23 ms·

Gen Z never learned to read cursive

• fortran77 4y ago
  The author of this piece, who teaches at _Harvard_ found that 2/3rds of her students couldn't read cursive.
  • jhbadger 4y ago
    It's about generations and what they are taught, not academic ability. I'm 52, have a doctorate, and only barely know cursive myself. Why would anyone expect young people today, raised from birth on computers, to know a frankly obsolete way of expressing text?
    • shmde 4y ago
      > to know a frankly obsolete way of expressing text? Why learn how to cook when you can get a packet of readymade food in the store. Cooking is obsolete.
      • npinsker 4y ago
        Plenty of people don't know how to cook and do fine. But cooking has big advantages -- it's cheaper, and you can make it just how you like it. Maybe everywhere's closed. There might be some slight advantages to cursive (e.g. it feels better to write), but horse-drawn buggies have some slight advantages over cars also. I think calling cursive obsolete seems completely fair.
      • tester756 4y ago
        Cooking is incredibly useful and there's huge difference between packet readymade food and made at home. Especially when you start cooking for a few people
    • wr4aqw34 4y ago
  • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    I was taught to read and write cursive in 1998-2007. Problem with cursive is ambiguity of characters e/l, B/E, S/Z, a/o, b/l, etc. and when you need to write faster because you are taking notes, then you don't have time to make those squiggly details of each letter and ends up with unreadable waves. I have personally dropped using cursive around 2004, because I was not able to read anything after myself.
    • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      "e" is three times shorter than "l". "B" and "E" have nothing in common. "Z" goes far under the base line. "b" goes back up and has a flat connecting high while "l" connects low. Same for "a" and "o" but I could see them being somewhat similar. "a" has a vertical line and connect at the bottom while "o" has a crossed loop and connects high. These letters are not supposed to look like each others. It goes further than details.
      • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
        Sorry you have no clue what are you talking about. I was writing with a cursive and those are exactly my experiences with it. The faster you will attempt to write, the faster it will start fusing into waves until you have only mmm mmmmm mmmmmm mmm mm like a Russian shorthand. Abandoned cursive and started using computer-like letters. Using it until today with my notes.
      • _dain_ 4y ago
        >These letters are not supposed to look like each others. It goes further than details. No, they're not supposed to. But in practice, in actual handwriting, they do, which is what the parent comment was talking about.
        • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
          I still take notes in cursive. The letters the parent points as looking similar most definitely don’t unless your cursive is extremely incorrect. "c" and "e" I would have understood. Those are written nearly the same way. But apart from "a" and "o" all the pairing mentioned concern letters with widely different sizes.
• slater 4y ago
  I feel you could make the same argument re: stenography?
  • fortran77 4y ago
    While I can read Gregg shorthand, it was always a _niche_ skill, used by professional secretaries and others who had to take notes. In the 70s it was taught in high school, along with touch-typing.
  • jollybean 4y ago
    That was never a commonly accepted form of writing, which is a material difference. I think over 18 years of education it's reasonable to teach kids both forms of writing. There is no lack of curriculum space. Most things we learn we forget. Writing is one of those neat thing we keep forever.
    • denton-scratch 4y ago
      > Writing is one of those neat thing we keep forever. Hah! You must be a young 'un. My handwriting has deteriorated over the years, from a pretty bad start. And "neat" would be an eccentric description of my style.
      • jollybean 4y ago
        You can still read and write printed script and cursive. And if you had to do it for more than 3 days, your skills would be back.
        • denton-scratch 4y ago
          ...and RSI, and arthritis of the knuckles. I don't relish the prospect of 3 days of handwriting. And I've never had pretty handwriting; all that would "come back" would be the ability to scribble fast. The ability to write nicely would never come back, because it was never there in the first place.
• Barrin92 4y ago
  >"Handwriting instruction had already been declining as laptops and tablets and lessons in “keyboarding” assumed an ever more prominent place in the classroom" While I think you can debate the particular merits of cursive the underlying fine motor skills that are developed are important in many situations. Wholesale replacing handwriting with keyboards or even voice is in my opinion a bad idea. I've been teaching people how to solder at a local makerspace and there's a big increase of "two left hands" young people from my experience. Younger generations just don't do a lot of mechanical work any more. Same with the decline in swimming. Tech should augment, not replace or even degrade physical abilities.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • XorNot 4y ago
    So how's your blacksmithing these days? After all, if you can't repair a plow then what will you do?
    • jeltz 4y ago
      Or your flint knapping? Edit: I think there are better and more relevant ways to teach kids fine motor skills than teaching them an outdated and useless script. What about just teaching them block letters, calligraphy or drawing?
    • Barrin92 4y ago
      I'm not entirely sure how the sarcasm is warranted given 1. I made clear that rather than the particular task, what is important is the development of skills, secondly the ability to perform basic repairs is also a rapidly declining but important skill, and thirdly blacksmithing is actually still a career.
      • andrew_ 4y ago
        it wasn't warranted IMO. Topics on HN which incite feelings of insecurity, or which drag up strong negative emotions, tend to result in a lot of brash negative replies and a lot of sarcasm anymore. This topic seems to be striking a nerve with a lot of folks who struggled with the teaching/skill at an early age.
• Spivak 4y ago
  Wat? Y’all learned to read cursive in schools? Like your teacher just wrote words but in connected illegible italics and had you figure out what it meant? And yet y’all think we’re the weird ones.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    If you write it, you learn to read it. And bad handwriting is a problem that transcends font.
    • toast0 4y ago
      > And bad handwriting is a problem that transcends font. Are you saying my handwriting is transcendent? Thank you.
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        It transcends a stone vessel of holy water.
  • zbrozek 4y ago
    I was in third grade in 1995 and was being taught cursive. I thought it was ridiculously old fashioned and a waste of time. I was punished for not doing copying assignments. I still think it was a waste of time nearly thirty years later. Handwriting in general, however, maintains merit.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • ajuc 4y ago
    I went to school in 1990 in Poland. We were taught to write in cursive FIRST. Like: "This is the letter "m", that's how it looks like, write it here in this line 1000 times in this pattern". Something like this: http://bystredziecko.pl/karty-pracy/nauka-pisania/5/szlaczki-nauka-pisania-m.pdf http://bystredziecko.pl/karty-pracy/nauka-pisania/5/szlaczki... I already could read books by then, but most kids didn't, so they learnt cursive first. BTW cursive isn't any less or more readable than printed letters by itself. It depends on how fast you write. Printed letters force you to go slower, so by default you write them clearer. But if you go slow with cursive it will be as clear as printed letters.
• nynx 4y ago
  I fail to understand why being able to read cursive as easily as print is important.
  • As_You_Wish 4y ago
    Do you know how to read cursive?
    • Quillbert182 4y ago
      I do, and I have to agree with the parent. The only time I ever read cursive is the occasional note from my grandparents.
    • denton-scratch 4y ago
      I don't know what that means; everyone's cursive is different, unless they're using some formalised script such as copperplate. [Edit] Have you ever watched someone writing copperplate with a nib? It takes forever. It seems to take about a minute PER WORD. It's beautiful, artistic script, and rather easy to read; but it's not much good for my shopping list, or my telephone notes, or my resignation letter.
    • jeltz 4y ago
      Yes, but I almost never have to use that skill. It is pretty pointless unless you are doing historical research and then there are more scripts that are useful to know.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Outside doing some historical research or reading historical documents. There is rather little use these days. Or receiving notes from someone who uses it.
  • pookah 4y ago
    If you're American all of your foundational and historical documents (Bill of Rights) are written in cursive.
    • 4y ago
• Dylan16807 4y ago
  > For many young people, “handwriting,” once essentially synonymous with cursive, has come to mean the painstaking printing they turn to when necessity dictates. It's not that big of a difference. Actually, going by this other atlantic article, cursive is only 10% faster. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/yeah-i-still-use-shorthand-and-a-smartpen/373281/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/06/yeah-... If you want a non-painstaking writing system for more than a few words at a time, you get a keyboard or use some kind of shorthand.
  • As_You_Wish 4y ago
    I developed my own shorthand in university. Wow did that make note-taking easy.
  • Quillbert182 4y ago
    Personally, as someone who wrote only in cursive for 4 years of my life, I find that cursive is significantly slower and more cumbersome that print.
    • Ekaros 4y ago
      Same, falling in to classes when it was simplified, but still teached and almost asked. Also with my slight fine-motor control issue it was pain. I could "text"(hand writing) quickly enough for it never being issue in any test. And it being at least somewhat readable. Ofc, I do sign my name in cursive, but I don't think you can even read the name from that or it be consistent from one minute to next. Thankfully police didn't even care about that in ID card application. So what is the point anyway, if even the official sample isn't verified.
    • WastingMyTime89 4y ago
      The idea is very surprising to me. I still semi regularly had to write a dozen pages for two hours exams a decade ago and I don’t see how I could have done that without writing somewhat fluidly. Print is very legible but it’s so slow. Then again, I don’t understand how you can learn to properly write cursive without using Seyes paper and for a reason I can’t explain only France does that.
