I don’t remember people ever writing cursive like what I was taught growing up. People just self-servingly turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day. The kid who can’t read our B-movie elvish script isn’t the one with literacy issues.
We either write within the ballpark of standardization, or we don’t. I think kids should be required to put in as much effort into learning cursive, as people put into actually writing cursive. Which is to say, absolutely none at all.
(Sorry to people who actually write legible, clean cursive. I wish I got to read your output in the wild.)
The thing is, it’s easy to read good cursive. It’s just another script. It took me 5 episodes of Last Exile to memorize the Greek equivalents to English letters so I could read all the text without looking up the translation guide. But when their writing looks like Jack Lew’s signature, there’s not a whole lot I can do to decipher it
Yes but really only the artistically minded and those with great manual dexterity have even a slim chance of doing it well. The rest has to write letters hundreds of times while their classmates go to recess.
feels like a lot of older people just use cursive as an excuse to cover up bad handwriting, because it’s harder to tell when it’s all squiggly in the first place
like, there’s a reason we don’t write in fancy serif typefaces, that would result in most people’s writing being even less legible than it already is.
I used to have really legible, accurate cursive. Someone made me feel embarrassed for still using cursive in middle school, so I stopped using it.
Now I can’t remember cursive well enough to use it quickly, and my print looks like an elementary child did it. ALL CAPS print is a good way for me to make my print more legible
turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day
But that’s cursive, isn’t it? I always considered cursive the script to be written when you just quickly need to write something down,being the style where the pen is raised the least, which happens to be the fastest way to write, at the cost of legibility. So cursive to me seems like the opposite of fancy.
Well,my teachers at the least insisted that cursive must be written perfectly, or you had to write it again.
As in, “rewrite the assignment because the arch on this lower case n is too high”.I only had that in primary school, because it’s important to have legible handwriting (so the teachers can properly grade you being one of the reasons), and it’s easier to change behaviours early on in life before they become habits, but after that I never had anyone insist on or expect perfect handwriting.
Cursive was taught separately from print. In elementary school an assignment wouldn’t be accepted in print, and afterwards it wouldn’t be accepted in cursive.
The thing is that back in the day you were expected to hand write all of your college assignments and printing or typewriting were not allowed. Because of that, it took decades and decades for enough older educators to die before people could use a computer for homework.
Right. Depending on how old you are, you may have or did have older relatives who wrote in impeccable cursive. My grandmother, for example, who was a high school teacher from the 1940s through to the 70s, wrote cursive that looked almost machine-made because it was so perfect. But they actually taught penmanship as its own subject back when she was a kid in the 1930s.
You’re just not old enough. Cursive was everywhere when I was a kid. They should still teach it to children because children learn language and writing easier than adults do. We should be able to read cursive. It is part of our language, and our history. Every old document is written in cursive. We shouldn’t end up with a society that can’t even read its original Constitution. That’s just Idiocracy.
Do you read old English?
On a regular basis? No. Ever? Of course. Shakespeare is written in old English, the original translation of Homer’s The Odyssey, and the King James Bible, to name a few things.
Shakespeare is modern English with some old words. This is Old English.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43521/beowulf-old-english-version
Thanks for the example and the correction.
The King James Bible is pretty much modern English. Shakespeare too. They actually sort of standardized modern English. Old English, the language,not just English that is old, looks like Icelandic or weird German and is maybe 500 years older than that, give or take.
Edit: Everyone who down voted your comment is dumb. Being willing to learn new things is a mark of high intelligence. Being grateful for the opportunity to learn is the sign of wisdom. Those who downvote you should instead emulate you. If we punish people for being happy to learn, they won’t want to learn.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the correction.
We are all constantly learning. Thank you for participating in this group discussion.
Beowulf is old English. Shakespeare is nothing like old English.
I grew up in a house with a rotary phone and a meticulously maintained phone book (written in cursive.) If I’m too young to have been able to reliable hone my cursive-parsing skills, what can we expect of younger generations?
