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.
> 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.
...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.
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?
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.
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
what good does it to, to tell the majority that their cursive is incorrect? if a system results in most people doing it wrong, then the system is wrong, not the people
>"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.
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?
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.
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.
You know how to solder so you get all judgy about people, who I note are coming to you to learn how to do it, when they can't immediately solder well.
But then you don't worry at all about not knowing basic blacksmithing, to as you would say "perform basic repairs".
That's because knowing how to solder is about as relevant as blacksmithing. It's a neat trick. It's handy if you do know it. It has absolutely no real relevance, or even substantial economic utility, to the vast majority of people in modern society.
And you've apparently got a wholly unearned superiority complex about "the youth of today". How original.[1]
Unless you keep regularly using them those fine motor skills will atrophy from lack of use.
And barely anybody will use it outside of the real world. All this does is make kids exasperated with their education because they're being taught something they know is outdated and has no real utility in the real world.
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.
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.
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.
I'm the same age as the students in the article, and I'm surprised that reading cursive is such an issue for them. Almost all of the letters closely resemble block letters except for R, S, Z and a few of the capitals. I mean, I don't use cursive at all in my daily life, but I still have no trouble reading things like https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Letter.posted.in.189... using context clues.
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.
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.
Outside doing some historical research or reading historical documents. There is rather little use these days. Or receiving notes from someone who uses it.
But they are also available in print? And it's 1 to 1 so even a 3rd grader could figure it out in a jiffy if that ever became necessary. I'm more worried about the shifting definition of words and historical context needing to be tied in.
> For many young people, “handwriting,” once essentially synonymous with cursive, has come to mean the painstaking printing they turn to when necessity dictates.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
This. I take notes in neat block writing, but also slurred cursive when I need to make a personal note (such as “this sprint is going to fail miserably, no reqs gathered”), which is nice so I have a little private space for notes.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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:
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.
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!
> 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
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.
My style has morphed into a sequence of separate letters derived from an italic style, but strung together as a sort of mock cursive. It looks a bit like really bad cursive, but I can't read my own writing.
I'm 66; it's much too late to learn to write all over again. I wish they'd taught me copperplate, instead of some half-baked italic. Or maybe just taught me to write properly in the first place.
Cursive probably comes from the time when ink and cursive where a great optimization. With an old ink pen and inkpot combo, cursive can be a lot faster and not to mention easier. The words flow easily from ink in pen to paper until the ink runs out.
If you actually take the time to learn it, you realise that it is one of the most consistent handwriting systems and actually surprisingly legible across authors of varying social background.
Can you give some sources regarding "objectively hard"? What objective measurement did you use?
"take time to learn" is a BS excuse from a readability point of view, unless you're talking about something very specific. Some things, yes, you learn. Some are just obviously hard. There's no reason for it being that different even from Kurrent
> What objective measurement did you use?
Similarity between letters (themselves across systems and others). Comparison with similar and preceding writing systems. All objective criteria and in most of them it fails miserably.
The people who used the writing took the time to learn it, so it's not a "BS excuse". Your comment derided the system on a general level. From your point of view it might not make sense to learn it, but not from the point of the historic users.
Once you learned it, you see that the similarity of letters is only superficial and you can distinguish them quite nicely, especially with context. You actually start to recognise patterns. And since the system gives you only very few ways to deviate, these patterns are surprisingly uniform across different authors. I haven't seen that with other cursive systems to this extent.
It becomes a bit harder though with writing from after the war, when people started to mix Latin into their Kurrent or Sütterlin.
> Your comment derided the system on a general level.
You're correct, I am deriding it because it is needlessly weird even compared with preceding writing system and there's no good reason for it. While this might have been weird "by accident", a system like that would not work (or be accepted) today.
Again, "you have to learn" is a bad excuse if there's no good justification. There's plenty to learn on the modern cursive system, but I don't have to learn what squiggles that look similar mean. There's no reason why t, d, e, c look like the way they look
"Regular" cursive is obtuse too. Lowercase cursive S looks nothing like an S. Lowercase cursive R doesn't look like an R either. Uppercase cursive F looks like it's backwards for some reason (at least the way some people write it, it looks like a backwards E). So does uppercase cursive G. People get used to these things.
You're right, and those are some of the things I was thinking when I said "you have to learn some things"
Yeah the capital F is probably the weirdest. The G/g difference is weird even in printed characters to be honest. (now, cursive lowercase r is just r connecting to the next letter)
> In the future, cursive will have to be taught to scholars the way Elizabethan secretary hand or paleography is today.
As mentioned in the article; indeed, you can replace cursive with <insert old script here> and the article would be the same lamentation for an audience of a different time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> Not everything is life that is old and not immediately effective is “useless”.
Agreed. But I’m not the one who described cursive as “outdated” and “useless”, the parent poster did. I used their exact words. That’s what made me curious: they used negative words to refer to the skill, yet reacted positively to their kid learning it.
If their answer is “I’m glad my kid is learning it because they’re having a blast”, more power to them! But is that the reason? My comment isn’t a gotcha, it’s a genuine question to understand the reasoning behind an (at first glance) cognitively dissonant¹ situation.
Useless, by definition, was a poor choice of word, apologies.
I meant something more akin to something you'd likely never need to use as a life skill or for employment in today's world.
One of my favorite trips as a kid was to some museum that displayed civil war letters. They were all beautifully written in cursive. For reasons like that, I'm glad tp have learned it, and hope she finds such things as interesting as I do one day.
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.
I went to a school that taught normal handwriting and I had some of the neatest handwriting in the class. I changed schools where they insisted I wrote “joined up” and my handwriting went to shit - looks absolutely terrible even today unless I put in a huge effort. I blame the school for hampering my ability to write correctly.
When I do write anything now I have to write slow and make a conscious effort not to write joined up. That way, it’s actually neat and readable again.