• As_You_Wish 4y ago
  I've typed almost all of my life. And, of course, you start out with block letters in 1st grade. I thought it was so cool to learn cursive. It was like the first step towards belonging to the adult world. And like most people, I do most of my communications on the computer. But, for me, there's nothing like the tactile feelings of writing in cursive on a piece of paper. The soothing flow of the pen, the feel of the roughness or smoothness of the paper on the side of my hand, the smell of the ink and of the paper, the impression or indentation on the paper. I just adore writing in the cursive script on paper.
  • UkiahSmith 4y ago
    You should try writing with a fountain pen, if you already haven't. It's a different experience than popular ball pens.
    • denton-scratch 4y ago
      Not any old fountain pen, though. A cheap one snags on the paper, and isn't at all pleasant. A good pen (on good paper - like, a nice laid) is certainly a pleasure. But who writes personal letters with a pen, these days? I've never tried to write with a quill. That must have been a real pain in the wazoo - constantly whipping out a penknife to trim the nib.
    • snvzz 4y ago
      Absolutely. This is how I survived handwriting. Pens would just physically hurt to type with. Fountain pens, no force required, they just glide on the paper.
    • As_You_Wish 4y ago
      Oh, I have. I love fountain pens and writing with them a lot. But those things get ink everywhere, I've never had it when they didn't, so I haven't had one in a while. But I love fountain pens, I've had many of them.
• theflyingelvis 4y ago
  It’s like a superpower. I can, with little effort, write notes that the ‘kids’ nowadays cannot read.
  • ajuc 4y ago
    Go one step further - develop your own script. It's surprisingly useful.
    • yieldcrv 4y ago
      ciphers are easily broken with frequency analysis. English always has a ton of E’s encoding can be much faster than decoding, going more complicated to beat frequency analysis is just going to slow your own decoding/reading down Yes it does thwart people that should have already been bounced by the cultural expectation of not reading your journal, but it doesn’t take a state actor to break it, just someone slightly above curious
      • ajuc 4y ago
        I'm aware (even if the one I'm using isn't a simple letter substitution, it's inspired by quenya and sanskrit). I created it for a tabletop rpg I'm running, my friends (a few programmers and a math major) couldn't decode it after a few weeks of trying without several hints and a few-pages-long sample, which is good enough for me. I've prepared a lot of puzzles for them, and this was significantly harder than a simple cipher with letter substitution, because even separating it into letters to feed it into frequency analysis isn't obvious. Of course if I used it for journals or sth like that it would be easy to crack, but I'm mostly using it to write very short notes. Have a crack if you want :) https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52366236038_9b3a642015_b.jpg https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52366236038_9b3a642015_b...
      • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
        Unless you're Christian Bök or reading Gadsby.
  • stjohnswarts 4y ago
• Quillbert182 4y ago
  I was taught how to read and write in cursive at school, and it was mandated that all non-math assignments were written in cursive from 3rd through 6th grades. I hate writing in cursive and have always found it slower and more cumbersome that block letters, and as a result, I haven't done it since other than for a select few things such as my signature.
  • Foobar8568 4y ago
    Writing in cursive should be faster than block letters, the gesture is like a flow going forward, unless crossing t or dots on i/j once the word has been written.
    • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      If you're right-handed.
      • Foobar8568 4y ago
        My daughter is left handed and has no problem with writing fast (at least for her age), fountain pen with (very) fast drying ink+quality paper. Otherwise, there are good pens now that are enjoyable to write nowadays.
    • stjohnswarts 4y ago
      It is definitely faster if you're well practiced in it. Not so much if you 99% of what you do is typing or "regular" written characters.
• shmde 4y ago
  I love cursive, I have written in cursive all my life. Cursive gives a special sort of personality to a person. Its unique to everyone. It just feels personal. Have you ever received a letter in your life ? Lets say its a personal letter maybe a love letter. What would you prefer. A mechanically block printed piece of paper which was "typed" by someone or a love letter written with ink and a pen and some cursive ?
  • mort96 4y ago
    What makes non-cursive handwriting less personal than cursive handwriting?
  • NavinF 4y ago
    If those were my only options, I'd prefer the printed letter, but realistically a text, voice call, or better yet an IRL conversion is far more common.
  • VintageCool 4y ago
    Cursive and block letters are not your only options. There is a wide range of legible handwriting between the two. For example, "Italic" handwriting has (imho) the advantages of cursive without the excessive strictures. https://www.italic-handwriting.org/exemplars/display/wellington https://www.italic-handwriting.org/exemplars/display/welling...
• johnzim 4y ago
  When I was reading for the bar in 2011 (analogous to 'taking' the bar in the US), one test, that of writing 'opinions' was, incredibly, still a handwriting-only assessment. It was expected that you would have to turn in something like a dozen full pages to cover all the pertinent topics in the exam question. Having primarily touch typed from a young age and being in possession of some truly horrible handwriting, the only way I could get through it was to spend half an hour practicing -every day- in order to reach the requisite speed. I looked then at the experience of handwriting that exam as massively anachronistic, and a decade later, my feelings are the same. However I can now handwrite at a decent pace, and I still find going to pen and paper a great aid when tackling complex problems. Is it a vital skill? I don't think so, but I'm quite certain it's a helpful one. Gen Z won't miss it, but then, playing a musical instrument isn't vital to one's education either, but few people who do would say they regret spending the time to learn it outside of school.
  • XorNot 4y ago
    I was dreadful at every instrument I tried and never had a shred of passion for them. I would've been better off doing anything else with the time and money invested.
  • prox 4y ago
    Interesting. Handwriting does require fine-motor skills, do you feel that was an improvement? Or : do we lack fine-motor skills if we don’t learn handwriting?
  • rtpg 4y ago
    This does remind me of engineering school entrance exams in France, where I would be happy to get to 4 pages in the philosophy stuff, but then look around and see that in the same amount of time so many people wrote 12 or 16 pages. I do think that a part of it was more of an upstream bottleneck in my mind, but part of me wonders if training that sort of writing skill helps with mental agility as well.
    • jeltz 4y ago
      Or maybe you were better at structuring your thoughts and getting to the point. More is not necessarily better.
• schoen 4y ago
  One interesting thing is that this problem has arisen many times in history, because the handwriting styles that are taught in school have changed so significantly and so many times. If you see handwritten documents from Germany or possibly Scandinavia before about the 1960s, they may be in this kind of script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin If you were taught to read and write in an English-speaking country, you'll probably not be able to understand most of those documents without practice! This has happened repeatedly as handwriting norms have changed enough to require conscious study, often called "paleography" when it's focused on reading older manuscripts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palaeography But as the Sütterlin example shows, this isn't just about reading things from the 14th century or something. There are a number of cases where handwriting styles regularly used in the 20th century may not be transparent to us today, and have to be individually learned. So you might say this has just happened over again!
  • raverbashing 4y ago
    > you'll probably not be able to understand most of those documents without practice! No. It is because this system is objectively and obtusely hard. Really, C looks like an L, B looks like an L, T looks like whatever, V looks like anything but a V etc This is not about practice, this is about who invented this being obtuse (the polite word I'm using here) Fraktur is weird but it is mostly readable. Older cursive methods mostly are readable (I mean, except Kurrent - though even it looks like a bit better than Sütterlin - and the Russian system). This looks like a bad joke for real
    • TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
      This. The moment I am pushed to write cursive faster, then it ends up as unreadable waves looking like mmm mmmmm mmmmmm mmmm. Even I was not able to read it after myself. Swapped on writing single characters like a computer and readability went through the roof.
      • denton-scratch 4y ago
• kirykl 4y ago
  Even being able to read modern cursive isn’t complete knowledge. Try reading formal cursive written 100 years ago it’s quite difficult.
  • prox 4y ago
    And learning it again and again as you gofurther back. It took me a bit but I can read 18th/17th century cursive well enough.
• Normille 4y ago
  Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32873924 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32873924
• noneeeed 4y ago
  As a Brit with two small kids, I was on the lookout for some practise books to help them practice what we call “joined up” writing and kept finding US based ones. I finally understood why so many Americans hate cursive, it seems a lot more florid and loopy than what we teach, almost like it’s trying to replicate Victorian copper plate. I can really sympathise with how frustrating it must be to learn and to write well and quickly for a lot of people.
  • Angostura 4y ago
    Yup. Our joined up writing seems a pragmatic and useful tool - it's certainly been taught that way since the 1960s. Though I was always rather jealous of my mum's fully elegant handwriting.
    • iso1631 4y ago
      I haven't written any 'joined up' writing since school 20 years ago, the only writing I make is short notes for myself which is far more legible than the nonsense they force on kids in primary school.
  • udp 4y ago
    Yes, UK educated here and I’ve literally never heard of “cursive” (other than from Americans). Just “joined up handwriting” that we learnt in primary school in those books with ascent/descent lines, which certainly seems to be a lot simpler than American cursive.