The Flynn effect suggests people are generally getting smarter, remembering things better, etc. Something is happening to cause younger generations to be generally better than their ancestors. IQ scores have their problems but it’s still a hopeful sign.
Different circles I guess then. Everyone I knew wrote in cursive when I was younger. Regarding your intelligence comment, it’s not an intelligence issue, just an education and exposure issue. Learning cursive is easier than learning to write all-together, but if you’re never taught, and you’re not exposed to it, then you’re probably not going to learn it. It’s such a simple thing to learn that I don’t understand the aversion everyone on this thread has towards it. It’s pretty nice when you have to write a lot of text, like taking notes or journaling.
The aversion in my case comes from seeing time being wasted on that when teachers could use it to teach much more useful things or making sure that kids learned everything else they’ve been taught.
Language changes. Teaching an entire script to be able to read translated documents when there are practical skills that could be taught instead is silly.
We don’t teach old English anymore, even though there’s a huge amount of our cultural history contained in it.
We don’t even teach people about the eras when we used to use “f” in place if “s”, and that’s right in the middle of the constitution.Can you read the original magna carta? America would not be unique amongst English speaking nations in having issues dealing with language drift.
lol mixing up language with its orthography system. Classic error
Conservatives are trying to prevent kids from learning history and sex ed, and we’re still hearing this bullshit lamentation about CURSIVE?
Schools are underfunded, teachers are underpaid and overworked, students are graduating barely able to read and with no critical thinking skills.
Who in their right mind is actually concerned about kids learning cursive?
Things I’d rather schools focus on:
Typing, Personal finance, Current events, Technology literacy, Graphic design, Human Computer Interaction
Or maybe practical skills related to trades or how to fix things: CAD, Cooking, Electrical, Plumbing
Literally ANYTHING but this cursive crap. It’s useless, it’s dead, move on.
To be fair, it’s trivially easy to learn cursive and it’s basically always been an extension of penmanship.
I’ve never been in a situation where penmanship mattered. Typing skills on the other hand are abysmal across the board and hamper my coworkers constantly.
It’s an easy way to teach fine motor control.
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Or disassembling electornics, which ice used way more than fucking cursive.
It really isn’t. Some people have a talent for it, most don’t.
Y’all don’t use whiteboards?
Why is penmanship anything that we care about now? Who writes things outside of notes?
But why do children need to be required to learn it when there are more pressing skills that they need?
How are you supposed to do any of this when your brain hemispheres aren’t connected? If you don’t link your letters, you ain’t wire your brain cells. /s
I once saw a post on Facebook claiming this unironically. I learned cursive (or a simplified version I think) in school and thought it’s still the standard until I saw the Facebook post and was like “so what”. How can people get so emotional about such details? Teach your kid cursive at home when it’s so important for you! Oh, you don’t have kids but a strong opinion about education? Share it on Facebook! I’m not there anymore and for a while now.
Absolutely they need to teach finance. I remember when I had to get a mortgage for my house and it was a complete slog because I had absolutely no idea how the whole process was supposed to work. The thing is its actually not that complicated, but because I didn’t know what I was doing it took forever and was stressful.
Schools teach academics. Parents teach life skills. Teachers already have enough to handle, I don’t understand this recent push to make teachers teach shit that parents should be explaining.
Im kind of with you. It’s going to come off as arrogant, but in HS and college I feel like learned how to learn new things. I was never taught how to get a mortgage by my parents…nor any financial stuff for that matter. I learned it all myself. I read up on investing, when I went to get a mortgage I read up on that and learned the ins and outs. I learned the basics of retirement planning all on my own…because I grew up in a wealthy area where they could focus on these things due to socio-economic reasons.
On the other hand, other people are not so lucky and these are vital life skills. If we aren’t going to be able to teach everyone how to really learn, we should probably be teaching them some of these common and basic life skills.