Exactly the same with my kids, 3 years of great legible handwriting, then it all wen backwards because the national curriculum driven by 90 year olds thinks writing for other people is a key skill, despite well over 99% of written communication being typed.
I have the same experience; my cursive was deemed too messy, so they gave me personal handwriting classes. I ended up with a script that was a cross between formal script and spidery rubbish. Nowadays I try hard to make recognisable letter-forms, and I link them up if it seems flowing and convenient. It's a struggle; often I can't read my own shopping lists.
Dammit, the buggers taught me to write so that nobody could read it. And this was an expensive school.
This is what I’ve watched happen to my son in school. Genuinely neat, readable writing that was plenty fast, ruined by hours of lessons on joined up writing, all of which took away from actual learning.
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.
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.
I wrote a comment of my own and scrolled through 700 comments before I found this response. The whole debate has seemed incomprehensible to me, for the 20 years that I've been aware of it.
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).
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.
> 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.
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
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.)
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.
I guess it sounds even weirder to us native speakers since we are much more used to hearing normal Italian.
I think it is easier for you because all that stretching gives you the time to focus more on the single words, also Italian speech is different from province to province. Sometimes it is also hard for us to understand other Italians, mostly because each region's native speakers mix some dialectal sayings and pronunciation into their version of Italian. We have tens of Italian languages in Italy, but the more you live here the more you understand other Italians beside your own (closer regions sound more similar but going from extreme north to extreme south it gets really different).
The general dialect is simply a correct form of Italian, following all the rules and without adding anything from your dialect. It is the Italian language you learn at school.
I don't think so, it sounds quite the opposite. Vocal fry is low register, sounds educated and is somewhat sexier while "cursive speech" is squeaky, childish and sounds really stupid.
Another simple answer is that it is a kind of variation on the accent of the Milan area (Varese/Brianza or something like that) that young people in most parts of Italy speak nowadays, since many famous singers and social media personality come from the Milan area.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Same here, unless I am concentrating super hard my block letters don't even look like another of the same letter. My handwriting is just not consistent. I've long theorized that nice handwriting is like 90% "do you make letter consistently the same" verses anything else, I can't do it (or have no patience to spend seconds on each letter, which still look wiggly). Typing is just better in every imaginable way IMHO.
What is an italic pen? I'm aware of italic fonts (slanted letters) and italic script (the same but handwritten), but I can't find anything about a specific type of pen used for it.
The kind of pen I'm referring to is a pen with a nib that is a flat blade of metal, cut across, making a straight edge, then slit to make an ink channel. If you drag it horizontally, e.g. left-to-right, it makes a very fine line; if you drag it vertically, it makes a line as broad as the width of the nib. Sometimes they are cut on a slant; sometimes you hold them on a slant. So take "horizontal" and "vertical" with a bushel of salt.
Basically, these things are metal replicas of quill pens, which are made as flat blades cut across to make an edge and then slit.
That wide-stroke/thin-stroke business isn't anything to do with italicness, as far as I know; nor is the business of everyone leaning to the right. It's about serifs, and related orthographic flourishes, isn't it? [Edit: the kind of script I mean is angular, straight lines, with vertical strokes meeting diagonal strokes; rather gothic.] Well, those flourishes are facilitated by that kind of nib. Whether that's italic or not, I don't know; but the pen-and-nib sets used to be sold as "Italic pen with set of nibs", or something like that.
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.
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.
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.
Enough with "studies." I have multiple studies correlating that smokers survive COVID-19 hospitalization better than non-smokers. Should we adopt smoking as a health policy against COVID? I don't think it would be a wise recommendation when factoring in other health risks associated with smoking. There's a few studies showing how SAT scores declined once American studies stopped praying in school.
Deeper processing isn't necessarily better. I would bet it also takes "deeper processing" to learn all the characters in written Chinese. There's been movements to simplify Chinese, but never movements to complicate English.
Language is best when it uses as little processing as possible. Its meant to be a medium, not a mental task in its own right.
So taking your research claims at face value, that's not actually evidence that cursive is good. In fact, its the opposite.
> You can learn to read cursive quickly. ... Soon every phone will be able to translate it.
Not only does that require substantial backup, it also sidesteps the problem of writing. There will come a point when you need it. Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may become a necessity. Your phone might just stop working.
And there's nothing wrong with being taught two ways of achieving the same. Or do you only know one way to add? One way to program? One way to throw a ball? It might even make the process more flexible and adaptable.
The typos are mostly due to the fact I didn't use a translator. I actually do know morse (albeit not as my primary written language :).
Except the very last typo your translator may have run into. That's not a typo at all, its a prosign. There is a difference between ...---... and ... --- ...
I'm thinking of the Morse code challenge in The Amazing Race. Noisy "battlefield" and a loop playing a message in dots and dashes. They had a key to decode it but utterly failed and ended up Philiminated. They test things but what was doable for the tester apparently wasn't for them. (Everyone else took the other side of the detour, they had no choice.)
Irony is a mask, the blight of those who can't quite coherently formulate their thoughts, and prefer to hide them instead. Has it ever convinced anyone?
About 10% of Americans are functionaly iliterate, like they have troubles to understand and form long sentences in writting. Learning second method seems wasteful in that case.
And yes, I know only one way to add, multiply and so on. Also I can only program in one way (in very specific language and heavy IDE support).
>Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may become a necessity
I agree with your incredulity at phones being able to translate cursive, but on your second point, if you're alluding to another World War starting and our technological world being destroyed, then frankly being able to immediately and quickly read old letters between grandparents & older generations will not be of a high priority...
There's a multitude of other scenarios, of course, in which writing could be benediciary, but not enough to compel anyone to improve their skills. And then it dies, and Idiocracy is starting to look more like a documentary.
> Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught.