• silisili 4y ago
  My kid, 11, is learning cursive now in public school. I agree it's outdated, but I'm glad, still. What sucks is that sometimes she asks for help, and me, not having written it in 20 years, don't remember all the letters(Capital F, J, etc). She also asked why n has 2 hills and m 3. I told her I didn't know, and always wrote them 'incorrectly', and that gave her confidence to do the same. At the end of the day, while I'm all for preserving traditions and such, agree cursive is a useless skill. Even before computers dominated everything, it felt like a weird thing that didn't save much time, and made everything harder to read.
  • Dylan16807 4y ago
    > She also asked why n has 2 hills and m 3. I told her I didn't know, and always wrote them 'incorrectly', and that gave her confidence to do the same. It's because cursive n has two downstrokes, and cursive m has three downstrokes. Counting by hills has issues when the letter before it has a high exit. You can end up with barely a hill or no hill at all. Consider oe vs. one (vs. ae), if you're cutting out the 'extra' hill. You can make it work but it gets pretty subtle.
  • ogogmad 4y ago
    The UK "joined up" handwriting has the same letter forms as the keyboard I'm typing on. I guess it's functional but less beautiful. Maybe not very traditional.
  • latexr 4y ago
    If you agree the skill is outdated and useless, why are you glad they’re making your kid learn it?
    • stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Not everything is life that is old and not immediately effective is “useless”. For example, snowboarding is “useless” and “inefficient” and contributes almost nothing practical to one's life in a pragmatic sense, however it's still fun and millions of people enjoy it. Some people may enjoy reading and writing traditional cursive and that's okay as well.
• Angostura 4y ago
  Kinds in the UK still learned 'joined up writing', which is simpler than the more elegant style of previous generations, but is practical tool for writing quickly.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 4y ago
    Oh, the American “cursive” is something more elaborate? That explains why people would hate it.
    • VintageCool 4y ago
      American cursive is an impractical "idealized" script. Some scholar a hundred years ago decided that handwriting would be faster if the pen never left the page, ever. As a result, American cursive is full of tiny hand-cramping loops and loses legibility. With one exception, the capital I is unconnected. My teachers made me retake the cursive test every week for a year because I always tried to connect the capital I to the next letter, and it took that long before anyone told me which mistake I was making.
      • Izkata 4y ago
        That must have been a distinct style, the version I learned does connect capital I to the next letter, while capital D/U/W doesn't unless it's a tall letter like lowercase l: https://sciencetrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/800px-Cursive-700x479.png https://sciencetrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/800px-C...
    • bowsamic 4y ago
      Yeah the American style is extremely ornate and traditional. The UK style is literally just print letters but joined up, nothing fancy.
      • Tesl 4y ago
        ohhhhh I didn't know this. I've seen these complaints from Americans about cursive a million times and I never understood why writing with joined up letters was so hard.
• flohofwoe 4y ago
  Isn't this sort of evolution kinda normal? Even though I learned modern German "Schreibschift" in school at the beginning of the 80's, I hardly ever used it outside of school. And this 'modern' script is completey different from what my grandparent learned in the 1920's and 30's, which I cannot read either without a lot of effort and looking up character shapes. (googling around a bit, apparently the evolution of script was mostly dictated by the writing tool - bird vs steel quill etc..., so it makes sense that the transition to typing causes another evolutionary step).
  • jeltz 4y ago
    Yes, it is very normal. Scripts have changed many times throughout history.
  • astrobe_ 4y ago
    Depends on countries I guess. In France, the vast majority of the handwritten letters I have received or seen were written in cursive. At some point a handwritten "letter of motivation" was also a de facto requirement for job applications, and not writing it in cursive would not even come to the mind of anyone - precisely because it variability gave it a more "personal" vibe, a feeling that was exploited by the bogus graphology pseudo-science [1] at that time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphology
    • TacticalCoder 4y ago
      > Depends on countries I guess. In France, the vast majority of the handwritten letters I have received or seen were written in cursive. Up to this day kids at school in France are still taught cursive. Source: my daughter was for five years straight in a British College and didn't learn cursive, but she just moved to a french school and now has to write cursive (and AFAICT the school, although private, is following the official french cursus). No biggie though: she adapted in a few days. As to me I don't write in cursive anymore (although I did learn to write using cursive) but I've got zero problem reading cursive.
  • asddubs 4y ago
• staticassertion 4y ago
  Good, cursive is stupid. School already finds so many idiotic ways to waste your childhood, removing this one seems like a solid win. As for the "tyranny of relevance", sure, we shouldn't only learn things that are strictly "beneficial". Abstract thinking is important and I can buy an argument that cursive forces our brain to think about language differently. Well, I can't buy it because I see no support for that let alone support for it being a better investment than, say, an additional hour of reading, or an additional hour of learning a new language, etc. The discussion here is about whether this segregates the population into "those who have access to cursive materials and those who don't" but if anything that's a great case for not having cursive - it was a mistake then, it's a mistake now. I find it odd that one student would choose not to read handwritten letters altogether because they're in cursive. Surely there's a transcript, and if your goal is to glean the emotion from the weight of the penmanship, I don't think that cursive will be a significant barrier. Or just learn cursive, I think an adult can likely learn cursive well enough to read it in an hour? It's... not hard. Reading crazy old cursive was never something we were taught, so no one has regressed there, that shit that just looks like '/-/-/-///--/----/~~~~' may as well have its own name, it isn't cursive. I mean, I guess that's kind of critical to this whole article - it maintains that only a few will be trained it it, but it's not a difficult skill and I suspect anyone who cares that they are "locked out" of that world would just pick it up in a weekend. IDK, I get the point, and for a lot of things I see this as an issue, but fuck cursive Rest In Shit
• butokai 4y ago
  Funny note: in Italy, the specific way Gen Z folks have of pronouncing vowels has been jokingly dubbed "cursive speaking"
  • prox 4y ago
    Really? How does that sound vs default Italian?
    • 01acheru 4y ago
      It is hard to explain how it sounds, you can still understand everything even if you never heard it before but the talker sounds ridiculous... That's the video that popularized "cursive speech": https://youtu.be/blLJ5UIu3r8 https://youtu.be/blLJ5UIu3r8 For example: "buongiorno amico, come stai?" would be something like "buoongioOrniio aamiIicooi, comiee staAiee?" It is basically adding random vowels around, stretching them and using a childish voice.
      • wildrhythms 4y ago
        As an American I think we would refer to this as 'sing-song voice'.
        • Tijdreiziger 4y ago
          Ha, that reminds me of my Swedish teacher, who loved to remark 'Swedish is a sing-song language!' whenever someone spoke too stodgily. Of course, she wasn't wrong!
        • contextfree 4y ago
          it makes me think a bit of Arabic and Indian singing performance styles (as an American who doesn't really know anything about either the Italian language or Arabic or Indian music.)
      • prox 4y ago
        Haha, not Italian but I have a basic understanding (buying stuff and simple interactions) but I can hear the difference, it does sound very weird! At least it’s not as fast as some Italian I’ve heard, the amount of times I had to ask a native speaker to slow down is high indeed.
• denton-scratch 4y ago
  My handwriting at school was so spidery that I was signed-up for handwriting lessons. Insanely, they gave me an italic pen, and had me practising italic letter-forms. Unsurprisingly, my handwriting turned into a mess of italic letter-forms and spidery crap. I'm told that my handwriting is not just readable, but even clear; but hell, if I can't read my own writing, I don't see how anyone can describe it as "clear". It's an ugly mess. It's good for signatures, though; I have a signature that seems pretty hard to copy. In fact I can't copy it myself; every time I sign my name it looks different. [Edit] There was another guy at school who was taught italic; he favoured green ink, and wrote in the most beautiful italic script you can imagine - very regular. It must have taken him hours to write his school essays.
  • Kuinox 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia
    • denton-scratch 4y ago
      I do not have a learning disability! I think my spidery scrawl was more legible before I had remedial instruction. My handwriting was damaged by my teachers. Sure, it was ugly to start with; but the remedial instruction just made it worse (and I ended up writing slower). Lose, lose, lose.
      • Terretta 4y ago
        > I'm told that my handwriting is not just readable, but even clear; but hell, if I can't read my own writing, I don't see how anyone can describe it as "clear". It's an ugly mess. ... suggests something is up.
        • denton-scratch 4y ago
          Well, sure. I'm 66, I was badly concussed a few years ago, I drink a lot, my hand is unsteady, and my eyesight is fading. Occam's Razor hacks away any diagnosis of learning disability.
• snickerer 4y ago
  I am a 42 year old European and I'm so glad that cursive is dying out as a compulsory school subject. Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught. That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense. You can learn to read cursive quickly. In fact you have to learn to decipher it again for every decade, region, and person, because it differs so much. I always wished for an OCR tool that translates handwriting into UTF-8 when I had to read it. Soon every phone will be able to translate it. I am happy about it.
  • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    In peer-reviewed studies, writing cursive has been linked to deeper processing of the language than printing, just as printing has been over typing. Early L1 development concerns aside, learning cursive was a pretty good ROI for me given how little time it took as a seven year-old, and how much time cursive has saved me over the years since. Related research: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7399101/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/
    • Macha 4y ago
      So despite containing cursive in the title, the first study appears to be comparing handwriting as a whole vs typing, not print vs cursive handwriting. The second study compares handwriting vs tracing vs typing, again no cursive vs print. The third study compares drawing vs typing, it doesn't address handwriting. Also all of them are using proxy measures like brain activity and not recall of the studied material. I could actually accept the more laborious and slower process of handwriting may slow kids down and therefore spend more time thinking about a subject as a hypothesis, but that's not what was tested here. Such a hypothesis would however favour print handwriting more than the theoretically faster cursive.
      • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
• DonHopkins 4y ago
  There are even Perl programmers who like to write out their code in cursive because typewritten Perl isn't hard enough for other people read.
  • johnnymorgan 4y ago
    I could believe this is real..also Perl rules!
  • LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Perl is a write-only language. I believe in making code readable. (And in the very rare situation where readable and efficient conflict and it matters I write the readable version as a comment to the efficient version.)
  • Gibbon1 4y ago
    Only a few people realize that Dijkstra's hand written letters are all valid Perl programs.
• amelius 4y ago
  I am more concerned about gen z never being taught to type with 10 fingers.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    Don't worry. They will just use touch screens soon enough.
    • arvinsim 4y ago
      Or will just rely on speech to text tools
    • AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      Or just use voice input. Writing as a whole may decline as technology advances.
      • esmon 4y ago
        There's just one problem: privacy. I don't have that when using voice input. Writing won't decline in favor of voice input until we find a way to make it private. Tangential to this, smart glasses won't replace smartphones either for the same reason.
        • viraptor 4y ago
          Make that privacy and accents. There are too many regions where choice recognition just won't work without essentially building new voice models. And that's before we get to people using their second/third/... language.
        • smitop 4y ago
          Viable on-device speech recognition is becoming reality. Apple is apparently processing some speech recognition on-device now: https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-device-app-privacy-181525551.html https://www.engadget.com/ios-15-siri-on-device-app-privacy-1... So far there aren't any particularly good open source voice recognition models though, in large part due to a lack of training data. You can (and should!) contribute to Common Voice to help change that: https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en https://commonvoice.mozilla.org/en
• maxboone 4y ago
  I like that I can write cursive, but I sure as hell didn't learn it through elementary school cursive. Glad that is phasing out, even though I'd hate cursive writing to die.
• alfiedotwtf 4y ago
  Gen Z also never learned use a typewriter, the Ink Well, the Slide Rule, or how to write Copperplate... but somehow I think they'll be fine.
• RunSet 4y ago
  If you don't learn to write cursive, don't be surprised when your vote gets discarded because your signature didn't match exactly with the scan on record. https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/signature-match-laws-disproportionately-impact-voters-already-margins https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/signature-match-laws...
  • FateOfNations 4y ago
    A neat, unadvertised trick we have in California: if you use the online voter registration, it uses the signature you have on file with the DMV. That signature is printed as an image on your driver licence, allowing you to have an exact exemplar of what they will be comparing to.
• fedeb95 4y ago
  Everyone in the comments seem to hate cursive but I actually like it. Not reading other people cursive, but nothing matches the fastness of cursive for writing down rapid thoughts. Sometimes I need to write something very fast and scribbled, even if it won't be readable by anyone one else.
  • rocket_surgeron 4y ago
    >but nothing matches the fastness of cursive for writing down rapid thoughts Shorthand is much, much faster. If speed of transcription is your priority, you should learn stenography. Cursive is an in-between, harder to read than standard writing but slower than stenography. It can take months to learn but if speed is your priority it is worth it, especially if you don't need it to be readable by anyone else. Intermediate practitioners can easily reach 250 wpm which is much faster than typical English speech. Skilled practitioners can easily exceed 300 wpm.
    • fedeb95 4y ago
      That is interesting but I don't know if I have the time, on the other hand I already know cursive. Plus I realise Italian cursive may be different from what the post is referring to. It appears there are two different english cursives for instance
• ogogmad 4y ago
  I once took a class taught by a Hungarian. He spoke in a monotone, and his script was unreadable cursive gibberish where "r" looked like "n", and "s" looked like "i". Please never again.
  • psytortilla_ 4y ago
    Must be this "Hungarian Notation" everyone keeps talking about!
• Quixotica1 4y ago
  I think the push back is really just based around the feeling that by not spending a few hours a week for part of a school year, kids will never be able to read something. So I think in general it’s just a weird feeling like if they decided learning any math after basic addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division wasn’t necessary and removed it for more relevant topics. It’s easy to argue that long division will never be useful for most people, but it also feels weird deciding what future generations can be ignorant about it
• miked85 4y ago
  My handwriting has turned into a mix of block letters and cursive over the years, and has become increasingly less legible since it is so rare that I actually write anything that isn't typed. I don't really have a consistent signature anymore.
  • xattt 4y ago
    My understanding is that cursive learned in school is supposed to be a launching point for your own style of script. I.e. you learn the fundamentals and then you learn the shortcuts. I worked in a paper-heavy environment where quick and dirty writing was important to adopt in order to get stuff done.
    • Telemakhos 4y ago
      Besides faster writing, children also learn fine motor skills by practicing different forms of handwriting. We had cursive in third and fourth grade and half-uncial calligraphy in fifth grade, not because we were expected to illuminate manuscripts but because it gave us time to learn how to control our hands.
  • beej71 4y ago
    My state has vote-by-mail only. A consistent signature is required to get your vote counted. So for me, it's about the only consistent thing in my writing. :) I'm starting to get embarrassed by my penmanship--I should work on that. Slow=smooth, smooth=fast, as the saying goes.
• random_upvoter 4y ago
  IMO children should be taught cursive writing both as a meditative exercise and as a teaching of motor skills and the lack to do so is a near criminal impediment of their development. I'm in my fifties and worked in a optics research lab and it was shocking to me how PhD students in their twenties, brilliant young men and women, lack the most basic tactile skills to handle precision instruments. Many of them would be better off working as elephant handlers.
• Havoc 4y ago
  I also differs by country / region. Went to a German school but not in physically in Germany. And nobody bothered to explain to me that the cursive we were taught was the German one (Kurrent) and isn't in use in the country. Same with mathematical notion. Chaos ensued when I hit uni
  • ncpa-cpl 4y ago
    My friends from the German School here write a very distinct cursive too. They didn’t know it either until I told them.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  Cursive is to writing as slide rules are to calculating.
  • lizknope 4y ago
    I'm 47 and I never really knew what a slide rule was for until a few years ago. When I did I thought "Oh, we've had calculators all my life, now I know why I never learned about them." They are interesting and I can see how they would have been hugely important 60 years ago.
• upsidesinclude 4y ago
  This is sad verging on pathetic. I work with professional engineers that look like they can hardly write their own name. I'm embarrassed for them. Can you imagine writing or receiving a love letter or note that appears as if written by a child? It's hard to convey the extent to which someone's stature is diminished to me when I see them write horribly. Just saying, this opinion exists too
• avnigo 4y ago
  > We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts to report what history—including the documents and papers of our own families—was about. I think we know this won't be true based on AI getting better and better at handwriting recognition, despite the downsides of offloading this work to machines (e.g. if trained in closed system, could result in censorship and potentially limited validation at the endpoint). However, I do see a lot of upsides to using computation for such efforts: increases the scale of processed documents by orders of magnitude and enables indexing, search, categorization, and further analyses which would otherwise take many man-months for trained translator and experts to complete.
• andrew_ 4y ago
  Cursive is a practical (this seems to be the point most heavily debated) art form. At a point in every day use. I'm awful at it, but glad I learned it. My block letter writing is also far less legible than my cursive. I've just stopped using it because I'm a keyboard cowboy and have been for 20 years. Like all art forms, we'll be lesser for its demise.
• janmarsal 4y ago
  I don't think anyone can read cursive comfortably. Especially if it's written by others.
• tr1ll10nb1ll 4y ago
  Well, I'm 19 and I was taught as a kid how to write cursive extensively in India. Not saying it's good or bad, however.
• jakzurr 4y ago
  And they're not missing a darn thing. I mostly quit writing cursive over 40 years ago. I can still read by mom's letters, but it was tricky even way back then. I don't think it's that hard to learn to read it, if you're motivated. Sometimes I enjoy trying to read Old German script (think WWII period). And English cursive from 1700's and 1800's is interesting (but then so is the vocabulary and idioms), but I don't see the utility now, unless it's something you enjoy.
• jwmhjwmh 4y ago
  I'm Gen Z and I learned cursive in elementary school. I've forgotten most of it, though.
• agluszak 4y ago
  "Baby Boomers never learned to read the Sumero-Akkadian cuneiform. How will they interpret the past?"
• account-5 4y ago
  Title: "Gen Z Never Learned to Read Cursive" Second paragraph: "... The answer: about two-thirds [can't] ..." Bit click baity! And also seems to only be about the US.
