Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths (2016)

nautil.us

79 pointslelf145 comments

I'm surprised that I didn't see hand fatigue mentioned, which is probably the number one reason cursive is actually useful, not that it is fast or "aided in cognitive development". Business scripts (like Spencerian in the early 20th c) were developed if you were Clerk or someone who had to scribe stuff out for hours on end, and it had to be legible and consistent. The mechanics of it are quite simple. If you hold a pen, pinch it, and write each letter by moving the your fingers in and out, you will tire quickly or get hand cramps. Cursive scripts on the other keep your fingers fixed, and you write by moving your whole arm, and bending your wrist back and forth, that's why letters come naturally at a fixed angle, because your wrist is going up and down as your arm moves across the page. It also makes writing legibly easier when you write large, your arm system is like one of those old line plotters doing big sweeping motions that you can easily control. Try writing large letters with finger movements while keeping your wrist and elbow mostly still and it's like chiselling them out. It's hard to maintain the right movements over large sweeps and make consistent letters. So this I feel is the number one reason to learn cursive, if you go to college and want to take notes for three hours a day while keeping your hand comfortable, it's natural to write through your whole arm, and the way to write naturally with your whole arm is to basically flick up and down while smoothly pushing your arm across the page: cursive scripts.

Unless you are left handed, in which case none of these things are true. I quickly get hand fatigue when I (try to) write in cursive.

I really struggled with cursive in grade school because very little of the mechanics of right handed writing work for left-handed kids, and the teachers didn't have anything to offer other than criticism of the writing I could do. Most lefty's I have talked to had the same experience.

I know, and it's a shame, because it actually takes very little effort to do better teaching of left-handed:

http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html

Then just write right-to-left. And to keep things readible mirror letters top-down (i.e. resulting in non-mirrored but 180 deg rotated page) :)

I had many teachers who insisted on cursive, and none of them were half as lucid as you were just now.

That’s how the cargo cult works. You’re teachers couldn’t explain why cursive was “better” but forced its use anyway.

Similarly, forcing left handed students to write with their right hand finds a rationalized basis in superstition, although it’s been explained that when a cultural custom forces a bias toward a specific dominant handedness by default, it benefits safety optimizations in aggregate.

I know zero people who write in cursive.

I know very few people who even hand write anything.

I know few people who read anything worthwhile too, but that's not an argument.

I do not know anyone who writes in non-cursive. I live in France where cursive is the norm.

Everyone I know hand writes on a whiteboard of a piece of paper. Or when they make a note to the teacher. Or when they use a post-it.

In the US it's a dead art. I learned it as a kid and never use it. My kids are actually not learning it. It's been removed from the curriculum in New York and I'm pleased.

It's still very useful for taking notes. I find taking notes on a computer is not nearly as effective as taking notes with pen and paper.

My reply was mostly for the "zero people" - contrasting it to "everyone" in other cultures.

I think that cursive is hardly readable (mine certainly, other too - and we almost see only cursive here in France).

Block letters (which I understand being separated letters, but still lower and upper case) is much better, but also much slower. Maybe that it is OK when someone is trained (where "OK" means " good enough for everyday handwriting, including taking notes").

A lot of discussions in this thread are probably due to the fact that we have, in France and most of Europe, either cursive, or capital block letters. We do not have the equivalent of typed text, where every letter is distinct (it is not that we cannot imagine how it looks like - it is just something we are not used to).

The recent US handwriting I saw was by Donald Trump - and is is all uppercase. I hope that this is not the non-cursive everyone discusses about but just his own style of "uppercase block letters".

Here's some handwriting sample for you:

https://i.imgur.com/0Pdq8Ci.jpg

Sorry for the poor photo quality, but it's the best I could manage to do at the moment.

On the left is some writing that I did just now, just for you! On the right is a page of notes that I wrote a few weeks ago. It didn't occur to me to get anything in there for scale until just now, but the larger notebook (the one on the right) is roughly 13 cm across by 21 cm high. The smaller one 12.7 cm by 19.6 cm according to the cover.