If you need to write by hand a lot, cursive is vastly more efficient and fast, as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often. You mostly glide over the paper.
This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down. Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at all, that is because they evolved to be written fast.
Whereas you can learn to do fast printing. My writing speed improved later in life once I convinced myself to switch back over to print characters -- I can speed up the process without losing legibility. Also some people do a mixture of the two, which really is writing out ligatures for common character pairings. I don't really do that, and it seams everyone sort of figures out their own stile, but it would be nice if written ligatures were taught as an in-between style.
Edit: To see examples, do a search for "fast printing", I know there were several good posts on one of the fountain pen forums. The style I liked referenced "bookhand", and to get good/legible at it you start by practicing writing small circles (both clockwise and counter-clockwise) and small straight lines (horizontal, vertical, diagonal with various starting positions). This also helps with general technical drawing, things like writing circles and making them larger and smaller. And learning to draw a straight line across a page freehand will help with character alignment.
I considered doing that in college--decided against it because overall I decided it wouldn't be worthwhile. Yes, I could have taken notes faster but it's not a skill I expected to have much use for later in life. I could already see that the computer was going to pretty much kill handwriting.
My experience is exactly the opposite. I used to do printed characters. My writing speed and legibility (especially for quick notes) improved significantly after switching to cursive. Once you realise that cursive is basically just a way to write printed characters in one flowing motion, it's weird to go back to printed.
But maybe we're talking differnt cursive systems, and that might explain our difference in experience.
100 years ago, when accounting and bookkeeping were all done by hand, writing cursive was probably quite a bit faster, and with all the practice you got, just as legible.
In high school, I wrote almost everything in cursive, but over the next 10 years, computers replaced so much writing that I fell out of practice. I'm not sorry it's gone.
Cursive is definitely faster while maintaining legibility. It's just that no schools in my country has taught us how to actually write it efficiently. For example when I'm writing cursive I'm holding pen incorrectly (yes, there are more efficient and less efficient ways to hold it), I'm moving my fingers incorrectly, I'm moving my hand incorrectly, and in the end certain muscles required for the efficient writing weren't properly developed.
I've learned all this well after graduating from the university, so there is zero reason to train that skill today. But I do know that my shitty cursive is 100% caused by my own lack of proper training to write. I've switched to the writing print characters nowadays, but only out of necessity, not due to efficiency.
I don't know what your country is but in a few US public schools we had fairly strict teachers trying to get us to correctly hold our pencils. They'd wander around class correcting people holding their pencil wrong, give out special grips that were supposed to force correct holding, and we were penalized on tests for holding our pencil wrong.
Not saying it worked that well, as it was only a handful of teachers who cared so maybe you'd have one year where it mattered. However they did try.
Ukraine. We were taught extensively how to write cursive, for whole elementary school, we were writing in special workbooks which reinforced the correct shape of the cursive letters, teachers were looking at us and helping us write correctly. Only it appears they didn't teach us the writing movement itself.
Quick question - do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes or your pen lies between thumb and index finger? Apparently the former position is optimal, while I hold it between fingers. Also my palm is always touching the table with a wrist so I move the pen mostly with my fingers (which a) strains them when writing a lot and b) produces wavy cursive, less legible that it should be), and the correct way is to move pen mostly with whole arm movement, don't touch wrist on a table and don't move fingers too much, only correct movements with fingers, not do all the work with them.
I think I still write incorrectly, it certainly isn't legible, and I haven't researched the concept recently so all I have to go on is decades old memories. I do recall I was regularly scolded for having my hand on the desk.
> do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes
I remember trying to do this as a kid and wasn't able to actually hold the pencil like that. It would flip up out of my hand every other word or so (grip was tight enough towards the tip, but towards the knuckle I couldn't hold it, so the pencil would swivel around the tighter grip).
This is the difference between theory and practice.
In theory, with proper training, it is better. In practice, it's a mess.
I've said before: If you want to start hating cursive, start doing genealogy. It's takes so long for me to decipher what people were writing (they often were writing very quickly), and I learned cursive when I was younger!
(I sometimes run across census pages where the census taker printed. It is vastly, vastly easier to read).
Signatures have almost nothing to do with normal written script, they are a special mark that
1) is ideally hard to replicate and unique
2) may be performed by somebody who doesn't write much
Fast printing doesn't return anything useful to me (google searches are personalized so I guess we're just seeing different things). I get printshops nearby.
I think cursive it taught very formally in elementary school, possibly to the detriment of adoption, just for the same reason everything is -- grammar is given hard-and-fast rules, math is route memorization or totally algorithmic -- because it is easier to grade that way, and also because people will find their shortcuts as they age. Switching between cursive and print seems fine to me (it can also be used for emphasis).
Cursive (interspersed with print as convenient) is sort of nice because it is a fairly "normal" way of writing that still goes quickly enough. I can write cursive anywhere on the spectrum of nice and formal to quick and sloppy, in one system. Quick and sloppy basically keeps up with by brain, maybe if I was taking lots of meeting notes I'd want to switch, but it is good enough for my current applications.
In practice it works out great, this is yet another example of the whole "contrarian-means-im-smart" thing that's entirely too prevalent here on HN.
Cursive is there for exactly what the other person said, it's much faster to write than print. There are generations of people who have successfully written and read large swathes of cursive, yet somehow this person thinks they know better, and their explanation for it is akin to a new way of writing (which is what cursive is) and recommendations on practicing it.
It might be much faster to write when you spend many hours per week writing on paper. I don't even spend spend many hours writing on paper per year! Abandoning cursive should habe been put up for debate already back when phones displaced letters in personal communication.
I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than full cursive.
What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions.
And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.
I grew up on cursive, and it always tired my arm so badly. When I learned it took far, far, far less effort for people back in fountain pen days, I felt somewhat cheated. Although they were all forced to use their right hands, never mind their brain lateralization, and that’s unfortunate.