• dfranke 4y ago
  I retrained myself on Barchowski last year. Barchowski and its close cousin Getty-Dubay are italic rather than looped, and a lot easier to read for someone who only ever learned print.
• bradmcgo 4y ago
  Zoomer here. I attended a Catholic school and can assure you that in second grade, I did indeed learn how to read and write in cursive. Not sure if this is limited to the school that I attended.
  • Quillbert182 4y ago
    That's the same for me. I had to use it for every (non-math) assignment from 3rd through 6th grades. I found it much slower and more cumbersome, and I have not used it since.
• sirsinsalot 4y ago
  All these "Gen Z don't do X" type articles are unuseful, redunctionist and usually wrong. I know quite a few Gen Z and younger people, and in my small sample, they're amazing groups of people filled with empathy, critical thinking, patience, emotional intelligence and more. That's my small sample, and these articles have equally skewed views and samples. Their views on the matter are as useless as my own. Generalising a generation is a bad idea.
• bluGill 4y ago
  Good riddance. Kids have too many more important things to learn and too little time to learn. Unless you are going into some weird specialist field you won't use it so why spend the time learning it. Get the kids out to more recess. End the school day sooner. Find something that will be useful and teach that. Don't waste kids time on a useless skill. (Or at least move cursive to art claas)
  • UncleEntity 4y ago
    > Don't waste kids time on a useless skill. I would say teach them the founding principles of the country but unfortunately those are all written in cursive. Probably better that they can’t read the original so it can be “interpreted” and they learn the double plus good version.
    • bluGill 4y ago
      There are plenty of electronic copies these days.
• Bakary 4y ago
  I don't understand the idea of cursive being useless or difficult. Are Americans learning some sort of old-fashioned lettering that I'm unable to picture? To me cursive is just the natural, fast, and smooth way to write by hand, whereas separated block letters are goddamn slow and jarring
  • RA_Fisher 4y ago
    We mostly type these days and block writing’s good enough, so it’s a waste of time for the masses in my view.
    • Bakary 4y ago
      It's a waste of time in the sense that it's too late to change, but in itself it is the mechanically superior way to write and block letters ought never to have been adopted. I just feel aesthetically depressed when I think of millions of Americans having their pen nibs jump everyday across the page like an alarmed bug, when they could be forming those delightful, uninterrupted, smooth-ass lines. Csikszentmihalyi (RIP) is turning in his grave at all that missed flow.
      • Trasmatta 4y ago
        Who are these millions of Americans who are writing a bunch of stuff by pen every day, instead of on a computer or phone?
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  • kalleboo 4y ago
    I love shitting on Americans as much as anyone else but I went to school in Sweden and I also never managed to get proficient at cursive writing - it was always slower, more painful to the hand and far less legible than block letters to me. And my teachers really tried, one even gave me some special triangular pencil that was supposed to help your grip. Once I was out of grade school I never used it ever again. And now in 2022 I struggle to remember the last time I wrote anything by hand at all.
• Garlef 4y ago
  To me, handwriting is in analogy to martial arts: You begin learning one style, but by the time you reached the higher ranks, you've basically created your own system.
• novakinblood 4y ago
  I (43 yr) had a moment where I showed how important it was for our family to understand cursive when we had to transcribe recipes and letters from ancestors (mom, grandparents, etc.) for my daughters (16yr and younger) who wanted to bake family recipes. Side note is I realized I’ve stopped writing in my journals in cursive about 10 years ago and transitioned to print. I don’t even know why other than being lazy or my handwriting has degraded and decided I wanted to be able to read my own handwriting.
• sfled 4y ago
  Script feels faster than block. Also, I enjoy using a good pen or pencil and just writing in script. My handwriting is OK. Funny thing though; If I use a pencil for writing it's better if I'm using a single sheet on a hard surface. When I use a pen my penmanship is better if I'm using several sheets of paper or a notebook.
• smeej 4y ago
  I appreciate that the top image for the article is a bunch of things written in completely indecipherable cursive, even for those of us who were taught to read and write it.
  • johnisgood 4y ago
    I have never seen such indecipherable cursive writings here (somewhere in Europe). Most of them look like signatures to me. Maybe they are cursive, but around here it almost never looks like this, if ever.
    • stjohnswarts 4y ago
      Eh if you read old historic stuff you get to see it in context. they clearly chopped these out from old manuscripts. When you stumble your way through a few paragraphs it comes pretty quickly as you get used to someone's writing. Not sure how our poor elementary school teachers read our reports in the lower grade levels though. :)
• MarkusWandel 4y ago
  Well, when I was in high school they also taught drafting with fine construction lines drawn with 2H pencils, fancy parallel motion rulers and so on. But that doesn't mean they will always have to. Stuff goes obsolete. In my parents' and earlier generation, writing letters by hand was an important communications technique, and cursive writing was the most efficient way to do it. My high school assignments were still mostly turned in in cursive writing, until my final year or so by which time computers and printers were available (at the school, perfectly OK for printing off your assignments) and my touch-typing skills had advanced far beyond my cursive writing speed. End of cursive, for me, I can hardly write that way any more. My mom, at around age 60 discovered computers and email too. Having learned typewriting in her youth, she took to it enthusiastically and 90% of her writing isn't cursive any more either. So it goes. Subjects can go from a mandatory skill to a niche subject, studied only by those who want to, in their spare time.
  • pibechorro 4y ago
    Writing by hand is a basic and essential skill. Cursive is may times better than printing letters. This is an American thing as far as I can tell. My 7th grade teachers in the 90s already where averse to my cursive (moved from latin america) and honestly had a hard time reading it. Ignore cursive at your peril. Its like not learning to do math on paper because we have smartphones.
    • _dain_ 4y ago
      99.999% of the time the stuff you read and write is done by keyboard or touchscreen, not pen. The remaining 0.001% of the time, chickenscratch is fine. "Cursive" is totally obsolete, get over it. When was the last time you actually sent or received a handwritten letter? Birthday / Christmas cards don't count, I mean a real bona fide handwritten letter. I bet it's been years. The comparison to mathematics is wrong. Writing math by hand is more convenient than futzing around with LaTeX incantations, at least when solving a problem (as opposed to writing up a solution). Some people use a stylus on a tablet; but that's just the same kind of thing by digital means. The process of writing out an equation is part of the way you solve it; you cross out terms as you cancel them, you draw ad hoc arrows, little graphs, circle like terms, and so on. In that context, handwriting is not just a means of expression, it's an effective tool of thought. The day digital input matches that convenience is the day I'll abandon handwritten math; but that day has already come and gone for ordinary prose.
• nobodyandproud 4y ago
  Gen X here. Good riddance to what was obsolete fifty years ago.
• asasidh 4y ago
  good for them. I never liked cursive anyway. In the US, there are at least 21 states that require cursive in public school curriculum. This is still too high a number. Just like art or coding it is good to keep it as an option for those who are interested and never good to be forced on the masses.
• adenozine 4y ago
  Yeah well, most of my generation (Gen X) can't do basic trig problems. Call it square. I think they'll be alright.
• fortran77 4y ago
  I'm a Hebrew speaker, too, and Hebrew nearly always hand-written in a "cursive" form that looks very different from the printed form. It's extremely rare for anyone to write the printed form, except if you're hand-lettering a sign, etc. (And even then, most will be in "cursive") Here's the "modern" cursive form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_Hebrew And here's the printed form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet#Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet#Alphabet I can do Cursive English, too, easily, because my education was in NY Public Schools. In Israel, where I am several months/year, if I have to write something out in English for a non-native speaker, I'll "print" it, but it never occurred to me I should do this in the U.S. for younger people. I'll take notes in cursive English (and/or Hebrew) when I'm in a meeting in NY. (My first language at home was neither English nor Hebrew but Yiddish! But this was largely spoken; when written it uses the same "cursive" Hebrew alphabet as modern Hebrew, with a few additions for letter variants.)
• samgranieri 4y ago
  I’m the father to a boy turning two in December, and I’m going to teach him how to read and write cursive myself in a few years. I think it’s a big mistake that reading and writing cursive was removed from common core standards.
• mensetmanusman 4y ago
  They should replace the practice with memorization of typing. Input rate on a mobile device is far worse than a keyboard, and I feel bad when I see that the next generation coming from homes with only mobile devices have such a slow typing/entry rate.
  • lofatdairy 4y ago
    Myself and a lot of my friends grew up with typing classes in middle school (in addition to growing up with cursive classes but in different years). It does seem the make a pretty big difference - even my mediocre 80 wpm is much faster than a lot of people of I meet.
• MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  And just as many boomers never learned to touch type. Different skills for different times.
• plaidfuji 4y ago
  This is all fine and good but… What are their signatures going to look like? Or is the plan for everything to be DocuSign Lucida Handwriting?
  • noirbot 4y ago
    Who cares? Pretty much everyone gave up on actually using signatures for any form of serious verification ages ago, and that's before you get into people who can't do more than initial for various physical reasons. Outside of things like law and finance that are deeply stuck in the past, almost nothing requires a signature these days, or if they do you can just kinda scribble something that vaguely has shapes of letters in it. I learned cursive, but I'm definitely not writing proper lettering if I'm signing a check or some contract.
