosyncratic sets of abbreviations and notations to let them take accurate notes/quotes quickly.
ggggtez 9y ago
It's impossible to say whether those children would develop their own style of short hand if they'd never seen cursive to begin with. You don't need to spend hours writing in cursive to notice that certain letter combinations appear together often, and coincidentally start smushing those letters together into some sort of cursive-ish mixture.
9y ago

plytheman 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

deleted 9y ago

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woodruffw 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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?

markshead 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.
icebraining 9y ago
Why? I mean, if anyone really wants to read the originals, they can learn cursive then. But why aren't transcripts enough for the average person?
megaman22 9y ago
I guess we should all start writing those s's that look like lowercase f's again then. Or people in the UK need to start getting fluent in Middle English to read the Magna Carta

phaus 9y ago

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.

wrycoder 9y ago
The sample of author Ball's writing at the end of the article looks like Italic Cursive, which I use myself. The whole idea of cursive is to allow ligatures in fast, personal writing, simply to make it fast. That became stylized in roundhand/copperplate script, later in Palmer. I hadn't run across the use of "manuscript" for "printing" until this thread. Apparently this is being done to elevate what is now considered pejorative. "Manuscript" is (was) a general term referring to a handwritten document, not its style, e.g. half uncial. Judging from the posts here, I'd say handwriting is doomed.
Bromskloss 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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-Handwriting/dp/0876781180/ https://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Program-Handwritin...

Symbiote 9y ago

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/hw4-600x800.jpg http://stanthonys.herts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/hw...

ggggtez 9y ago
Are you asking me to Google That For You? http://lmgtfy.com/?q=american+children+cursive http://lmgtfy.com/?q=american+children+cursive
ghaff 9y ago
The Palmer method was the standard system taught in the US when I learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method
torstenvl 9y ago
Americans are genereally taight D'Nealian cursive. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian
khedoros1 9y ago
In 1993, I was taught D'Nealian cursive. It's a derivative of the Palmer cursive that the other commenter mentions.
userbinator 9y ago
The backward slant ("reverse italics") in that sample suggests the writer is left-handed, or was in an otherwise awkward position while writing that. It certainly stands out and makes for a weird effect...

codinghorror 9y ago

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).

takk309 9y ago

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.

Angostura 9y ago

> 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.

SAI_Peregrinus 9y ago

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.

k__ 9y ago

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

alexasmyths 9y ago

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!

alexasmyths 9y ago

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.

abritinthebay 9y ago

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)

TomK32 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

brandonmenc 9y ago

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 9y ago
> It was arbitrary and unfair Can you expand on why you think so?
- BearOso 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    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?)
    - 9y ago

jacobolus 9y ago

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.

chis 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.
- recursive 9y ago
  > Cursive is the most efficient method for writing by hand. I think people only think this because they have the most practice doing it. For instance, shorthand is more efficient.
- discoursism 9y ago
  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.

novalis78 9y ago

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.

CodeWriter23 9y ago
They simply do not teach cursive in LA Unified.
7952 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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.

autocorr 9y ago

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.

bearbearbear 9y ago
I know zero people who write in cursive. I know very few people who even hand write anything.
- coldtea 9y ago
  I know few people who read anything worthwhile too, but that's not an argument.
- BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  I do not know anyone who writes in non-cursive. I live in France where cursive is the norm. Everyone I know hand writes on a whiteboard of a piece of paper. Or when they make a note to the teacher. Or when they use a post-it.

riledhel 9y ago

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.

Bromskloss 9y ago

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?

CodeWriter23 9y ago

> 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.

CamperBob2 9y ago

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.

dabbledash 9y ago

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 9y ago
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.

Growlzler 9y ago

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

tomjen3 9y ago
That is fine, most likely I will just work elsewhere.

fsiefken 9y ago

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

mwcampbell 9y ago

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!

hoosieree 9y ago

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.

cafard 9y ago

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.