No, you can write cursive faster than printing--that's why it was invented. It's just that it takes enough practice doing it that it becomes muscle memory--it's not something that can be done well as a conscious act because the reaction cycle is too short.
It's like driving stick, you can't consciously operate the clutch and gearshift smoothly. When you're trying to start the system is very sensitive to the amount of pressure, balancing it for maximum power transfer without slowing the engine too much requires a feedback loop shorter than you can consciously do. Shifting gears is a lot more forgiving but if you're going to simply take your foot off the clutch you must have a reasonable match between the RPM of each side--and even if you have both a speedometer and tachometer you can't actively be looking at them while you're trying to drive.
Are you also still using an ink pen that will smear all over the place unless you are pointlessly neat? As a left handed child learning cursive in school was an exercise in frustration since the school system mandated that it had to be done using the most outdated and counterproductive tools they could find. So instead of "properly" mastering it I noped the fuck out the moment it was an option.
> It just profesional
Most professional texts I am dealing with are digital and cursive is not the default anywhere as far as I can tell.
No. I stopped using cursive years before I had to. Other students mocked me for a while but it was worth it. To this day, I simply refuse to read cursive.
I doubt that many people are taking notes in any mathy class at least on computers (without stylus input). Even in non-math classes, notes often include diagrams and other drawings that are much harder to do real-time in computers than on paper.
> as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often
Except for crossing your Ts and dotting your Is and depending on your language's alphabet, other diacritics which breaks the flow since you're switching from gliding over the paper to pattern matching letters and words from the start of the sentence.
Indeed, and in the USA, stenographer's notebooks only disappeared from craft aisle of supermarket and drug stores during my adult lifetime.
// They're the pads with spiral at top, stiff cardboard back, Gregg Ruled with horizontal lines and one differently colored vertical line down the middle of the page.
Except this isn't the 12th century and we aren't all working as scribes in a monastery or whatever. I'm not paid by the volume of what I write, nor is anyone nowadays. If we need volume, we have this 19th century invention called a printer.
I think it's true in principle. It may be true for most. It was not true for me - one day I finally acknowledged that all my fast paced noted ended up as a squiqqly unreadable line, and went back to block printing my notes.
I think of cursive as an art or craft - not to say it's not a valid thing to learn, but also not a particularly practical or needed thing for most people today. I'm 44 and last time I did cursive was about 23 years ago.
I certainly don't think it's a necessary gate for my kids to go through. Things change. Life changes. Other than inertia, I feel cursive should go the way of logarithmic tables etc.
For me, the need for professor to actually be able to read what the heck I wrote continued out weighing the speed factor :). Legibly, I was faster block printing.
> you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often.
But you are contact with the paper far longer, which incurs friction and uses more ink/graphite. Moving the writing tip through the air is far easier and faster than dragging it along the paper.
With cursive, not only do many letters require twice as much drawing, such as letter "l" (ell) -- with cursive you have to draw twice as long a line (up and down again) compared with printing (a single stroke). But they also require drawing across the gap between letters, again slowing you down and not contributing to actually forming any letters.
I am old enough that cursive was taught and used throughout my entire educational period, but around age 11 or 12 I decided to start printing instead, and I was easily able to write as fast as my peers on in-class exams, etc. And far more legibly.
I learned my own version of cursive through trial and error, and I found that the most efficient method is to just barely lift the tip off the paper between characters, in a manner that provides little resistance from the paper. Usually, you'll see a light trace of the tip between the characters, but not as strong as some examples of cursive you might've seen.
I think most people here are only looking at cursive as a writing method only. When you're a kid, you're not only learning how to write (or history, or multiplication tables, or playing a recorder, etc.), you're always meta-learning. Cursive also helps you develop fine motion; history helps you train your learning of boring topics, retain them and link them; and so on.
I must concur, I dreaded cursive as a kid. My writing was never "tidy" though it was always very readable, and my teacher bugged to the point I asked my mother for a laptop to do my homework (this was in early 00s, in Argentina, so this was never a real option). I kept using cursive through university, as it was the fastest way to handwrite for me, and I keep using it nowadays, although not handwriting every day. I believe (although this is a counterfactual) I would be even more clumsy today if I hadn't learnt cursive.
That's a surprising point of view. In the schools of the 80/90ies, note-taking had to be done with pen and paper, and you were doing it for hours. Printed documents were rare (in the eighties Xerox machines were a luxury, so they used some sort of waterless printing [1] that left a strong smell of alcohol on the paper).
Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking, so why cursive was a thing was pretty obvious. It was also normal to write in cursive for homework, tests, exams. I am still using it at work today. And if I were to go back to school, I would definitely use it again, although my touch-typing is decent enough that I could keep pace.
If the purpose had been to be better at taking notes with pen and paper, than being taught to write in shorthand would have been a much more useful skill than being taught to write in cursive.
Shorthand tends to be somewhat difficult to read quickly, difficult to scan, and somewhat personal to the individual stenographer. To make the notes useful most people would need to transcribe them first.
It's not taught, but it is a skill one also develops. Probably this is not taught because french kids already have a hard time with spelling.
Fun fact: french physicians are well known for undecipherable cursive hand writing. Part of what makes it difficult to write is that they use Greek letters for short hand. For instance, they replace "-tion" suffixes with a theta, or the "ph" combo with a phi.
> Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking
You mean it should have been that. We had tons of people (me included) whose cursive stuff is 100% illegible (we were forced to use it for the first few years at school, not 100% sure if it was only the 4 years of elementary school) and as soon as we were allowed to use whatever type we liked (be it cursive, or printed, or a mix) suddenly I could read what I wrote and I was also a lot quicker.