You can see on the right that I've written some elaborate headings... I'd imagine I'm one of very few people, if not the only person, who writes headings in such a script. Below that, you can see that I employ cursive and block for different purposes: most writing is in cursive, but "foreign" language (Old English in this case) words are written in block. I do similar things in other sorts of notes; for example, I might write source code or command names in block to keep them visually distinct from the commentary.

In the US, it seems that most people these days "learn" cursive at some point, but abandon it the first chance they get. This wasn't always the case (my mom and my grandma write exclusively in cursive, for example). Personally, I tend to only write with block letters if the scribbles are intended for a recipient (or, as mentioned above, as a semantic device).

> I live in France where cursive is the norm.

I live in Silicon Valley where I don't care where people who live anywhere else do it because they don't matter.

Do you know any undergrads? Writing notes in cursive was was essential to me taking a bunch of math and CS courses at once and doing well.

> you write by moving your whole arm

Which f*cking nobody properly teaches or bothers to mention (at least where I was studying). The problem with cursive is not the cursive itself but incompetent teachers who don't know how to write. Add to it mid 20 century style of teaching forcing students to write tens of pages of notes each lesson for 16 years, all the time doing it wrong, with fingers only, and you get a population of people who can only scrawl something unintelligible on paper. I'm forced to write in separate letters when doing notes because otherwise it is too embarrassing.

Just yesterday the Illinois state senate overrode the governor's veto in order to mandate that all schools teach cursive before fifth grade. Major arguments I heard included "reading notes from grandma" and "preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures).

http://www.chicagotribune.com/ct-cursive-required-illinois-2...

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/politics/ct-illinoi...

>"preventing identity theft" (via cursive signatures)

lol. as if banks (and other institutions likely to get hit by fraud) do signature checks.

Surprisingly, institutions do at least sometimes check that there's something on the signature line. I had a car registration renewal returned recently because I forgot to sign it. Given that my signature is a totally illegible scrawl, I don't see what good it does but we still pretend that what might as well be just an "X" for a lot of people actually means something.

And it can indeed be just an X. It displays intent. You placed a scrawl on the line to signify your intent to agree to/abide by whatever's on the paper. Without that intent, they assume you made a mistake.

I think it's better than blindly taking any paperwork without "signatures" on them.

What I'd love to have, for this purpose, is a signet ring with a stylized version of my initials on it.

If I need to sign something official, I'll pull out an stamp pad and a bottle of ink, soak the pad, press my ring into it, and then slam my hand down on the paper ring first.

That's the norm in Asian countries like Japan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_(East_Asia). They even have different types of seals that are used for just plain signatures and more important things like loans.

That's fair. It is something of an indication that "Yep. This is final." It's a bit silly in the case of a check that you have mailed but it's not a completely unreasonable practice in general.

I had a buddy who would always "sign" receipts by drawing little doodles on the line. A different doodle each time, ranging from simple to elaborate, from decent to obscene, but always comical.

In China, your signature usually has to be legible. I've got funny looks in the bank for apparently scribbling all over the signature field.

I had a check rejected at the bank. My signature didn't match the card on file closely enough, so they sort of put me through the ringer before they cashed it. Wasn't even a lot of money.

Same in Poland where they ask you to "sign legibly". Which makes completely no sense, my name is already printed somewhere else on the form.

You got lucky.

Bank managers will have clerks randomly pick a stack of checks and reject them so their clients feel like there's some auditing going on.

I was right there. I watched her try to match the signature.

That sounds like an old wives tale.

They do. I have been asked in the past to write as in my recorded sample or record a new one.

>I have been asked in the past to write as in my recorded sample

if you're a fraudster, this can be easily circumvented by going to a new financial institution?

>record a new one

wait, what's the point asking for a signature sample when you can always record a new one?

presumably the process for recording a new sample involves verifying your identity (e.g. going in person and providing a government id with photograph).

Maybe when there's a problem they do check ?