I somewhat agree that you can’t expect teachers to teach kids everything. A professor explained to me once that school should teach you how to learn and a degree is a demonstration of your ability to learn.
The issue I have with what you’re saying is that we know that not everyone wins the birth lottery and has two parents with the time to raise their kids properly.
Public school should be an equalizer and it shouldn’t matter what kind of family you were born into. And yes, that probably means smaller class sizes, more teachers, more specialization of teachers, or just plain giving the teachers the resources they would need to teach some of these critical things. I know teachers and know that they are underpaid and overworked, we can’t ask more of them without addressing that first.
I’m just very concerned about the long term impact to our civilization of leaving too much teaching up to parents who themselves are uneducated. There are no qualifications needed to become a parent, unlike being a teacher. Some parents that I talk to, you can’t get more than four sentences into a conversation with them before they start spouting off conspiracy theories or justifying racism and if schools aren’t allowed to teach these kids anything to the contrary then I fear for the future.
I’m also concerned about the perverse incentive that corporations have in a capitalist economy to ensure that kids aren’t properly educated. Kids who aren’t taught anything about finance are more likely to be preyed on by credit card companies, student loan sharks, etc. Corporations are constantly working to deceive us on all matter of topics and kids need to have at least a baseline of understanding of some of these things or they will get screwed over really easily.
My tiny quibble with your post is that I wish you had included critical thinking in your first list. Other than that this is spot on.
That being said, my kids are learning cursive and I’m happy for it. It’s not something that requires years of in depth study to learn. My third grader is only a few months into school and can already read and write cursive after just starting it this year.
But if it were gone, I wouldn’t bat an eye.
How to pay taxes and make a budget. Media literacy. Nutrition. How to drive a car. Coding. The list goes on and on.
You guys seem to be under the impression you can’t do both. I learnt all of that in high school (some as extracurricular but computers were relatively new). You can definitely have both.
Cursive takes a few hours to learn to read.
Maybe for an adult, but they literally spent two and a half years drilling it endlessly at my school and doomsaying about how you’d fail out if you didn’t master it, only for me to move on to middle school and immediately be presented with my first typed essay assignment.
It’s just such a silly hill to die on all so people who did learn it don’t feel silly because nobody else reads it.
When teaching how to drive a car they need to teach the skill of actually looking and processing what’s happening rather than just the mechanics of how to operate the vehicle.
Most people seem to drive along without any real awareness of what’s happening around them which is what causes most accidents. Sure, that car shouldn’t have pulled out in front of you from a side road, but if you’d been paying attention you would have been able to see they were doing it, and avoided the crash.
Now I may be a bit biased, but it would be nice if people could read my hand writing. There are just some people that write in cursive despite it not being taught. It was mentioned once in 2nd grade for me and for some reason it stuck.
Well cursive helps people with dyslexia
No it doesn’t.
Every time you look at cursive it just looks like a series of random squiggles. If you already have problems with character recognition how is making it illegible going to help?
It makes each one one thing. Some if my family were given cursive kessons sooner to help them. It more about helping them write not so much help for the reader.
I mean the problem isn’t whether they taught cursive or not, it’s whether you actually use it or not. Cause I was taught cursive in school but barely know how to write it now cause I never have to use it.
I’m nearing 40 and haven’t been required to write in cursive since grade school. Don’t every use it unless more than a word or two a year probably. I have no problem writing in it on occasion. It’s just curvier versions of letters that you link by not picking your pen up. Sure, there are some weird capital letters, but generally, knowing the concept is enough to get it mostly right. I don’t really understand how some people struggle.
Right there with you. It’s a very small leap from print to cursive. That people are so mad at it is hilarious.
that’s not at all how it’s taught in the US
Its purpose has passed. We don’t write with quills or dip pens anymore. Franky, we don’t write by hand much at all. Maintaining two systems of writing when handwriting is rapidly being reduced makes no sense. Your situation (I’m the same) is a great demonstration.
