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> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. I don't know about that - writing something out is still the best way to learn and reta

> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. I don't know about that - writing something out is still the best way to learn and retain something long-term.

extra88 4y ago
Okay but you don’t have to handwrite it in cursive.
- coffee_beqn 4y ago
  Cursive is optimized for fountain pens I believe. As long as we have pencils and ballpoint pens, using cursive is just a holdover from olden times with no actual pros compared to simpler writing methods
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I use fountain pens in my daily life and don't touch cursive (although my handwriting has some elements of it). It's a misconception that cursive was made for fountain pens. Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the formal version taught in schools was essentially a prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented to help you write faster. In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics became cheap.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off. I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore. For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
    - throwaway675309 4y ago
      The situation is not the same at all. The few people alive today who actively still use cursive to write are just as equally capable of handwriting in a block or printed format, it's not a language or even a dialect. And nothing of import today is written in cursive. (Not books, or literature, or legal texts, or contracts, nothing)
- webmobdev 4y ago
  Cursive helps you write faster. Some even claim that it makes you better at spelling, forming words and sentences and thus overall better writer ( https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/raise-a-reader-blog/cursive-writing-practice.html https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/raise-a... ). I can't attest to all that, but I recognize that it does create more neural pathways and involves more motor skills to learn which are beneficial to a young mind.
  - LorenPechtel 4y ago
    No idea about whether it is of benefit, but it definitely takes more learning as you can only write decent cursive by muscle memory. Block letters can be written at any pace, cursive must flow.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    Anything that involves motor control creates more neural pathways, they could just as easily spend that time drawing or learning to paint, and the children will probably have much more fun which is an important aspect of learning.
- tsimionescu 4y ago
  Cursive is still faster to write than typed fonts, and less taxing when writing a lot. On the other hand, I don't think the difference is huge, so the value of it depends a lot on how much time it actually takes to teach cursive vs teaching non-cursive.
  - pfranz 4y ago
    Sure, but does the improved speed increase learning and retention speed? There's additional time spent to learn and master cursive. If that's the only purpose, would that time be better spent elsewhere? From the Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials I know who were taught cursive in school very few use it for note-taking. It seems like a huge waste if the only reason for teaching it has failed multiple generations already.
    - tsimionescu 4y ago
      I'm 30-ish and not from the USA, but all of my generation has been taught cursive and used it all the way through college - even though I went to a computer engineering college. Some people's handwriting was using some more print letters (for example, I mostly use print capitals, but cursive for the small letters, with some exceptions such as y or x).
      - pfranz 4y ago
        From what I've seen, at least from 2000 forward in the US it was mostly expected that assignments would be typed and printed in high school/college. A lot of the length requirements specified it (times new roman, size 12, single space, one page). I imagine it was because of access (the colleges I know of had a computer lab), formality, and avoiding back-and-forth over legibility. After leaving college and not needing to write much after a decade or two, its jarring enough to get used to writing in block script.
        tsimionescu 4y ago
        I've expressed this in other places in this thread as well, but I just don't understand how you can turn in assignments in anything mathy (math, physics, chemistry) or diagram/table-heavy (biology, logic) in typed form. Even with tools like LaTeX or modern Word it takes so much longer than writing by hand... I can at least understand the idea of writing printed characters by hand - the difference between that and cursive isn't that large, and is non-existent for the above. But to forego handwriting entirely doesn't seem plausible to me, in these subjects at least.
makeitdouble 4y ago
As far as I am aware of, we don't know. Many studies are done on students typing notes in class, but I've seen nothing on people proactively learning something by themselves on a computer for instance (like if we were summarizing learnings from a video with no time pressure to write it down)
- webmobdev 4y ago
  The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01810/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0181...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

> We're never going back to a world where cursive is in widespread use. I don't know about that - writing something out is still the best way to learn and retain something long-term.

extra88 4y ago

Okay but you don’t have to handwrite it in cursive.