I know in France signature on bank checks are verified above a certain amount (3000€ or 5000€ I think but I'm not sure)

FWIW: Postal ballots require signatures. Election administrators often use software to assist and sometimes automate this task. The "challenge" rate varies, depending on competency, but can be as high as 1 per 1000. Which has definitely had an impact in close races.

Said as a recovering election integrity activist: the automated signature recognition systems I studied, some 10 years back, should be utterly rejected. The error rate (both false positive and negative) is unacceptable for elections. And much of this cannot be fixed with better algorithms. Signatures change as you age, you injured your wrist, and so forth.

Just as onerous, the election vendor businesses where pushing a "per voter" fee structure. So instead of just selling you the gear, they'd also charge 10 cents for every signature compared. On top of every ballot printed, mailed, tracked, etc.

In short, the push to postal balloting is basically a rent seeking exercise, to make up for the loss of revenue post-touchscreen debacle, and much more expensive overall.

Oh, I almost forgot a tidbit. Our State Patrol, who investigate check fraud, were employed to train our election signature verifiers. At the time, both they and the banks would only use the software to flag signatures, never to fully automate the task.

What about teaching it (EDIT: making a signature) as an art form, for the soul purpose of creating something unique? (EDIT: not necessarily cursive)

That seriously takes some control over one's own handwriting before it is really possible. Artful lettering has its own learning curve. Plus I'm not sure this is going to have benefits over any other sort of art training.

Additionally, I think this bypasses the real goal of writing - you need writing to be both efficient and legible to others as a base function. This is why hand-written notes to myself often are sloppy and without sentence structure, notes shared with others generally meet the above, and sometimes my writing is pretty and nearly typeface, with the "a" and the "g" written as it appears here. I think folks really need just that middle level of writing. I mostly do the pretty stuff so I can occasionally use it in artwork if I so choose.

I don’t see a reason for signatures to be legible, just identifiable.

Well, sure, for just a normal signature we use daily. Poster was talking about making the signature artful. It doesn't matter if it is legible or not at that point, but it still takes some control to pull off.

But then why cursive, and not any other of the millions forms of art?

Yes. Even in handwriting there are more forms than just D’Nealian or Palmer cursive. Why not Spencerian, Fraktur, or Carolingian?

Real reason: "I had to learn cursive, damnit, so you do too!"

Also the reason for eV and mole units, and Fortran. Not to mention the whole imperial unit system. Adults can't be bothered changing their ways and since they have the power, they make the next generation do the hard work of keeping up instead of correcting their own mistakes.

I don't remember eV, but moles are the obvious way of expressing what they are. Also Fortran is within rounding error of dead outside of a few niches, where it benefits from everything being done in it, which is similar but not the same as your premise.

Reading these comments makes me wonder if there is something wrong with US cursive or the way it was taught. I learned cursive in first grade GDR and continued school in Austria where we had to (and enjoyed) writing copious essays weekly over and over again. It's actually amazing to watch the penmanship shift over those years and develop into a idiosyncratic style or to see the speed and form impacted by topic, time and material. The ability to use basic materials to communicate and express knowledge and civilization should include a wide array of skills from cursive all the way to tool classes. When you finish high school the goal should have been to hand over the foundations of civilization and let you go from there. Rhetoric, grammar, broad knowledge of history and science, firm skills in math and your ability communicate seem to me the basics of an enlightened age. A touch typing course is really not that hard or difficult to add on. But there is something refined and cultivated in training your brain's neural net to become skillful as far as mastering the basics of self-education (reading with clear and deep understanding) and self-expression (communicating clear discursive thoughts) goes.

I agree that it is good to learn skills for their own sake. But do you really think that cursive is actually good at communicating information? If people find it difficult to write legibly then it is not really achieving that goal. I found cursive a constant problem at school that made the teacher obsess about presentation rather than content. And as an adult I find it hard to read peoples idiosyncratic scrawl. Text should be easy to read, that is the most important thing.