I'm 56 and essentially can't write decent cursive anymore since like decades as I stopped as soon as I could. No problems reading when it's correctly written, but as a leftie I found cursive handwriting hard since day one, so I resorted to capitals only, save for my signature, which however is different every time: I have 5 filed at the bank as I can't produce two seemingly identical; I often joke with the clerk that for me would be a lot easier if they asked for a blood sample for DNA recognition:)
I could be wrong as I am ESL and moved to USA at a young age.
I believe we were taught cursive to build motor skills. My teachers always gave me good remarks for my neat handwriting, and I remember spending hours practicing both regular and cursive characters. Fill out the sheet, then my mom would erase it and I would do it again and again.
I've been learning Chinese. Learning to write the characters (not even memorizing -- just copying by sight correctly) has been a very effective way of learning to read Chinese handwriting, especially the semi-cursive script. With almost any writing instrument, the order and direction of strokes is important to reading Chinese, and the best way to learn to decode that is to learn to encode it yourself, probably.
I would suspect the same is true of cursive Latin script, in the same way.
This is what I found when trying to understand the history of Fraktur. It’s complicated to say the least:
"Fraktur is often associated with being the official Nazi font and is still being used by Neo-Nazi groups in Germany today. The fact that it was, ironically, banned by the Nazi Party is just a part of its long and strange history"
Yes, the Nazis ironically considered Fraktur (whose existence massively predates Nazism, by hundreds of years) a Jewish influence and got rid of it. After the ban, the only place where it survived were tombstones.
Curiously, the same goes for the stahlhelm which is widely seen as the signature item of the Nazi military. In truth, it was simply the traditional helmet of the German military which the Nazi wanted to replace with a more modern design, but it was already too late for them, and it was the GDR military that ended up using it.
This makes me wonder (as a 30 year old who can't read cursive well). Can folks easily read English script writing from the 18th/19th century? The script writing from earlier eras looks fairly different from 20th century cursive.
19th century is rather easy, 18th century writing, with difficulty. The cursive taught in schools this last century is a streamlined, more practical hand.
> Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught.
In my university you had to write so fast to follow the teachers that if you were not writing using cursive you were probably missing half of the content.
Did something change between generations? Because HS teachers would mythologize this but it doesn't match at all with my experience. Even ignoring that professors have slide decks and lectures are recorded professors seem to encourage students to only take light notes so you can actually focus and participate in the class.
or the university could just .. make recordings of the lectures? why should students be burdened with realtime handwritten audio transcription? if you miss even a single sentence it can fuck up your understanding of the entire rest of the lecture. but with video you can just pause and rewind, speed up and slow down however you want.
it's even worse in math / physics / anything that uses a blackboard -- you have to copy down what the prof draws on the board as well as what he says aloud. two simultaneous information channels, bottlenecked by handwriting speed and muscle cramps. students frantically copying down things by hand as professors talk is a ridiculous outdated ritual that ought to be binned.
When I will be king of the world, I will kick every professor who does this out of the universities immediately. Their didactics are so bad, they should not be allowed to teach.
I have severe carpal tunnel syndrome in my right hand. I'm relatively certain that it was brought about by being forced as a child to write cursive for hours on end. We were even forced to hold our writing instruments in a specific manner. I would have horrible hand cramps each day, severe pain and I even have an abnormal growth on one finger from it.
I was forced to waste hundreds of hours of my life getting instruction in an arcane, obsolete format.
As a nearly 42-year-old American, I fully agree with you. In particular:
> That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense.
Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind. I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.
Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite. Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.
That ocr exists, at least in some form. There are efforts to digitize old census records, which are written in cursive. Humans are just used to double check the work of the ocr program.
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.)
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.
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.
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
That is as fast as most people think though so it is good enough. I'm still glad I learned to use all 10 fingers, but that is to spread the strain out. Typing speed is not the limit for most people
The average speaking rate is >100 WPM. I really doubt most people think at only 60 WPM. Try transcribing a normal person having a normal conversation and you'll quickly see how difficult it is even as a fast typer.
>Try transcribing a normal person having a normal conversation and you'll quickly see how difficult it is even as a fast typer.
I type at around 120 wpm and I can't keep up with my speaking speed. When I transcribe my own recording I have to constantly pause the recording to catch up. Speaking is "bursty", where you say a lot of things very quickly and then slow down again.
It is for most people though. I certainly have seen some self taught people type quickly but it's not the norm. I learned typing and do 80-100 words per minute. I have seen very few hunt and peck typists that can reach that rate. It's also not nearly as efficient. I think it should be taught in high school at least for a semester. It's only getting more useful rather than less.
talk about a useless skill these days. That said I have 4 analog clocks on the wall as decorations for Austin, NYC, London, and Tokyo like the old newsrooms. Yes they are all set to the atomic standard via RF
I was doing something in my college class this week and I wanted my students to follow along typing what I typed. I was amazed at how slowly they typed.
I also show them ctrl+F and they think I'm a magician...
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 322 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
And if you had to do it for more than 3 days, your skills would be back.
Why learn how to cook when you can get a packet of readymade food in the store. Cooking is obsolete.
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.
I have personally dropped using cursive around 2004, because I was not able to read anything after myself.
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.
"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.
what good does it to, to tell the majority that their cursive is incorrect? if a system results in most people doing it wrong, then the system is wrong, not the people
Where I live people can write properly. The system very much works fine and has been working fine for centuries.
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.
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?
This topic seems to be striking a nerve with a lot of folks who struggled with the teaching/skill at an early age.
But then you don't worry at all about not knowing basic blacksmithing, to as you would say "perform basic repairs".
That's because knowing how to solder is about as relevant as blacksmithing. It's a neat trick. It's handy if you do know it. It has absolutely no real relevance, or even substantial economic utility, to the vast majority of people in modern society.
And you've apparently got a wholly unearned superiority complex about "the youth of today". How original.[1]
[1] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aav5916
And barely anybody will use it outside of the real world. All this does is make kids exasperated with their education because they're being taught something they know is outdated and has no real utility in the real world.