coffee_beqn 4y ago
Cursive is optimized for fountain pens I believe. As long as we have pencils and ballpoint pens, using cursive is just a holdover from olden times with no actual pros compared to simpler writing methods
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  I use fountain pens in my daily life and don't touch cursive (although my handwriting has some elements of it). It's a misconception that cursive was made for fountain pens. Rather, cursive evolved because it was faster to scrawl words onto paper without lifting up the pen, and the formal version taught in schools was essentially a prescriptivist version of a quick scrawl. It was invented to help you write faster. In particular, I've heard the myth that if you lift a fountain pen up, it might drip on the paper, so it's better to write in one continuous motion. Fountain pens haven't been leaky for the last few hundred years (when well-maintained). By contrast, ballpoints used to leak tons of ink before precision manufacturing and plastics became cheap.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Cursive is faster than separate letters. However, our need to write is sufficiently limited these days that it's not worth learning another system to speed up writing. However, kids should be taught to *read* cursive until we reach the point where the people who write it have died off. I have watched this in a different context in China: The government mandated the teaching of Mandarin (which is simply the Beijing dialect) but did not object to also teaching the local dialect. Kids learned the local dialects to communicate with those who only spoke the local dialect. However, at least in the cities the people who don't speak Mandarin have pretty much died out and if alive they aren't very active in society. The young generation sees no reason to learn the local dialects and the schools don't teach them anymore. For those who don't know the situation: The grammar and the like are identical, all that varies is what is said. Unlike an accent, however, they are not mutually intelligible. I have seen my wife (Shanghai-born, speaks half a dozen of the dialects from nearby cities) switch dialects to something she knew the person she was speaking to would understand but the eavesdropper she was trying to avoid would not. The written form was standardized (at least on the mainland, Taiwan still uses the old ways) earlier, even when two people can't understand each other they can communicate by writing. This results in the apparently nonsensical subtitling of Chinese movies in Chinese. It also results in what I call fingerwriting: when faced with a word the other person doesn't understand you will often see them take a finger and write the character on the palm of the other hand.
  - throwaway675309 4y ago
    The situation is not the same at all. The few people alive today who actively still use cursive to write are just as equally capable of handwriting in a block or printed format, it's not a language or even a dialect. And nothing of import today is written in cursive. (Not books, or literature, or legal texts, or contracts, nothing)
webmobdev 4y ago
Cursive helps you write faster. Some even claim that it makes you better at spelling, forming words and sentences and thus overall better writer ( https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/raise-a-reader-blog/cursive-writing-practice.html https://www.scholastic.com/parents/books-and-reading/raise-a... ). I can't attest to all that, but I recognize that it does create more neural pathways and involves more motor skills to learn which are beneficial to a young mind.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  No idea about whether it is of benefit, but it definitely takes more learning as you can only write decent cursive by muscle memory. Block letters can be written at any pace, cursive must flow.
- throwaway675309 4y ago
  Anything that involves motor control creates more neural pathways, they could just as easily spend that time drawing or learning to paint, and the children will probably have much more fun which is an important aspect of learning.
tsimionescu 4y ago
Cursive is still faster to write than typed fonts, and less taxing when writing a lot. On the other hand, I don't think the difference is huge, so the value of it depends a lot on how much time it actually takes to teach cursive vs teaching non-cursive.
- pfranz 4y ago
  Sure, but does the improved speed increase learning and retention speed? There's additional time spent to learn and master cursive. If that's the only purpose, would that time be better spent elsewhere? From the Boomers, Gen-X, and Millennials I know who were taught cursive in school very few use it for note-taking. It seems like a huge waste if the only reason for teaching it has failed multiple generations already.
  - tsimionescu 4y ago
    I'm 30-ish and not from the USA, but all of my generation has been taught cursive and used it all the way through college - even though I went to a computer engineering college. Some people's handwriting was using some more print letters (for example, I mostly use print capitals, but cursive for the small letters, with some exceptions such as y or x).
    - pfranz 4y ago
      From what I've seen, at least from 2000 forward in the US it was mostly expected that assignments would be typed and printed in high school/college. A lot of the length requirements specified it (times new roman, size 12, single space, one page). I imagine it was because of access (the colleges I know of had a computer lab), formality, and avoiding back-and-forth over legibility. After leaving college and not needing to write much after a decade or two, its jarring enough to get used to writing in block script.
      - tsimionescu 4y ago
        I've expressed this in other places in this thread as well, but I just don't understand how you can turn in assignments in anything mathy (math, physics, chemistry) or diagram/table-heavy (biology, logic) in typed form. Even with tools like LaTeX or modern Word it takes so much longer than writing by hand... I can at least understand the idea of writing printed characters by hand - the difference between that and cursive isn't that large, and is non-existent for the above. But to forego handwriting entirely doesn't seem plausible to me, in these subjects at least.

makeitdouble 4y ago

As far as I am aware of, we don't know. Many studies are done on students typing notes in class, but I've seen nothing on people proactively learning something by themselves on a computer for instance (like if we were summarizing learnings from a video with no time pressure to write it down)

webmobdev 4y ago
The Importance of Cursive Handwriting Over Typewriting for Learning in the Classroom: A High-Density EEG Study of 12-Year-Old Children and Young Adults - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01810/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0181...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]