I’d say cursive is the Roman numerals of penmanship. It’s a quaint thing to use for style, but that’s it.
This is so puzzling to me, here in Brazil everyone writes in cursive, we all learned fine as children, it exists because it’s easier and faster to write with it and you are going to write a lot during all your school life.
One thing I’ve picked up from these threads over time is that different places mean different things by “cursive”.
In some places it’s treated as “how to write legibly by hand quickly” and in others it’s more of a formal writing system designed for signatures and the like.
For example, we were required to use it while learning it, and then told not to use it for handwritten assignments once we left elementary school. It was preferred that things were written using print or typed was strongly preferred.Kids now don’t even have to write by hand as much, because typing is a vastly more practical skill.
Assignments were all done in Word, that’s normal, I mean it more like taking notes during class.
Notes weren’t graded, but assignments had to be handwritten in perfect cursive until it switched to being unacceptable to use cursive.
Because they weren’t teaching efficient handwriting, they were teaching a second, slightly more formal, alphabet that can’t be used in most circumstances.
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That’s probably because you’re more experienced with one. The whole point of cursive is more efficient writing
In the US, my kids have done most assignments online since middle school. They’ve never needed cursive except for the brief refresher every year, and the occasional legal thing, such as a signature card to get a bank account.
Although, I’m amused that my kid in 11th grade now has to hand-write some assignments for the first time, as a reaction to generative ai.
Can someone explain why one cannot read cursive? It is just a tilted (sometimes fancy) font, what’s so hard about it?
Edit: After being made aware by a fellow lemmy’er and googling it, it seems I confused cursive with italics, English is not my first language. Though I learned cursive at school when I was 6 without realizing it is called cursive in English. It was part of the basic curriculum at that time, didn’t know this wasn’t a thing in other countries.
There are some wonky letters, like capital G, S where if you never learned you wouldn’t know what you’re looking at.
As someone who didn’t learn English as a first language, cursive is like another language to me. I don’t recognize half of the letters, and i never encountered it enough to properly learn it or have an incentive to learn it.
[Serious]Can you read when you tilt a page 30° to the left? Or is it more about the font type than the font angle?
I think you’re thinking of italics, not cursive.
Your are correct, I looked up the difference.
Seems though I learned cursive at school when I was 6 without realizing it is called cursive in English (English is not my first language) . Didn’t know this wasn’t a thing in other countries.
I downvoted myself :D
It’s not though like why the fuck is s a triangle that’s the only thing I know about it and can’t read it
It is not a triangle, it is a slash with a hook like /J but combined. You never lift your pen of the paper to write a word. Dots and dashes are added after the word is finished.
I’m sorry how is
not a triangleA tri-angle has three angles
I think at one point a cursive S was “draw an S without lifting your pen from one letter to another” so it comes out looking a bit like an 8. Then the top loop got smaller and smaller, until the one guy who codified the cursive alphabet just didn’t put the top loop on at all.
This same guy for some reason decided capital Q should look like a 2.
If I were in charge of the curriculum, students would get an introduction to cursive and an afternoon playing with it, basically so they can recognize it as a “font” and read it. Then let them continue to print or more likely type their work.
I was similarly confused when I first learned about this. We were never taught to write in “print”, so handwriting - cursive - was the norm.
It isn’t just cursive. I’ve seen a lot of younger people have issues reading bad copies of older print letters. Part of it isn’t being used to seeing information presented in a certain way or not being found via OCR.
Not being able to write cursive I understand.
Not being able to read cursive is an issue that will out your lesser education and put you at a disadvantage in social situations.
How many social situations do you get into where cursive is relevant? Wedding table cards? Pretty sure even people not taught cursive can get the gist since most letters are pretty close to print.
Menus
Yeah… it’s going to be hard to convince me that a literate person is going to be unable to discern a menu because it’s in cursive and they only know print. I’ve been able to get the gist of menus in different languages just from a common Latin base.