In a sense that's definitely true. In another it seems to also depend on the cursive system. I recently went to Freud's museum and was able to read his letters without problems. Over a hundred years of using the same cursive system. It's beautiful, elegant and to a degree a form of art - Western calligraphy, if you will. The synergy of fine motor skills, art, history, neatness, self-expression and cultural transmission in conjunction with expressing yourself seem to be worth something. It's perhaps not even the cursive itself, but the training, persistence and effort that goes into creating something useful through your own hands that teaches so many valuable lessons. Easy is not always better - especially patience with oneself and persistent effort in mastering a skill could perhaps be beneficial for the next generation.

They simply do not teach cursive in LA Unified.

Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never even taught how to write block letters.

The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective?

Edit: anecdotally, I write cursive cyrillic faster than I write block letter English, and Russian isn't even my native language.

Keyboards eliminated the advantages cursive had for input speed in most cases, and I find block characters easier to read. Definitely don’t feel cursive has advantages when handwriting speed is less relevant.

People who learned block letters first, and who rarely encounter cursive, undoubtedly find block letters easier to read. But you might imagine that if had learned cursive first and used it regularly, you would have no problem reading it.

The point I'm trying to make is that the preference for block letters is an accident of how most of us were taught, and not intrinsic to the writing style itself.

I've been taught cursive since elementary school and I've seen plenty cases when people's cursive was almost unreadable for me. Which almost never happens with block letters. Cursive has only one advantage - maximum speed of writing. If you need to write down something fast especially in large quantity (like lectures in university). But readability is usually harmed in that case. Especially bad situation with doctors, I've never understood how they can produce such cryptic notes when people's life can depend on it. Anyway, I don't see a point in cursive today (even though that's the only way I write text in my native language, but that's rarely needed).

That's undoubtedly true, but I think the more important thing is that cursive is just dead in adult society. Reading other people's cursive handwriting represents a tiny, infinitesimal percentage of the reading in most people's lives. Computers, books, magazines, newspapers all render text as block letters and that's what most people are used to nowadays.

Teaching cursive is a complete waste of everyone's time.

I grew up in France where we were taught cursive exclusively. When people get older, their handwriting changes and can be very personal and hard to read (even for other cursive writers). Besides, apart from their own writing, most people read exclusively block characters from books and screens.

Actually, I wish I could write block letters more fluently as my (mixed/cursive) handwriting is quite embarrassing!

It's not just raw input speed - writing on paper allows you to quickly jump around the text, making small corrections, adding notes/symbols/drawings, etc.

I can jump around and make corrections in vim far quicker than I can flipping a pencil, erasing, flipping it again, writing correction. And that's for a simple edit that doesn't require moving block of text. Hand writing it slow and inefficient.

Because you don't write a lot of code on paper? Working with text (for notes or prose) is very different than working with code. You don't think "I need to correct that thing located 23 words forward so I use 23w or press w 23 times" - you position your hand and make a correction.

For one thing, in English at least (and AFAIK throughout users of the Latin alphabet more broadly), you pretty much have to be able to write block letters as a literate person. Block letters are generally less ambiguous. (Especially all CAPS.)

I think my elementary school years (early/mid 2000s) were some of the last years that cursive was taught in NYC. It looks like they're bringing it back this year[1].

I hated it at the time and switched to block lettering as soon as I was allowed, but I've noticed that my style has become increasingly (and organically) cursive ever since I began college and really needed to take notes quickly.

Cursive may still be slower than typing, but there's a reasonable evidence that screens diminish in-class comprehension and that writing notes requires more digestion of the material than typing. Anecdotally, that's certainly been the case for me.

[1]: https://twitter.com/NYCSchools/status/832275877924831233

The study I remember suggested that cursive increases comprehension and retention because it's slower. The theory was that because it's slower, you paraphrase, summarize, and elide more, which engages comprehension and interpretation subsystems, rather than only exercising the speech-to-text subsystem of your brain.

It might also/alternatively be that the longer time necessary to write the information longhand keeps the information in your working memory long enough that your brain is more likely to automatically start to interpret it.

