USA Today article on cursive handwriting

[Cynomys]

Just a quick note to call your attention to an article on the teaching of cursive handwrting in the schools. .Title is "Some States Buck the Trend and Preserve Penmanship":

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/...fornia-cursive-penmanship-technology/1724263/

 

[maxman]

Those darn Nintendo's have robbed us of children learning to write!

Really though, they say that typing is the more important thing to learn.
I think that there is room enough in a kid's brain for both.

 

[reboot]

We're losing the ability to write anything, whether cursive or keyboard.
What good would beautiful handwriting be if the content were gibberish?

 

[Slivovitz]

Look at that death grip in the first photograph. Must be very uncomfortable to write even one page like that.

One aspect of the decline of cursive is that fewer people can read it these days. I get in the habit of printing if I'm writing something down for anyone who I don't actually know can read longhand. Leaving out any uneasy doubts about my penmanship, many younger people seem not to have learned it at all, and look at my writing as if it's cuneiform. Even some in their twenties, thirties, and forties seem to have gotten so out of the habit of reading it that it's best not to try when the object is to communicate.

When I was a child, I was used to reading longhand from relatives, teachers, and other adults, even though it had departed from the regular, rounded hand that they had no doubt learned as children. It would be a shame for someone in 2050 to find a box of old family letters from the 1980s in their attic, and have to take it to a historian to be deciphered.

 

[reboot]

We started downhill years ago with signatures. Look at the names on the Declaration of Independence and compare those signatures to the ones you see today. Today's look like a simple scribble and a line. People are amazed when they can actually read my name on my checks.

 

[N2theBreech]

I must have read a dozen articles like this in the past few months. Seems they always ask the students whether it's worth learning cursive, which is a bit like asking the young boy in the Kaolin temple if his ancient master is teaching him correctly! Ive noticed that the students who know cursive typically say its valuable skill. Those who don't, say it's a waste of time.

If we don't teach our children cursive I wonder how they will manage when they engage other cultures where cursive is still taught? The world is getting smaller each day.

 

[N2theBreech]

We started downhill years ago with signatures. Look at the names on the Declaration of Independence and compare those signatures to the ones you see today. Today's look like a simple scribble and a line. People are amazed when they can actually read my name on my checks.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing. Of, course we all know the wiggle and squiggle are carefully rehearsed. I think it's just another fad, which made me want to start cleaning up my signature so it's legible!

 

[The Zigster]

I actually am one of the few who took Latin in high school, and believe me, the Latin class did me more good in life than penmanship lessons. Give me a keyboard is my motto.

 

[DunEdinRanger]

It's official, I'm now a fossil.

 

[celestino]

Great little article!

 

[Tiny_MN]

We started downhill years ago with signatures. Look at the names on the Declaration of Independence and compare those signatures to the ones you see today. Today's look like a simple scribble and a line. People are amazed when they can actually read my name on my checks.

Funny, I was thinking the same thing. Of, course we all know the wiggle and squiggle are carefully rehearsed. I think it's just another fad, which made me want to start cleaning up my signature so it's legible!

I agree that the signatures have really declined. Mine never was very sharp and crisp like John Hancock and other Founding Fathers. Now, it's just a couple of quick scribbles thanks to driving as a courier for a while. Nightly, I would have to sign for quite a few pickups/deliveries. The worst was middle of the month when people would overnight, signature required, their mortgage payments. I was at the post office signing for over fifty pieces of mail at just that stop.

 

[Not The Original Kermit]

I agree that the signatures have really declined. Mine never was very sharp and crisp like John Hancock and other Founding Fathers. Now, it's just a couple of quick scribbles thanks to driving as a courier for a while. Nightly, I would have to sign for quite a few pickups/deliveries. The worst was middle of the month when people would overnight, signature required, their mortgage payments. I was at the post office signing for over fifty pieces of mail at just that stop.

I find it hard to make a legible signature these days when most of the time I sign on an electronic pad with a fat stylus that makes precision loops and swirls impossible.
back in the days when you had to sign for credit card reciepts, I got grief once because the clerk couldn't read my name. Now days with chip and pin on everything, I can't remember the last time I actually signed a reciept.

 

[jamesspo]

+1.

<RANT>
I'm an engineer, so I work with a lot of other engineers. There has been a huge decline in writing ability, keyboard or written, among our young people ; even very well college educated ones that I work with. I think it may be due in part to texting, instant message, and other forms of short hand oriented communication, as well as a decline in expectations in our schools and by parents. It's sad, but true. I try to call people on it when I see it in a business setting. It happens a lot here on B&B as well. I see a lot of bad punctuation, no punctuation, run on sentences and endless other attacks on the written word . It's not a bid deal in a forum, of course, but I do find it makes it very difficult to understand what folks are asking sometimes when they write so terribly.

</RANT>

We're losing the ability to write anything, whether cursive or keyboard.
What good would beautiful handwriting be if the content were gibberish?