Also, the idea of using a method of writing meant to make writing faster in a printed menu is ridiculous. Pure wankery.
I’m from the UK, I don’t think I’ve ever heard people talk about cursive writing at all. When I was in primary we learnt joined up writing which I don’t thinks the same. I have never seen a menu in NI that wasn’t typed and printed and the UK doesn’t even have a written constitution either.
When I was in primary we learnt joined up writing which I don’t thinks the same.
Pretty sure Americans just call that cursive. Where I’m from cursive is just this, so it used to confuse me too.
I’d just leave if the menu was in cursive.
I learned cursive a good 20 years ago in third grade, haven’t used it since outside of signing my name and deciphering the odd handwritten letter from someone 40+ who still writes in cursive (and still handwrites letters)
Find better friends, in that case.
Unfortunately not everyone you socialize with is worthy of being a friend. Cursive illiteracy means nothing to me in that regard. But if the pronunciation of .gif and what color text bubbles your phone sends can matter to people. Well.
We just don’t need that sort of negativity in our lives.
*In the US? I don’t think think is a thing at all in Vic Australia. I can’t read cursive, and am slightly above averagely educated for my country (honours).
In Victoria Australia practically no one uses cursive, and the joined handwriting they (used to / or maybe still do) teach in Victorian schools is basically just printed text with minor alterations to make it join better. They don’t mandate a specific form of writing AT ALL in highschool (years 7-12**). Hence why I switched to writing as close to printed text as possible, slightly joined for some extra speed.
People should write in a way that’s legible first, speed second (when you want others to actually be able to read)
If you write in cursive here, no one can read what you’re writing.
Nothing to do with your level of education, and frankly, anyone who hasn’t STOPPED using illegible writing styles by the time they finish an undergrad degree at the latest, I’d look at sideways for being unnecessarily difficult (obviously, if they can’t write any better, then fair enough).
**Because there is one year or “prep”, it’s actually years 8-13
Fuck cursive. Being forced to write in that was absolute torture. The forced use of specific esoteric hand-cramping illegible scribbles is asinine.
There surely was a use for penmanship before the proliferation of ballpoint pens and typewriters, but the way it was taught while I was in school was completely backwards. The intent of writing in script is to quickly flow from one letter to another without needing to lift the nib of a quill; rote learning of individual hieroglyphs with full disregard for the writer’s natural hand movements is at best asinine, and at worst cruel.
The fact that we were tormented decades in the past doesn’t justify more torment now. Be better.
I find cursive is very useful when writing notes that only I will ever need to read. Reading and writing another persons cursive has never been easy for me and it has never impacted my life with one exception. I cannot read post cards from my aunt. Oh, and that time a decade ago when I had to fill out the “I will not cheat” pledge on the back of the SAT.
Turns out if you need to write something with speed we have these things that are like typewriters, but they don’t even jam!
Oh, and that time a decade ago when I had to fill out the “I will not cheat” pledge on the back of the SAT.
One of the hardest sections of the SAT, right there
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Never tried. Apparently yes, but I sound like a child reading each word like, “yeah, that’s definitely’vested’ I’m sure!”. I doubt the next generation will except a few people.
I see your point, but I’m not sure I believe somebody could lie about it’s contents even in the distant future with how many legible copies there are.
On another note, this website exists which is super cool! https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/downloads
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I’ve never once encountered such a book. The only times I see cursive are stuff from older relatives, and they all write differently to each other so it’s just a matter of familiarity, and on headings or labels trying to look fancy.
Sometimes it comes up in old stuff for academic or personal interests but “knowing cursive” is often secondary to understanding those. Letters or papers intended for others are often perfectly legible, personal notes are a total mixed bag. (Looking at you, Charles Darwin.)
Found the weird ammurica fetish guy.