And bad handwriting is a problem that transcends font.
Are you saying my handwriting is transcendent? Thank you.
Handwriting in general, however, maintains merit.
"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...
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.
[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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
I would guess cursive is slightly faster if you practice both equally.
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.
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.
Pens would just physically hurt to type with. Fountain pens, no force required, they just glide on the paper.
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
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...
For example, "Italic" handwriting has (imho) the advantages of cursive without the excessive strictures.
https://www.italic-handwriting.org/exemplars/display/welling...
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.
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.
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
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
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!
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
Swapped on writing single characters like a computer and readability went through the roof.
I'm 66; it's much too late to learn to write all over again. I wish they'd taught me copperplate, instead of some half-baked italic. Or maybe just taught me to write properly in the first place.
Computer keyboards FTW.
I felt compelled to check and indeed you are right.
Can you give some sources regarding "objectively hard"? What objective measurement did you use?
"take time to learn" is a BS excuse from a readability point of view, unless you're talking about something very specific. Some things, yes, you learn. Some are just obviously hard. There's no reason for it being that different even from Kurrent
> What objective measurement did you use?
Similarity between letters (themselves across systems and others). Comparison with similar and preceding writing systems. All objective criteria and in most of them it fails miserably.
Ideally you want letters that are similar to the printed form but dissimilar to each other. https://bighack.org/font-accessibility-and-readability-the-b...
Once you learned it, you see that the similarity of letters is only superficial and you can distinguish them quite nicely, especially with context. You actually start to recognise patterns. And since the system gives you only very few ways to deviate, these patterns are surprisingly uniform across different authors. I haven't seen that with other cursive systems to this extent.
It becomes a bit harder though with writing from after the war, when people started to mix Latin into their Kurrent or Sütterlin.
You're correct, I am deriding it because it is needlessly weird even compared with preceding writing system and there's no good reason for it. While this might have been weird "by accident", a system like that would not work (or be accepted) today.
Again, "you have to learn" is a bad excuse if there's no good justification. There's plenty to learn on the modern cursive system, but I don't have to learn what squiggles that look similar mean. There's no reason why t, d, e, c look like the way they look
I think it's just a matter of familiarity. They look as similar as our g and q, or a and d. (the cursive versions, not the one displayed here)
> V looks like anything but a V
It doesn't look like the current V we're used to. For them our V doesn't look anything like V either.
Yeah the capital F is probably the weirdest. The G/g difference is weird even in printed characters to be honest. (now, cursive lowercase r is just r connecting to the next letter)
https://wikiless.org/wiki/Kurrent?lang=en
Source: My (Swedish) grandfather taught me how to do genealogical research.
As mentioned in the article; indeed, you can replace cursive with <insert old script here> and the article would be the same lamentation for an audience of a different time.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32873924
I can really sympathise with how frustrating it must be to learn and to write well and quickly for a lot of people.
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.
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.
I guess it's functional but less beautiful. Maybe not very traditional.
Agreed. But I’m not the one who described cursive as “outdated” and “useless”, the parent poster did. I used their exact words. That’s what made me curious: they used negative words to refer to the skill, yet reacted positively to their kid learning it.
If their answer is “I’m glad my kid is learning it because they’re having a blast”, more power to them! But is that the reason? My comment isn’t a gotcha, it’s a genuine question to understand the reasoning behind an (at first glance) cognitively dissonant¹ situation.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance
I meant something more akin to something you'd likely never need to use as a life skill or for employment in today's world.
One of my favorite trips as a kid was to some museum that displayed civil war letters. They were all beautifully written in cursive. For reasons like that, I'm glad tp have learned it, and hope she finds such things as interesting as I do one day.
When I do write anything now I have to write slow and make a conscious effort not to write joined up. That way, it’s actually neat and readable again.
Dammit, the buggers taught me to write so that nobody could read it. And this was an expensive school.
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.
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).
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
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin
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
That's the video that popularized "cursive speech": 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.
Of course, she wasn't wrong!
I think it is easier for you because all that stretching gives you the time to focus more on the single words, also Italian speech is different from province to province. Sometimes it is also hard for us to understand other Italians, mostly because each region's native speakers mix some dialectal sayings and pronunciation into their version of Italian. We have tens of Italian languages in Italy, but the more you live here the more you understand other Italians beside your own (closer regions sound more similar but going from extreme north to extreme south it gets really different).
I believe this is what they call vocal fry.
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.
... suggests something is up.
Basically, these things are metal replicas of quill pens, which are made as flat blades cut across to make an edge and then slit.
That wide-stroke/thin-stroke business isn't anything to do with italicness, as far as I know; nor is the business of everyone leaning to the right. It's about serifs, and related orthographic flourishes, isn't it? [Edit: the kind of script I mean is angular, straight lines, with vertical strokes meeting diagonal strokes; rather gothic.] Well, those flourishes are facilitated by that kind of nib. Whether that's italic or not, I don't know; but the pen-and-nib sets used to be sold as "Italic pen with set of nibs", or something like that.
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.
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/PMC4274624/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5422512/
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.
The students who only printed lagged on every metric: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/langandlit/index.php/la...
Does the paper have any relevance to whether teaching cursive helps (causes) learning more generally?
Language is best when it uses as little processing as possible. Its meant to be a medium, not a mental task in its own right.
So taking your research claims at face value, that's not actually evidence that cursive is good. In fact, its the opposite.
Not only does that require substantial backup, it also sidesteps the problem of writing. There will come a point when you need it. Heck, if the war in Ukraine gets out of control, it may become a necessity. Your phone might just stop working.
And there's nothing wrong with being taught two ways of achieving the same. Or do you only know one way to add? One way to program? One way to throw a ball? It might even make the process more flexible and adaptable.
