4 ms·

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 sup

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.
giraffe_lady 4y ago
This is making a bunch of assumptions about what cursive is and what it means to write it that mostly just aren't true. Just to set the stage here there is a small but real division of history focused on the study of scripts over time so you don't need to just make stuff up starting from now. There is a balance between speed of writing and legibility, and scripts in a single language tend to just go back and forth on those two over time. Cursive is fairly balanced between them but being moderately biased towards speed. It isn't easier to read for most people, anyway, though not much harder than our other scripts either. People also love to, and always have, attribute various intellectual or moral virtues to specific scripts! That impulse is similar to dialect, where it has a lot more to do with who uses different scripts, who they are associated with at a given time. In a society dominated by church-educated aristocrats for example, a literate merchant class will attribute sophistication to the ecclesial script and eventually switch to it, etc. It's not hard to extrapolate this pattern to our current time, I don't think. And then finally users of non-cursive scripts still think and write in terms of units of words, and making this error in your reasoning indicates you probably have the nature of language flipped on its head. The "true" language is the spoken one! Writing systems are just that, systems used to write it down, and the scripts used to make them are even less a part of the language system a person uses to think. And finally finally our non-cursive script is very close to carolingian miniscule and predates cursive by like centuries. There's not even historical authenticity to cursive superiority. It's fine that you like it more but don't make it an issue of intelligence or virtue because it is neither.

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.

giraffe_lady 4y ago

This is making a bunch of assumptions about what cursive is and what it means to write it that mostly just aren't true. Just to set the stage here there is a small but real division of history focused on the study of scripts over time so you don't need to just make stuff up starting from now. There is a balance between speed of writing and legibility, and scripts in a single language tend to just go back and forth on those two over time. Cursive is fairly balanced between them but being moderately biased towards speed. It isn't easier to read for most people, anyway, though not much harder than our other scripts either. People also love to, and always have, attribute various intellectual or moral virtues to specific scripts! That impulse is similar to dialect, where it has a lot more to do with who uses different scripts, who they are associated with at a given time. In a society dominated by church-educated aristocrats for example, a literate merchant class will attribute sophistication to the ecclesial script and eventually switch to it, etc. It's not hard to extrapolate this pattern to our current time, I don't think. And then finally users of non-cursive scripts still think and write in terms of units of words, and making this error in your reasoning indicates you probably have the nature of language flipped on its head. The "true" language is the spoken one! Writing systems are just that, systems used to write it down, and the scripts used to make them are even less a part of the language system a person uses to think. And finally finally our non-cursive script is very close to carolingian miniscule and predates cursive by like centuries. There's not even historical authenticity to cursive superiority. It's fine that you like it more but don't make it an issue of intelligence or virtue because it is neither.