I have heard of this argument many times and it never made any sense. Is it really a big deal that kids these days might have trouble reading the original 1787 hemp copy, The one they keep in a climate controlled room in dc? Even the Supreme Court Justices use print transcriptions. This always seems like a purely sentimental arguement
Oh no imagine not veing able to read the slaveowners manual
Voicing pride that you’ve never read the constitution of a country you don’t even live in is weirder 😬
You mean the one that starts with “congrefs” because the long s was a thing at the time and the letter f had a different meaning?
How much time should we spend teaching school children about 200 year old antiquated orthography?
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Because it’s a waste of time, and a lot of people were taught in a way that wasn’t the easy, quick way you seem to think it was.
The way they taught me was to write the alphabet in a new script over and over for about an hour a day twice a week for several years. If you had poor handwriting you had to do it more, and you could fail lessons based purely on “didn’t shape your cursive S correctly”.
Then you leave elementary school and teachers immediately switch to saying they won’t accept assignments in cursive, and then in highschool and college they won’t even accept handwritten.
Slide rules are also easy to learn, but we don’t teach them because there’s no point to it.
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Welcome to why so many people hate it. You’re taught it, it’s an awful experience, and then you never use it again.
We may as well teach slide rules and abaci.
Cursive is dumb anyways. Let’s have a second way to write that’s harder To do, less legible, and designed for old school fountain pens no one uses that have difficulty with upstrokes
Let’s all go back to learning shorthand!
This is what my arthritic handwriting looks like anyway…
Shorthand is pretty badass. My mother knows how to read and write it, and I envy the speed at which she can take notes. A bonus for her was that she could write stuff down when we were kids and nobody could read it.
I always wanted to learn, but the farthest I ever got was professional level typing. My mother in law is a paralegal and says she rarely ever uses it anymore.
Weird they call it shorthand. That looks like a lot of writing just to say “Gregg.”
wait, that’s an actual script? I thought it was just slang!
Court reporters learn it. They can transcribe conversations by hand. It’s pretty wild. From what I understand of it, each symbol is a word, or combination of words.
Its more just writing the sounds with othet short cuts.
Harder to do? The whole point of cursive is for easier writing. Writing print by hand is what makes no sense. It’s more legible, but print is called print for a reason.
On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to be a standard for cursive in the US. When I learned to write in 1st grade in my country, there was an official cursive alphabet and everybody learned the same one. But my daughter started learning cursive now in the US (3rd grade) and because the letters she’s learning are very different from the ones I learned, I looked up what American cursive looks like. Every single source I found on the subject had a different alphabet.
Whichever cursive my (US) schools taught all those ages ago was cumbersome and nonsensical. Nothing about it was easy.
Going by the feedback from Americans in this thread, cursive is “fancy-pants writing” so yeah, if your teachers were of the same mind they probably prioritized teaching whatever they thought would pair well with a powdered wig (basically calligraphy) rather than whatever would be quick to write and easy to read.
As someone who lives in a country where cursive still dominates handwriting styles, I find all these discussions… curious. As a country you managed to lose the ability to handwrite efficiently, and as far as I can tell it’s because of conservatism missing the point of cursive.
Well, it’s also not like we have to hand-write anything these days.
We don’t hand-write more than Americans, yet we use cursive. And today’s young adults still spent their entire childhood/teenage years hand-writing at school (and even though kids today have more computers in classrooms, they don’t use a keyboard for everything, nor do I think they necessarily should).
So at least for that phase of life, writing quickly and efficiently is still a worthy goal. You can write however you want of course, but so many people choosing to let go of cursive tells me that it wasn’t taught properly.
But yeah once you’re out of the school system you might as well write everything in capital letters (that’s definitely my go-to on paper forms to spare others the chicken scratches I use on personal notes).
From 7th grade onward I believe we were able to ensure that the school had to legally accept typed assignments. It was the only way I could complete them on time.
I was fine with handwriting math since no sadist had yet invented cursive numerals.