  • seized 4y ago
    I've had terrible handwriting and a wildly inconsistent signature for my entire life (late 30s now) and it's never been an issue. Anyone using a signature for actual validation/verification is crazy.
    • stjohnswarts 4y ago
      your vote can get tossed in some states if the signatures don't match exactly. It's part of Texas' initiative to disenfranchise people of color and mail-in votes in some communities. It's similar in some other republican states.
• joshstrange 4y ago
  Good riddance. I was born in 1991 and I learned (and hated) cursive in elementary school with my teachers nagging us that "every paper you write going forward will be in cursive". Even back then I thought that was bullshit but I was big into/bullish on computers, even in elementary school. Sure enough I don't think we used it in middle school at all other than to sign our names. I still distinctly remember taking the ACT, opening the booklet and it saying "Please write the following paragraph below in cursive" (it was a bit about how you hadn't cheated or received outside help, 2-3 sentences) and my blood running cold as I hadn't written cursive in almost 8 years. I meekly raised my hand after a minute or two and said "Um, I don't think I remember all the letters to write this in cursive" which was followed by a LOT of people exhaling/sighing, thankful that someone else spoke up. The teacher/proctor was a little confused for a minute and asked the room who else wasn't sure they could and pretty much every hand went up. After a minute she just said "just print it, it will be fine". To this day (some ~14 years later) the only thing I write in cursive is my name and even that's a stretch, I get the first letter, a distinct letter in the middle/end and call it a day.
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    Out of curiosity, when you say "print it" here, does that mean "write it by hand but using print-like letters", or literally "print it using a computerized printer/type-writer"?
    • joshstrange 4y ago
      Write it by hand. In this case the test was on paper so we just wrote the paragraph using normal letters on the lines provided.
  • tdeck 4y ago
    I was born in the same year and had the same experience on the SAT. When we got to that part, everyone was audibly confused. In my elementary school we were taught non-slanted cursive, which was billed as more readable but also slower to write. Learning it involved copying text and having it judged, there was hardly any practice in reading cursive writing, maybe 5 birthday cards worth. Occasionally there would be an old-fashioned teacher who would write on the board in cursive, and I'd just listen to them and mostly go by what they said out loud.
• addicted 4y ago
  I learned to write cursive, but a decade without writing at all meant I can no longer do so, and so rely entirely on non-cursive writing. Cursive is vastly superior. It’s not even close. It’s way more efficient. It’s easier to read. It helps you think in larger units reducing mental burdens (you think of writing in terms of words, as opposed to single characters, because if you’ve written them frequently enough, a word becomes a memorized unit in itself). If we believe writing is important we need people to write and read cursive. The only reason I would not think this is important is if as a society we agree that with the rise of typing writing itself is not important.
  • joshstrange 4y ago
    > Cursive is vastly superior. It’s not even close. It’s way more efficient. It’s easier to read. It helps you think in larger units reducing mental burdens (you think of writing in terms of words, as opposed to single characters, because if you’ve written them frequently enough, a word becomes a memorized unit in itself). I've never experienced this, it has always been harder to read for me and humans already skip over parts of words when reading in print, it's not a cursive phenomenon. That's why you can read through a paragraph of text that has letter jumbled in the middle of words and almost not notice. > The only reason I would not think this is important is if as a society we agree that with the rise of typing writing itself is not important. I think that ship sailed over 2 decades ago. In the late 90's I was 8 or 9 years old and it was clear that cursive was a waste of time as I was learning it (and then turning around and teaching my own teachers how to use the computers in the classroom).
  • stjohnswarts 4y ago
    One night of practice would bring it all back. It's packed in your neurons somewhere if you care to exercise it. I do that about once a year. Just pick up a book and write out several pages. It comes back rather quickly.
    • disqard 4y ago
      Echoing parent, and I'd like to reinforce this for gp -- you can bring it back in < 1 week, if you write for 30 minutes every day. I was forced to learn this dreaded skill in grade school, and said "good riddance" to it in the early aughts, and only took it back up ~15 years later -- and I thoroughly enjoy it now. If, like me, you happen to actually want to get back into it, you are much better positioned to resuscitate your skills than somebody picking up a pen/pencil for the first time today.
• raldi 4y ago
  > We will become reliant on a small group of trained translators and experts Within three years our iPhones will do it for us.
• mistrial9 4y ago
  I studied typography seriously, some type design, and graphic arts .. the vocabulary of visual expression, and the lineage of cultures, are made richer and more plural by embracing cursive writing. Utilitarian and personal-aversion arguments are pushed to the front of the comments here, but do not represent all people or all arts. I will write cursive again today, after some pause, due to reading this.
• zuminator 4y ago
  Way back in the 1960's Isaac Asimov wrote an essay called "Forget It," in which he goes over some of the things children used to be routinely taught in school that are no longer part of the curriculum. Such as the full range of arithmetic using Roman numerals. Such as dry weights, including 2 pints to a quart, 2 quarts to a...pottle? 2 pottles to a gallon, 2 gallons to a peck, 4 pecks to a bushel, 2 bushels to a strike, 2 strikes to a coom, 2 cooms to a quarter, 5 quarters to a wey, and 2 weys to a last. Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to make room for more modern and efficient material. We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. Nor will we need to. By the time the last generation of cursive readers has died out, people will likely have available a "Google Lens" type augmented-reality translation on the fly of great-great-grandma Edith's old love letters.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    >Asimov makes the case that rather than teaching old information, we should be forgetting more obsolete facts to make room for more modern and efficient material. In high school (gawd, 30 years ago now), we had to memorize the opening of Canterbury Tales in Old English. I can still recite the first few lines. Why? What was the point of forcing students to do that? It's taking up precious space in the very limited memory banks. Instead, I can't remember if the arguments for the explode function has the string then the separator or the separator and then the string.
    • johnchristopher 4y ago
      Devil's advocate: it's teaching you how to memorize something you don't want yet need to.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        I don't want to need it ever
    • BeFlatXIII 4y ago
      The explode function is probably jumbled because the order is different in different languages you've encountered.
• stakkur 4y ago
  This is not true, of course. In the US, millions of students still learn and write cursive. Yes, even in public schools. Is it uniformly taught/practiced? No, but it’s far from ‘dying out’. My wife is a 20+ year public school teacher, and daughter attends a Waldorf school. And all criticisms I read of cursive seem to utterly ignore the proven cognitive and other benefits of handwriting, instead focusing on ‘efficiency’ and ‘speed’ or—even sillier—comparing it to ‘keyboarding’ as if handwriting’s only value is its utility.
• tommica 4y ago
  Personally I enjoy writing in cursive, and am happy I was taught it as a kid
• mrg2k8 4y ago
  Last week, during a meeting, I found myself scribbling some notes in cursive some 20 years later since having last used it, the only way we have been thought to write in school in an Eastern European country. I didn't know it was possible for anyone to not understand cursive or to forget it, even if one wanted it. This is definitely a thing just in the US. I have been writing in block letters because my writing is tidier this way and have self-taught myself to do it. Maybe this way less entitled peoples will have a better chance at making it, a sort of culling of the weak and unwilling.
  • Terretta 4y ago
    To the untrained eye, Cyrillic script feels like an endless line of Ms --impressive people can read it! https://i.imgur.com/KEmhkXx.jpg https://i.imgur.com/KEmhkXx.jpg
    • supersrdjan 4y ago
      It's the lower case i, m, sh, t and p that all look similar in cursive. Here in print: и, м, ш, т, п (though t and p and t have little lines above them to differentiate them, and some people are taught to put a line under sh to distinguish it. At least it's like that in Serbian.
    • mminer237 4y ago
      My boss writes English cursive like this. I'm always wondering, "Is that a 'uu', 'aa', 'wi', 'ler'…?", and et cetera because they all look almost exactly the same.
• runjake 4y ago
  My US-based, tween kids were taught to read and write cursive in school. I keep hearing this myth but haven’t ran into anyone that I know of that actually didn’t learn cursive.
• DanAtC 4y ago
  Zaner-Bloser is disproportionate and ugly and should have never been taught to anyone. Had recent generations been taught something practical like D'Nealian or something beautiful like Spencerian then maybe cursive wouldn't have gotten such a bad wrap.
  • stjohnswarts 4y ago
    I can't agree, I quite like it more than the other two you mentioned
  • anjbe 4y ago
    I was taught D’Nealian in elementary school. I took to it fine, but within a few years decided it looked dumb, and dropped the tails and loops that looked out of place compared to the letter forms I saw in print. I learned cursive easily in third grade, and have used it in most handwriting ever since. Looking back, I have wondered whether D’Nealian had a positive effect there or not. It’s pretty weird reading all these other comments about how useless cursive is. Certainly I think it’s more important to type well than to write in cursive. But while the vast majority of my life’s text output has been via computer, I still use handwriting in plenty of places—postcards, birthday cards, thank‐you notes, and so on. Am I just anachronistic
• JulianMorrison 4y ago
  If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead scripts - everything from cuneiform, to gothic black letters, to cursive. If they need it, they can go learn it. Most won't.