Then there's the tactile-based theory that writing letters longhand is more psychologically engaging than typing is. I'm skeptical of that, because once you learn to type you can feel when you hit the right letter, and feel when you hit the wrong letter. There's immediate tactile feedback either way, it's just different. "Did that feel like the motion I remember is correct for writing that letter" is replaced by "did that feel like my finger was in the right place for that letter when I felt that keypress". Without some good studies proving that there is a difference in cognitive effects between different kinds of tactile feedback, I think it's BS promoted by old-school teachers who refuse to deal with typed assignments.

There seem to be a lot of theories about why there is an effect, but is there any data to demonstrate that there is one?

Let me just paste the same quote I used in a comment 22 days ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15506774)

------------------------------------------------------------

The results revealed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand. Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is canceled out by “mindless transcription.”

“It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently,” the researchers write.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/take-notes...

sorry, I meant cursive versus print. I don't really care about laptop note takers.

All the comments in the thread above you were about handwriting vs. typing. If there is a difference between different styles of handwriting, it's likely in favor of the slowest method (if the theories on note-taking and retention are correct). That would be some kind of elaborate calligraphy where each letter is adorned with vines, or something.

what do you mean if there is a difference? My question was not to speculate on what causes the difference, but whether or not it actually exists.

I completely agree. I just transferred schools, and I use to type all of my notes, because I could. Now, I'm handwriting my notes, and I think that my comprehension is way up.

The funny thing is that the grey quotes in the article look very close to Cursive Italic, which is faster than American Cursive(what we all know as regular cursive) and Manuscript + it is just as easy to read as Manuscript(print). If we actually cared about efficiency and effectiveness in handwriting we would have switched to this a long time ago.

I do calligraphy as a hobby. I'm going to time myself but I'm already 100% certain I can write much faster with Cursive Italic in spite of the fact that I spend just as much time writing printed characters.

American Cursive looks very nice when done properly. However, it requires near-perfect execution to be legible.

The sample of author Ball's writing at the end of the article looks like Italic Cursive, which I use myself.

The whole idea of cursive is to allow ligatures in fast, personal writing, simply to make it fast. That became stylized in roundhand/copperplate script, later in Palmer.

I hadn't run across the use of "manuscript" for "printing" until this thread. Apparently this is being done to elevate what is now considered pejorative.

"Manuscript" is (was) a general term referring to a handwritten document, not its style, e.g. half uncial.

Judging from the posts here, I'd say handwriting is doomed.

I never knew that there were all these names for different types of handwriting. I'm trying to sort them out. What is the difference between Cursive Italic and American Cursive? And what is Manuscript, except something written by hand?

I used this book (I see that it's now out-of-print, though) to improve my handwriting by using italic. You can see some examples inside the book.

https://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Program-Handwritin...

I went to Catholic school in the 80s and 90s, and was forced to use cursive the entire time.

Starting in 1st grade, I'd get straight As - except in "handwriting" - always a B there - and it kept me from ever getting "First Honors."

It was arbitrary and unfair, and it made me hate school. And cursive.

> It was arbitrary and unfair

Can you expand on why you think so?

How do you measure handwriting? Is the teacher grading by taking a caliper and measuring the exact form of each letter mechanically, or is he/she just comparing based on what “looks good” to the eye.

Some people might not have very steady hands. Are you going to penalize them for that?

I see your point, and can sympathise. Nevertheless, let's dig further and see if we can get to some fundamental principle:

> is he/she just comparing based on what “looks good” to the eye.

How are art subjects in school graded? I actually don't know.

> Some people might not have very steady hands. Are you going to penalize them for that?

Some are bad at something else, like mathematics. Are we to penalise them for that? Yes, those students get a low grade in mathematics. Can we motivate a difference in attitude between handwriting and mathematics by an appeal to usefulness, saying that it is useful to be good at mathematics, but not as useful to shape beautiful letters? Is it nevertheless a point in teaching it (and arts)? Is the teaching of those subjects motivated by other things than their usefulness? Should they, because of that, be graded differently, perhaps in such a way that effort, along with performance, can yield a high grade? (What happens then if someone relies on a grade to see how well someone else does music?)