Except the very last typo your translator may have run into. That's not a typo at all, its a prosign. There is a difference between ...---... and ... --- ...
Certain popular online morse translators don't know how to handle non-printed morse characters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosigns_for_Morse_code
And yes, I know only one way to add, multiply and so on. Also I can only program in one way (in very specific language and heavy IDE support).
I agree with your incredulity at phones being able to translate cursive, but on your second point, if you're alluding to another World War starting and our technological world being destroyed, then frankly being able to immediately and quickly read old letters between grandparents & older generations will not be of a high priority...
If you need to write by hand a lot, cursive is vastly more efficient and fast, as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often. You mostly glide over the paper.
Whereas you can learn to do fast printing. My writing speed improved later in life once I convinced myself to switch back over to print characters -- I can speed up the process without losing legibility. Also some people do a mixture of the two, which really is writing out ligatures for common character pairings. I don't really do that, and it seams everyone sort of figures out their own stile, but it would be nice if written ligatures were taught as an in-between style.
Edit: To see examples, do a search for "fast printing", I know there were several good posts on one of the fountain pen forums. The style I liked referenced "bookhand", and to get good/legible at it you start by practicing writing small circles (both clockwise and counter-clockwise) and small straight lines (horizontal, vertical, diagonal with various starting positions). This also helps with general technical drawing, things like writing circles and making them larger and smaller. And learning to draw a straight line across a page freehand will help with character alignment.
But maybe we're talking differnt cursive systems, and that might explain our difference in experience.
However, just like most skills, some people may be naturally better, so I suppose I could be wrong.
100 years ago, when accounting and bookkeeping were all done by hand, writing cursive was probably quite a bit faster, and with all the practice you got, just as legible.
In high school, I wrote almost everything in cursive, but over the next 10 years, computers replaced so much writing that I fell out of practice. I'm not sorry it's gone.
It's odd to even see people make the argument that cursive isn't faster. Literally no one wrote in print except young children.
I've learned all this well after graduating from the university, so there is zero reason to train that skill today. But I do know that my shitty cursive is 100% caused by my own lack of proper training to write. I've switched to the writing print characters nowadays, but only out of necessity, not due to efficiency.
Not saying it worked that well, as it was only a handful of teachers who cared so maybe you'd have one year where it mattered. However they did try.
Quick question - do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes or your pen lies between thumb and index finger? Apparently the former position is optimal, while I hold it between fingers. Also my palm is always touching the table with a wrist so I move the pen mostly with my fingers (which a) strains them when writing a lot and b) produces wavy cursive, less legible that it should be), and the correct way is to move pen mostly with whole arm movement, don't touch wrist on a table and don't move fingers too much, only correct movements with fingers, not do all the work with them.
I remember trying to do this as a kid and wasn't able to actually hold the pencil like that. It would flip up out of my hand every other word or so (grip was tight enough towards the tip, but towards the knuckle I couldn't hold it, so the pencil would swivel around the tighter grip).
In theory, with proper training, it is better. In practice, it's a mess.
I've said before: If you want to start hating cursive, start doing genealogy. It's takes so long for me to decipher what people were writing (they often were writing very quickly), and I learned cursive when I was younger!
(I sometimes run across census pages where the census taker printed. It is vastly, vastly easier to read).
1) is ideally hard to replicate and unique
2) may be performed by somebody who doesn't write much
Fast printing doesn't return anything useful to me (google searches are personalized so I guess we're just seeing different things). I get printshops nearby.
I think cursive it taught very formally in elementary school, possibly to the detriment of adoption, just for the same reason everything is -- grammar is given hard-and-fast rules, math is route memorization or totally algorithmic -- because it is easier to grade that way, and also because people will find their shortcuts as they age. Switching between cursive and print seems fine to me (it can also be used for emphasis).
Cursive (interspersed with print as convenient) is sort of nice because it is a fairly "normal" way of writing that still goes quickly enough. I can write cursive anywhere on the spectrum of nice and formal to quick and sloppy, in one system. Quick and sloppy basically keeps up with by brain, maybe if I was taking lots of meeting notes I'd want to switch, but it is good enough for my current applications.
Cursive is there for exactly what the other person said, it's much faster to write than print. There are generations of people who have successfully written and read large swathes of cursive, yet somehow this person thinks they know better, and their explanation for it is akin to a new way of writing (which is what cursive is) and recommendations on practicing it.
queue xkcd reference about standards.
I was responding to the idea that it's slower to write put forth by the other poster.
Signatures are not cursive.
And right there is one of the crucial cognitive and proprioceptive benefits of handwriting over ‘keyboarding’.
What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions.
And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.
I know many people who can write cursive both fast and beautiful, most of them women.
The problem seems to be rather a lack of training due to a lack of interest.
Writing on the keyboard with ten fingers slows me down, but not because the ten-finger system is slow, but because I haven't trained it.
It's like driving stick, you can't consciously operate the clutch and gearshift smoothly. When you're trying to start the system is very sensitive to the amount of pressure, balancing it for maximum power transfer without slowing the engine too much requires a feedback loop shorter than you can consciously do. Shifting gears is a lot more forgiving but if you're going to simply take your foot off the clutch you must have a reasonable match between the RPM of each side--and even if you have both a speedometer and tachometer you can't actively be looking at them while you're trying to drive.
It's just profesional.. writing legible cursive is also part of the skill.
> It just profesional
Most professional texts I am dealing with are digital and cursive is not the default anywhere as far as I can tell.
I've seen the nicest script written by a left handed person, dramatic because the stroke curvature is inverted.
Yeah, technical drawings, systems architecture, as I mentioned elsewhere, block letters are best.
Mostly the cursive is for notes, requests, thanks - there are a lot of 'professional' arenas
There are less and less needs for this, so I think this is a good development
// They're the pads with spiral at top, stiff cardboard back, Gregg Ruled with horizontal lines and one differently colored vertical line down the middle of the page.