Good for you that your school was willing to adapt to your needs, but surely that was not the norm for millennials when they were in school. I never went to school in the US but I don’t believe that classroom activities (tests, note taking, exercises, etc) were normally done on computers in the 90s/00s/early '10s…
So why did those kids stop using cursive, at a time when hand-writing was frequently needed? My point is that it can only have been taught wrong if it was not legible or fast enough for most kids to see a point in using it.
That was my experience too
Harder to write? It’s easier and faster. I take it you don’t know how to write cursive?
It certainly wasn’t in the 3rd grade and it isn’t now
It takes significantly more effort and has poor results.
It’s way faster and super easy…
It was painful, tedious, and slow.
It sounds like your school sucked.
Seems like we all had the same experience
Harder to read, but easier to write.
And not that it matters but there are still fountain pen users, makers, influencers and all that, it’s a niche hobby now.
So, so much harder to write. Painful, tedious, and unnatural.
I mean I don’t see how? it’s the equivalent of swiping vs typing on the phone
Maybe I’m weird, but I still prefer to type vs swipe too. Swipe is super inaccurate and I spend more time fixing errors than typing
And you make more errors with swiping than if you had a physical keyboard.
I have 20-30 fountain pens. Negative on the cursive.
Unrelated, what’s your EDC?
What’s an EDC?
Also enjoy how that commend apparently made people sad lol.
Every day carry?
Im cursive myself but to each their own.
I have a Procyon Platinum, but I stopped carrying it because it would run dry if not left flat. I have not yet found a fountain pen that will work for me if carried vertically in a pocket or backpack.
As far as my preferred daily users, it’s the TWSBI Eco–they hold a whole lot of ink and flow very well. I have rolls full of pen after pen I have acquired over the years. It’s always the Eco that I go back to. I should probably focus my collection there!
Decent choice, and very collectible, I recommend the twsbi VAC mini and the diamond 580 series as they both have decent capacity and are wet writers, a bit more $ mind you but not astronomical
I use fountain pens on the daily and would never dream of trying to do cursive.
The only times I used cursive was to sign my name on important documents. Now I don’t even do that anymore. I just write my name with normal letters without lifting the pen.
My signature is anything from a sine to cosine wave. Doesn’t matter as long as it’s sined.
It’s just a phase you’re going through.
Signing just means write your name but real fast ad sloppy
When I turned 18 and had to sign my social security card with my full name, I had to look up how to do the capital letter in my middle name in cursive because the last time I wrote one was in third grade in the early 2000’s
I just use a specific sort of squiggle that only I can reproduce and have used it for decades.
I hate cursive.
I hate “formal” cursive, but the concept is solid – economy of motion, or time, or whatever. In fact, I’ve realized that some of my printing looks like cursive if I write quickly. Cursive that just looks pretty can go fuck itself.
Agreed.
I had to learn it in elementary school, and for some extended amount of time, all schoolwork had to use it. Then for a while after that (a few years) some teachers would still require it. Best part was when they’d critique your handwriting too, so it was an aspect of your work that you didn’t gain points for, but that you could certainly lose points. I remember one poor girl that came in to our district in like 6th grade, after we’d already had all our training in it. She turned in a paper and I guess was just supposed to know not to print. The teacher made her redo it in cursive…and then didn’t like the way she drew a certain letter (different than how the school taught it), so she started subtracting a point for each time that letter appeared or something, so this girl ended up with like a -2 out of 10 or some shit. I guess the issue was worked out somehow but I remember even as a kid thinking “wow what a dick move”.
As soon as the requirements from teachers stopped, I quit using cursive and have never once ever needed to use it since (aside from my signature).
Not once.
It’s something interesting to learn and I think it’s definitely worth teaching kids how to read it and how to write with it themselves…but it should be something that’s like…a few weeks of instruction per year, from grades 3-5. Not all year, not required in all subjects. Just “a few weeks each year, we teach the kids this skill and then give them a refresher”. Maybe require it in “cursive month” each of those years, and certainly accept it anytime. But way less emphasis than my school put on it.