  • ncpa-cpl 4y ago
    > If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead script I like when languages have lots of “backward compatibility” For example Spanish handwriting system hasn’t changed much. Except perhaps it used to use more abbreviations. A couple of months I went to a museum and was able to read 400 year old Spanish texts, and I can also grab a 200 year old book in Spanish and read it easily. As there have not been major Spelling or writing changes. With French I can even go further back. This is more difficult in German where older books used to be printed in Fraktur and handwriting starts getting very different in the early 1900s. I guess this gets more difficult in other languages like Mongolian, Turkish or Romanian which have undergone two or three different alphabet changes.
• toolslive 4y ago
  I (a middle aged European) feel a bit silly now. I've had an American send his CV to me which listed "cursive writing" as a skill. A was bemused as for me it falls in the same bucket as "tie laces" or "ride a bike". IE something that has no value because everybody knows how to do it. How wrong I turn out to be.
  • tverbeure 4y ago
    I remember a science and technology TV program on Belgian TV back in the early nineties where they showed a PC program that could convert handwriting to text. Amazing! But when they showed it in action, it couldn’t do cursive “because nobody writes cursive anyway”, according to the American developer. At the time, I assumed that the guy just made that claim to excuse a serious limitation of his software: why would anyone not write cursive (which is faster)?
  • deleted 4y ago
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  • ThePadawan 4y ago
    Devil's confused advocate here - depending on the age of the candidate, that might have been intended to be a "fun fact" sort of addition? As in, it might have also read "Japanese calligraphy". Gives the HR person to ask about their passions a bit, figure out how they roll? (Disregard that idea if this was actually just listed as a core job skill like "Word and Excel experience")
• rascul 4y ago
  I wrote cursive for many years. In the end, I found it to be slower to write, slower to read, and uses more ink or graphite. Also there's a possibility to smear words when moving the hand back to finish the t's and i's, and the extra movement there also seems inefficient. In addition, with block letters I can fit more on a line legibly, using less paper in the end. I'm not really sure what the advantages are. I do think it can be useful to know. There might be less cursive out there now then there was, but I do come across cursive documents from time to time and I'm happy that I can read them.
• Balgair 4y ago
  I love cursive. For me, it's faster to write and faster to read. The idea of drawing the words instead of printing them, putting a smidge of creativity into my writing, makes the whole exercise of writing and taking notes easier and more enjoyable. I put my emotions into the drawings/words and can tell my emotional state years later. The larger curves, the more joyous I was. The sharper the lines, the more i hated that particular meeting. The 'faster' the drawings the more hurried the meeting. ETC. It adds an extra layer or two of information to my writing that I just don't seem to be able to manifest in print, and at no cost to me in terms of time.
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  Was early into computers and we used printed copy back then - your 'listing'. I'd letter changes on the code then use an editor then run then get another listing. So I was going to write a letter to my brother who'd moved out to Silicon Valley, and I found I could no longer write in cursive. Several years of just lettering had beat it out of me. Anyway I could hand-letter faster than cursive anyway. I let cursive go 40 years ago, and never looked back.
• lizknope 4y ago
  I'm 47 and I haven't written anything in cursive (other than my signature) since age 16. In 11-12th grade we had to type all reports and I always did homework and tests in print not cursive because I hated writing in cursive and the teachers hated reading it. They would explicitly tell us "PRINT NO CURSIVE!" The author answers their own question. "How will they interpret the past?" "In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today." Fine, I don't see any problem with that. The author is concerned with people being able to read historical documents. If you really need to do that then be prepared to take a short course on that. It's not like learning a foreign language. People should be able to learn to read it in a week or two at most.
• xdavidliu 4y ago
  The author used to be the President of Harvard.
• moritzwarhier 4y ago
  I was born at the end of the 80s and there was a funny thing called "simplified cursive" in Germany. I struggled for the rest of my life with that and already half gave up on cursive while still attending the German equivalent of high school. Maybe that was partly caused by me prematurely being put into school (1-2 years early), but some letters still feel like a motoric and decisional exercise because I couldn't quite decide how to write e.g. lower-case "l", where the "simplified" and the non-simplified version differed. My solution at high school was already to discard cursive completely. At the time, this ceased to be a problem as grades progressed.
• pier25 4y ago
  I'm in my 40s and in the past 10 years I've only handwritten my name in a couple of forms. That said, learning to write by hand is very important for cognition because it develops fine motor control.
• LoveMortuus 4y ago
  I'm having a hard time believing this to be true... All the writing I do is in cursive, it's so much faster and neater than non-cursive. I don't have to worry about the spacing between the letters when writing cursive and writing common words isn't really a muscle memory of writing each letter but of the entire word. I'll have to ask a relative who's a teacher in the elementary school if this is also true here in Slovenia. Somehow this makes me really worry... Will the children in the future not even write using a pen and paper but just using a keyboard and a touch screen?
  • ip26 4y ago
    I learned cursive, but rarely have cause to write more than a sentence or two with pen or pencil anymore. Anything long form is digital, such as a word doc. Even paper itself is used sparingly.
  • DigitallyFidget 4y ago
    When I was in highschool, I wrote a paper on how education lags far behind technology and modern era. In modern era, people write emails, type via messengers/sms, and use digital means of communication. Rarely is hand-written considered normal in any situations where transcribing is necessary. Even with maths, people don't hand calculate large, long, complex equations. We use computers, calculators, and technology to accomplish it with far greater accuracy/reliability and speed. Simple arithmetic is useful to learn to do in your head, but to solve a²+b²=c², you can just google up a Pythagorean calculator. My point is that it's useful to know to find/use the tools to solve problems, not how to to solve by hand. This didn't exist 20 years ago, but it does today, and schools should teach for a modern and future era. It does no good to teach the youth archaic ways of the old which aren't in use anymore. If the parents believe it's important, then it should be taught by the parents to preserve a culture or value they believe in. But schools should spend time to functionally educate. Cursive is just one of those things that has been replaced by technology, for most it is much faster to type than it is to write, and the advantage cursive has over manuscript is that it was faster. Well, keyboards are faster than cursive, and print is more simple and clean looking in manuscript than cursive on a display using a font.
• ajmurmann 4y ago
  This has happened time and time again, but maybe it hasn't happened to speakers of the English language in a longer time and this is remarkable. My German grandma wrote in a style called Sütterlin that neither I nor my parents could read but she learned in school. I'm able to read blackletter/gothic script which must gen x people cannot read just because my parents had a lot of old books and I wanted to read an old print of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. There already was little practical value in being able to read that back then and I'd rather see young people put that every towards a foreign language, literature, philosophy or math or computer skills. The only time I notes read blackletter is to translate ancestry documents for my wife.
  • mistrial9 4y ago
• quest88 4y ago
  Please get rid of dioramas next. What a waste of everyone's time.
• irrational 4y ago
  My kids said they spent one week on cursive in elementary school. They sign their names using print/block letters because they have no clue how to write their names (or anything else) in cursive. Cursive is almost like a secret language to them.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  What is with all these things about "never learned to do X". When the time comes to learn it you can do it in days, maybe hours if necessary. In minutes you can read in "interpreted mode" and in days in "compiled high-performance mode". Half the things people say aren't taught to kids are trivial to learn as an adult so who cares. "They don't teach you how to do taxes", "they don't teach you to read cursive". It takes maybe an hour max to learn the skills.
• EGreg 4y ago
  I made this site for Free Talk Live, who discussed this topic in much more depth several days ago: https://ftl.fm/clip/FTL/Qsvrgnovt https://ftl.fm/clip/FTL/Qsvrgnovt
• 19h 4y ago
  I'm really tired by all of these click-bait articles essentially saying my entire generation is retarded. I can read cursive, where's your god now? Seriously though, if at all this might be an American thing. Here in Germany we definitely had lessons on cursive writing. I write cursive. Hell even most lined school notebooks for children start with a page that has cursive writing in it, so that children can train on it.
  • bambataa 4y ago
    The focus on cursive seems to be very American. I really don’t understand why people think that joined up writing isn’t useful any more. Don’t people note things down and want to do it faster that writing out each letter separately?
    • IshKebab 4y ago
      I might be wrong about this but I think cursive is a very specific style in America, whereas in the UK "joined up writing" is less restrictive. Maybe that's why they make such a big deal about it. Probably why it has such a clumsy childish name here too - nobody talks about it as an adult because it's just "handwriting".
  • okdood64 4y ago
    > saying my entire generation is retarded. As a middle stage millennial, we too were once considered retarded. But now we control the media, so it's time to pay it forward. Seriously though, the article's point about the loss of this skill will result in a knowledge access issue is ridiculous. Anyone who's reading these source materials in cursive should be able to pick it up without too much effort.