I think of cursive as an art or craft - not to say it's not a valid thing to learn, but also not a particularly practical or needed thing for most people today. I'm 44 and last time I did cursive was about 23 years ago.
I certainly don't think it's a necessary gate for my kids to go through. Things change. Life changes. Other than inertia, I feel cursive should go the way of logarithmic tables etc.
But you are contact with the paper far longer, which incurs friction and uses more ink/graphite. Moving the writing tip through the air is far easier and faster than dragging it along the paper.
With cursive, not only do many letters require twice as much drawing, such as letter "l" (ell) -- with cursive you have to draw twice as long a line (up and down again) compared with printing (a single stroke). But they also require drawing across the gap between letters, again slowing you down and not contributing to actually forming any letters.
I am old enough that cursive was taught and used throughout my entire educational period, but around age 11 or 12 I decided to start printing instead, and I was easily able to write as fast as my peers on in-class exams, etc. And far more legibly.
I must concur, I dreaded cursive as a kid. My writing was never "tidy" though it was always very readable, and my teacher bugged to the point I asked my mother for a laptop to do my homework (this was in early 00s, in Argentina, so this was never a real option). I kept using cursive through university, as it was the fastest way to handwrite for me, and I keep using it nowadays, although not handwriting every day. I believe (although this is a counterfactual) I would be even more clumsy today if I hadn't learnt cursive.
Cursive was extremely practical or fast note-taking, so why cursive was a thing was pretty obvious. It was also normal to write in cursive for homework, tests, exams. I am still using it at work today. And if I were to go back to school, I would definitely use it again, although my touch-typing is decent enough that I could keep pace.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterless_printing
Developing your own short-hand helps a lot or just going with a standard
Fun fact: french physicians are well known for undecipherable cursive hand writing. Part of what makes it difficult to write is that they use Greek letters for short hand. For instance, they replace "-tion" suffixes with a theta, or the "ph" combo with a phi.
You mean it should have been that. We had tons of people (me included) whose cursive stuff is 100% illegible (we were forced to use it for the first few years at school, not 100% sure if it was only the 4 years of elementary school) and as soon as we were allowed to use whatever type we liked (be it cursive, or printed, or a mix) suddenly I could read what I wrote and I was also a lot quicker.
I'm 56 and essentially can't write decent cursive anymore since like decades as I stopped as soon as I could. No problems reading when it's correctly written, but as a leftie I found cursive handwriting hard since day one, so I resorted to capitals only, save for my signature, which however is different every time: I have 5 filed at the bank as I can't produce two seemingly identical; I often joke with the clerk that for me would be a lot easier if they asked for a blood sample for DNA recognition:)
I believe we were taught cursive to build motor skills. My teachers always gave me good remarks for my neat handwriting, and I remember spending hours practicing both regular and cursive characters. Fill out the sheet, then my mom would erase it and I would do it again and again.
I would suspect the same is true of cursive Latin script, in the same way.
The same is true about Fraktur (the old German script), and yet few people are capable of reading pre-1940 books typeset in Fraktur.
There is no way around it, the vast majority of people won't learn old scripts and they won't be able to read their grandparents' correspondence etc.
This might be worth the progress, but let's not pretend that the continuity rupture is smaller than it is.
"Fraktur is often associated with being the official Nazi font and is still being used by Neo-Nazi groups in Germany today. The fact that it was, ironically, banned by the Nazi Party is just a part of its long and strange history"
Source: https://www.typeroom.eu/a-nazi-font-banned-by-nazis-fraktur-...
Being able to understand old stuff is not a skill everyone needs to attain at school.
If you need it for your chosen academic or career path, you’ll learn it.
In my university you had to write so fast to follow the teachers that if you were not writing using cursive you were probably missing half of the content.
it's even worse in math / physics / anything that uses a blackboard -- you have to copy down what the prof draws on the board as well as what he says aloud. two simultaneous information channels, bottlenecked by handwriting speed and muscle cramps. students frantically copying down things by hand as professors talk is a ridiculous outdated ritual that ought to be binned.
When I will be king of the world, I will kick every professor who does this out of the universities immediately. Their didactics are so bad, they should not be allowed to teach.
I was forced to waste hundreds of hours of my life getting instruction in an arcane, obsolete format.
> That future generations are cut off from old writings is nonsense.
Some of us are cut off anyway, until the writing is either OCR'd or manually transcribed. I'm legally blind (though with some usable vision), and some of my friends are totally blind. I can read handwriting if it's magnified enough, or large enough to begin with, but my skill for deciphering handwriting has faded due to disuse. It's very rarely a problem anymore.
Some of my least happy memories from elementary school are of learning to handwrite. My teachers quite reasonably thought that I would be better off if I learned to make maximal use of the vision I have. It made sense at the time (the 80s and early 90s); if I had only been proficient at writing in Braille or on a computer, I would have had no way to write something in-class that could then be immediately read by my sighted teachers and peers (unless I used the one classroom computer, as I sometimes did). But now I wish I had started learning Braille in first grade, and that they had made me keep using it even when I thought I didn't need it. And these days, any low-vision kid shouldn't have to waste any time at all learning to handwrite. Honestly, I wish they'd quit teaching sighted kids to handwrite too, so future generations wouldn't produce any more text that's inaccessible to us. But I suppose that's too extreme.
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
So perhaps a little sensor on or in our neck will allow us to speak to computers silently.
Touch typing is not necessary to type fast.
I type at around 120 wpm and I can't keep up with my speaking speed. When I transcribe my own recording I have to constantly pause the recording to catch up. Speaking is "bursty", where you say a lot of things very quickly and then slow down again.
I also show them ctrl+F and they think I'm a magician...
Glad that is phasing out, even though I'd hate cursive writing to die.