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What’s the advantage though? What benefits does this have besides being able to read book covers written by people out of touch with their audience?
It’s faster to write
You know what’s faster? Taka Taka on my keyboard.
Fair point, but if you’re worrying about speed more than anything else, you’re probably writing quite a bit and you’re more than likely taking notes of some sort.
The motor skills involved in writing things down by hand seems to aid memory more than typing it out does. Taka taka’s fun, faster, and not nearly as wasteful, but I’m choosing to stick with my 9,000 pens for retention
My RSI will take taka taka any day.
To start, I’m pro teaching/learning cursive. To respond, my brain barely works fast enough to have letters for print, speeding up the writing isn’t the bottleneck.
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Signatures, not so much.
Lots of completely illegible signatures out there lol
You can read other people’s signatures
Why would you want to
the constitution
Plenty of verified print versions floating out there
notes from your older lawyer
If I’m paying someone 100$/minute, they’d better be able to write in print upon request
Every lawyer I’ve worked with has used email for everything.
You could have your doctored and not be able to read my signature.
I use it when writing text along side math or diagrams, to differentiate it. I write cursive notes and use print to add emphasis. It’s also much easier to write legibly at a higher speed, which I’ll admit was more important before we typed as much as we do now. My cursive is at least as legible as my printing.
The advantage of learning it is being able to read when other people write with it.
I’m not saying it’s common, but it’s not hard to learn to read and I’m sure you will come across it at some point.
being able to read when other people write with it.
They can write legibly if they want me to read what they write.
It’s not that someone is going to write something they want you to read.
It’s more about someone wrote something and by chance you want to read it. The only problem is that it’s in cursive, you can’t.
For you personally? Probably not much. For us as a society? Well, being able to read our laws and history in their original form is pretty important.
Not really, they’ve been transcribed and the people who need to be able to read the originals can learn just like people learn Latin if they need it, not as a mandatory language in school.
Transcriptions are easy to alter. Kids learn reading and writing, and language in general much faster than adults. You can spend an hour a day for a few months with a kid and they’ll have it down pat.
You really think people are gonna go down to the basement in DC and reason.the original documents and failure to read those is how we lose our rights? Stuff like the patriot act are bigger threats
Future legislatures will. I don’t like the idea of nobody in our government being able to read our laws in a generation.
Average people can view the original Constitution when taking a tour, and it’s pretty neat to be able to read the original. Like a lot of things in education, knowing them won’t necessarily be very useful, but they can provide for a richer, more fulfilling life.
It’s easy to learn cursive and compare if you’re that paranoid about it (although being extremely good at reading cursive doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to read all documents written in cursive), it doesn’t mean everyone needs to learn it.
z doesn’t look like that in cursive, nor do most of the capital listed you listed Better to just post an image of the correct versions
That is how z looks in cursive.
They’re the same thing.
I literally linked to an image showing exactly what it should look like.
That’s just a different font.
I hope you know what fonts are.Edit. Apparently not, lol
Well I’m pretty sure you don’t, since handwriting doesn’t have “fonts”.
Stay in school, kids.
That moment when you find out fonts are older than the printing press.
That’s the only “font” taught as cursive to Americans. I’ve never seen anything like yours referred to as cursive
I thought cursive was the American word for joined up handwriting, but reading this thread I don’t really get what it means.
No, you’re right. That’s just called cursive here.
From what I understand after reading a bunch of calligraphy books (both modern and 19th century), there two ways to use the word. Most Americans use the word cursive to mean some form of joined writing, usually something like business penmanship (or a business script). These are usually descendants from English roundhand and spencerian.
However the word can also be used to describe a scale between cursive and gothic. The more gothic a script is the more times the penman lifts their pen. The more cursive a script is, the less the pen will be lifted off the page.
I write exclusively in cursive. It’s natural for me and everyone around me was taught it as well.
The only time I ever use cursive is when I write my signature, and it’s mostly just loops and squiggles.