• agentultra 4y ago
  I keep journals. Lots of them. Diaries, subject matter that I am learning, books I have read, letters I've never sent... but they're all written in cursive. I thought that my children might like to have them some day as a way for me to live on but if they can't read them, what use are they? Still I continue to write this way. Out of habit and training. I hope some people manage to keep it alive.
• beej71 4y ago
  Any other GenXers reading this feeling nostalgic thinking it might be fun to pick up the pen again?
• TedShiller 4y ago
  Fixed title: Gen Z never learned a lot of things
• obblekk 4y ago
  This is a good use case for deep learning. The entire human knowledge of converting cursive to normal could be learned into a (probably) compact model and then the utility/culture of older writings would be accessible forever. Like a modern Rosetta Stone.
• wonderwonder 4y ago
  I spoke to a right leaning friend the other day about this exact topic. She pitched it as a conspiracy to make people unable to read the past so that alternative facts could be taught. I very much doubt she invented this concept so there is likely an entire segment of people out there pushing this thought.
• coding123 4y ago
  "reading" cursive. It's the same letters except for a few differences and they are connected and slanted. I learned cursive in school (age 42) but anyone can look at it and with at least 4 minutes of spare time can learn to read it. I swear our country spends more time trying to shock people than just getting through.
• deleted 4y ago
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• soggybutter 4y ago
  I would assume this has some effect on gen z signatures?
• troyvit 4y ago
  My kids never learned to write cursive either. It's not a problem except that they don't really have a signature as a result, and they're starting to have to sign stuff for school.
• WaltPurvis 4y ago
  Semi-related question: Most contracts and many kinds of forms that require a signature will have two lines, a first line that says something like "Print your name" and a second line for you to sign your name, which has always been understood to mean sign your name in cursive. What do young people do now? Presumably they just print their name and then (for no reason whatsoever) print their name again? Just something I've been wondering about...
• philiplu 4y ago
  I write in cursive in one place only - physical checks. Had a subcontractor rip me off on a house remodel years ago, adding $1000 to a check I'd written with printing, not cursive. The bank reimbursed me, so no loss, but from then on I always write the check amount in cursive, careful not to leave any space to insert a change. Of course, I now only write a handful of actual checks a year, and that just because I pay someone regularly who prefers checks to Venmo.
  • IshKebab 4y ago
    I was always taught to draw lines to fill the blank space. I don't think you need to use cursive.
• frodetb 4y ago
  I love cursive, even as a programmer who touch types on a keyboard most of the day. Cursive is just so comfy and looks so nice. But I'm also incredibly thankful that I'm as proficient with a keyboard as I am. I'm never more than an Alt-Tab away from a terminal, and have some nice and simple aliases for creating new plaintext notes, or accessing old ones. Yet I also need to keep a notebook or piece of paper closeby for handwritten sketches, notes, diagrams, etc. I studied maths and physics, where solving problems with pen and paper is simply how you do things. Come to think of it, I'm quite thankful for that part, because it is a powerful skill to have developed for managing ideas. I have friends who are bad at handwriting, and who hate it and avoid it for that reason. Some of them claim that handwriting is a useless skill. I also have parents who are bad at typing, and who prefer handwriting for that reason. They do see the utility of touch typing, however. I know both well, and value both very highly. I maybe won't be so strict on my kids as to force them to learn a writing style designed for pens we no longer use, but will encourage them to try it, and to at least get comfortable with writing by hand.
  • LorenPechtel 4y ago
    About all I end up sketching is geometry/trigonometry and that's exceedingly rare these days. Programming classes was math-heavy, but in more than 30 years of doing it for a living I've never used more than pretty simple math. Programming is far more logic than math. There have been a couple of occasions where calculus would have been useful--but googling the answer or brute-forcing the answer was far faster than scraping the rust off my calculus.
• marvin 4y ago
  Northern European here. I don't understand this at all and need an explanation. Maybe someone can provide the context I'm missing. I've heard Americans complain online about having to learn "cursive", for at least 20 years. Basically for as long as I've read forums online. In school, we learned something called "loop writing", literally translated. It's a technique for writing without lifting the pen from the paper very often. This technique is much faster than writing out capital letters, or typing letters as they would be written by a printer or printing press. Soooooooo... How does this "cursive" thing fit into this? What is the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by hand? The "printer font" or "capital letters" options are a lot less efficient when writing. Do you just prioritize uniform legibility over time when writing? Do you almost exclusively type on computers? How is this resolved? I still write notes and messages on paper all the time, and I can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it.
  • mattnewton 4y ago
    American here, I learned cursive in school (what we call our “loop writing”) but it was clear it was going to be phased out to child me. I write about as quickly in block letters and can actually read the resulting words clearly, as opposed to my cursive which turns into a long line of m’s and l’s as I get faster. I find that slowing down to make the cursive legible takes longer than block lettering for my unpracticed hand, and have never needed it enough to justify additional practice. Both methods are about on par with phone typing or dictation, and far far slower than typing on a physical keyboard. I recently tried to switch back to a paper notebook because I found my phone was constantly distracting me when taking notes, but the loss of text search, ease of sharing/editing, and and speed when writing was too great so I abandoned this approach in favor of other methods for controlling distractions.
  • wilsonnb3 4y ago
    > In school, we learned something called "loop writing", literally translated Yeah, this is what we call cursive. > What is the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by hand? We write the "printer font" or "capital letters" that you mention. > I still write notes and messages on paper all the time, and I can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it. Firstly, most people don't write on paper that much anymore. Secondly, this is sort of like when people on hacker news talk about using a tiling window manager like i3. They can't imagine going back to a regular window manager, they are so much more productive, etc, etc. But at the end of the day, tiling window managers remain niche because swapping between windows isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people. They mainly contribute to making someone feel more productive rather than be more productive. In other words, writing speed isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people so it just doesn't matter much if we do it inefficiently. If you were a court stenographer required to write by hand or something, then cursive would be a good investment. Otherwise, meh, not much point.
• kemayo 4y ago
  Bear in mind that there's distinct meanings to "cursive" -- the dictionary meaning that just refers to a writing style with the letters all connected, and a common American usage that refers to some very specific stylized letter-forms that often bear minimal resemblance to the print forms of the letters. The latter is fairly illegible if you haven't been taught it, I feel -- it winds up looking like a series of minimally differentiated squiggly lines. e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HandwritingOfOneJohnJay(NotTheFamousOne).jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HandwritingOfOneJohnJay(N... As someone who was educated in the UK in the 90s I was taught what was just called "joined up writing", which was us being encouraged to connect up the normal print forms of the letters. I never had any exposure to the American style. It might possibly have a speed deficit compared to the American style (I'm not sure), but it does have a clear legibility advantage...
  • zem 4y ago
    when i was a kid in india we called it "running hand", and yeah, it was pretty similar to print letters only joined, except a few letters like "r", "s" and "z". https://byjus.com/worksheets/cursive-letter-a-to-z/ https://byjus.com/worksheets/cursive-letter-a-to-z/ is pretty close to the variant i learnt.
    • kemayo 4y ago
      This one is pretty close to how I was taught it, for what it's worth: https://www.barnesfarminfants.co.uk/_site/data/files/images/pictures/36F757A0A0F1B908D33FDE1CEE7F7736.jpg https://www.barnesfarminfants.co.uk/_site/data/files/images/...
• wonderwonder 4y ago
  I can read it with out issue but I use the computer so much that my handwriting has devolved to a mix of cursive and print, often in the same word
• tibbetts 4y ago
  Can confirm, my kids get letters at camp from their grandmother written in cursive and they basically cannot read them. They can puzzle out cursive when it is very neatly written, but casual cursive handwriting is frequently impenetrable.
• deleted 4y ago
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• harimau777 4y ago
  Personally at this point I can barely print. I can understand the logic of not learning cursive but it's definitely a shame; just one more beautiful thing that we are losing in the name of progress.
• ihusasmiiu 4y ago
  My brother in Christ, you are not teaching it.
• cafard 4y ago
  The older generation of my family wrote letters in cursive. I'm here to tell you that some of those letters--even the ones in a handsome, regular script, could be very hard to read. I use cursive for Christmas cards, and sometimes for notes, and I hope that it's legible. On the other hand, all the elementary-school report cards with Ds or perhaps they were Us for poor handwriting suggest otherwise.
• remram 4y ago
  I know many millennials who can't read cursive here in the US. It was a shock to find out my wife couldn't read my notes unless I use block letters. I grew up in France and I am very slow at writing those by hand...
  • monetus 4y ago
    Did French schools avoid print, and force script? Somewhere around 1 in 5 wrote with cursive in my schools (millennial from Appalachia).
    • remram 4y ago
      I was taught to use a fountain pen and to write a cursive in school. I can remember fountain pens being mandatory in classes for assignments but pretty quickly I observed people writing in print.
• foxyv 4y ago
  The best part is, if they NEED to read cursive at any point, all the information is there for them to learn it. The internet and information sites like Wikipedia have made learning some of this stuff in school totally unnecessary. You have on demand just in time information for nearly anything. Stuff that you don't need to use often, or immediately, is best learned this way. Cursive is a prime candidate.