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I was born in 1991. I learned to write cursive in school, but I can't comfortably read it. Whenever I get a card from an older relative I've got to slowly puzzl
by tdeck 8y ago
I was born in 1991. I learned to write cursive in school, but I can't comfortably read it. Whenever I get a card from an older relative I've got to slowly puzzle over some of the words. Apart from the odd instructor who wrote on the board in cursive, these occasional personal notes are my only practice. These days most people default to what used to be called "printing" so it's rarely a big deal.
If we want to bring back cursive, there needs to be more of an acknowledgement that reading and writing are different things, and need to be practiced differently. When I was learning Morse code, it was understood that sending and receiving are different skills (e.g. I can send at 25 WPM but can only copy at about 12 WPM). The same doesn't seem to be true about cursive education.
- anon491throw 8y agoWhat's interesting is that difficult to read / "ugly" font text is more memorable than easier-to-read text. Therefore, memory-item checklists, insightful quotes and other bits of important text should use Comic Sans, cursive, etc. to achieve memorability, whereas most ubiquitous affordance labels and signage shouldn't.
- gruez 8y agoSource on this? You'd think that if it worked, all the ads you see would be in ugly fonts, seeing how well adtech optimizes.
- jsty 8y agohttps://qz.com/1417818/hard-to-read-fonts-can-help-boost-your-memory/ https://qz.com/1417818/hard-to-read-fonts-can-help-boost-you... Here's a font designed to leverage the effect for improving recall
- tdeck 8y agoVery interesting! Though it seems like you'd grow accustomed to this font and lessen it's effect if used regularly as part of a study process.
- cjslep 8y agoI lasted one semester in Russian class thanks in part to the cursive writing full of what looks like to English speakers as cursive u and w mixed with half-height dotless cursive i's. It was really hard to read and write Cyrillic like that.
- paleotrope 8y agoI lost the ability to easily write English cursive when I learned to write Russian cursive. слышу is my go to word when I want to show people how crazy Russian cursive can be.
- a2tech 8y agoThats exactly the boat I'm in--my grandmothers write me notes and cards and they use beautiful old style cursive. It just looks like squiggles to me--I hand the letters over to my wife and she reads them to me.