 

[inspiringK]

Ive noticed that the students who know cursive typically say its valuable skill. Those who don't, say it's a waste of time.

This is a great way to put it, and sadly is true about many skills not leant today and knowledge not sought.

Thanks for the article link, it is an interesting read. I think that it is fair to say that there are many utilitarian based justifications behind ensuring that young people know how to use a keyboard before they leave school. Though, I doubt this is a skill that they need years of practice for. Their exposure to keyboards is also inevitable, so they are bound to pick the skill up somewhere anyway.

Cursive, on the other hand, requires forced exposure. By eliminating cursive writing opportunities from the curriculum, schools are robbing youth of (essentially) the only chance they will have to learn the skill before their adult lives. The teacher in the article, Avery, also makes a good case for the usefulness of cursive writing. Without the speed gained through stringing letters together efficiently, I would not have been able to write the university essay exams in the same way that I did using cursive.

 

[jamesspo]

I agree, although I will say that "typing" is different than just being familiar with a keyboard. I had a typing class in high school, and I can say it is one of the most important classes I've ever taken. I'm on a computer constantly though (and actually typing, not just clicking around on the web), so that probably makes it a lot more valuable to me.

I think that it is fair to say that there are many utilitarian based justifications behind ensuring that young people know how to use a keyboard before they leave school. Though, I doubt this is a skill that they need years of practice for. Their exposure to keyboards is also inevitable, so they are bound to pick the skill up somewhere anyway.

 

[rajagra]

Nobody wants to learn anything any more.
Mental arithmetic? Just use a calculator instead!
Spelling and grammar? Let the spellchecker take care of it!
Memorizing things? Just use Google instead!
If it's hard, it isn't worth it!

I'm all in favour of doing things in the most efficient way, but avoiding a skill because you can scrape by without it is just plain lazy.

If there is ever a global catastrophe that ends civilisation as we know it, mankind will find it hard to recover because everyone will be dependent on tech that won't run without power.

Writing things down is a great help in memorising things. I'm not sure that block writing is fluid enough to work as well, and typing notes on a keyboard probably doesn't engage the brain in the right way. (I could be wrong, I'd like to see it tested.)

 

[jamesspo]

Writing things down is a great help in memorizing things. I'm not sure that block writing is fluid enough to work as well, and typing notes on a keyboard probably doesn't engage the brain in the right way. (I could be wrong, I'd like to see it tested.)

Very much so. That has been my primary method of committing things to memory my whole life (second only to studying something right before sleep, which seems to force my brain to ponder and commit to memory while I sleep).

 

[jzuzphreek]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]Whether it's required or not, cursive is fast becoming a lost art as schools increasingly replace pen and paper with classroom computers and instruction is increasingly geared to academic subjects that are tested on standardized exams. Even the standardized tests are on track to be administered via computer within three years.

[/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]And here we have it! [/FONT]

[FONT=arial, sans-serif]There is no more learning for the sake of learning. All learning has been relegated to what you need to move on, nothing more. In bygone days (well before my time), learning was done by reading, research, and discussion. Nowadays, a student only learns what they're asked (forced) to. Standardized tests have tried to ensure that all students learn the same thing at the same level, but that's not how people learn. Why can't kids learn useful things in school?

And this talk of "typing is more important than handwriting." I learned to type before I was 12, in about 2 weeks on a cheesy shareware program my dad found. Never had one day of typing in school, but could out type kids in high school who took a SEMESTER LONG COURSE on typing. Unfortunately, I let cursive get away from me in high school, and am just now trying to get it back. It definitely requires more focus than typing. [/FONT]

 

[The Count of Merkur Cristo]

Cynomys:
Great read.

It’s sad longhand is going the way of the dinosaur in some places, but I applaud the states that are keeping longhand as a essential skillset within ones repertoire of skills.

Also, I firmly agree with the author’s statement, "Longhand is also a symbol of personality".

“Writing is an act of faith, not a trick of grammar”. E.B. White

 

[Doc4]

The sad thing is, we may raise a generation that cannot even read cursive script at all. Well, some of the letters they can probably figure out, but ... what to do with that funny 't' at the end of words, and Syngent isn't the only one who'd be stumped by 'z'. And of course, a lot of the letters can become confusing to the uninitiated if there is any imperfection in the handwriting ... the sloppier the harder to figure out.

In fifty years, if you want to know what your great-grandmother wrote in her diary, or figure out her recipe book, or read an ancestor's letter written home on the eve of D-Day ... odds are you have to take the letter to some sort of honemeister ... er, script-meister ... who can decode the thing into helvetica for you.



(In Japan, they have three alphabets ... hiragana (the easy one), katakana (the hard one), and kanji (the really really hard one.) Not many people in Japan can still read kanji any more, apparently, and we may be headed the same way.)

a bit of kanji ...