Math, history, geography, the technical part of a language (grammar, spelling,...) can be learned. It is simply a matter of effort. Some are better, some are more interested, but ultimately you can learn. I had Spanish at school (France) and had a hard time just because I did not like it. Then I started to like it and, miracle, my marks sky-rocketed.

If you do not have steady hands you will never be good at drawing because you will not be able to learn it. Salle if you have asthma and want to sing (I guess). You should not be marked dusk because of that. Same if you are in a wheelchair and cannot run a 100m.

Personally I (30 years old now) went to Catholic school (K-12) and learned cursive somewhere around 2nd or 3rd grade and was forced to write in cursive until I graduated 8th grade. Most of the time as a kid I hated it and wished I could write in block letters and once I hit freshman year of high school I never looked back. Fast forward through four years of high school and three gap years when as a freshman in college I realized I really missed writing in cursive. After a pretty rocky few weeks of abysmal looking script I got back into the groove and took four years of notes in handwriting and continue to journal and write notes and letters in cursive.

I've always been somewhat artistic and take a lot of pride in my handwriting as I would a drawing. I look at others' writing to see how they draw letters I like and try to incorporate it into my own style. I take my time writing each letter and word and try to make it as consistent and beautiful as I can (and while others compliment me on my writing I'm always a bit dissatisfied) and generally take a lot of pleasure in the simple act of writing. For me it's a means of expression for myself.

Despite all that, I've tried really hard to come up with defenses for teaching it in schools much like I was taught and I generally come up pretty empty handed. Other than reading some random bits of cursive here or there in our society there really is little need for it. I'd like to think that its artistic merits are enough to justify it, in giving kids a chance to express themselves, but I doubt most kids appreciate it for that - even I hated it as a child. I'd like to say it will help improve people's writing, but frankly most people's writing I see, cursive or otherwise, looks like, as Sister Anne back in 7th grade would say, chicken scratch. As a piece of tradition which unites us as a thread through previous generations I do like it, in a way it's a cultural link to my parents, grandparents, and beyond, but that doesn't necessarily stand as a great argument against more practical skills that could be taught in that time. If the opportunity cost of teaching it can be ignored, though, it doesn't seem otherwise harmful to keep teaching it for the sake of tradition. Maybe keep teaching it but not spend as much time on it to satisfy all camps?

I'd rather just have junior high and high schools offer a calligraphy elective. That'll allow people to learn it for its artistic merits if they want to without having to bog down the elementary school curriculum.

And instead of teaching people pure block letters, teach them some form of italics or D'Nealian. That offers some of the aesthetic advantages of cursive without the unreadability.

(interestingly enough, my elementary school in the early '90s taught D'Nealian and cursive, but no pure block letters)

I write in block letters since the senior year of highschool. I need it to be able to understand my own writting. I didn't like it then, but now with my sons I see the use of it. It teaches them attention to detail, observation, patience, fine hand dexterity, spatial references. Even if they don't ever use it again I find is an extremely useful and powerful tool for a 5 year old.

Ever since I took a technical drawing course the sophmore year of high school, I haven't wanted to write in anything other than draftsman's block letters. I always had atrocious handwriting, cursive or otherwise, but at least now I and others can read what I write.

I do both: Cursive for my own notes, because it's faster and more comfortable, and block letters for stuff I need others to read.

Nice story, thanks.

Studying cursive, calligraphy, lettering, graffiti, cuneiform, emoji and so forth should all be standard units.

Call it "writing systems and visual languages". Incorporate (adapt) Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" and Hofstadter's "Godel, Escher, Bach".

Compare and contrast different systems thru the ages. Have kids invent their own alphabets and fonts.

And then offer elective classes, perhaps under the humanities and arts curriculum.

It seems like there's value in rote practice of tasks for improving focus and discipline. I'd argue that's part of why learning piano helps kids so much.

I can't name any specific reason to practice cursive though.

Cursive is the most efficient method for writing by hand. Also, for many, it's much easier for them to write in a readable fashion with cursive.

My son is 11, and was never taught cursive in public school. His print writing is legible, but not neat. He just learned cursive (it took him less than two weeks at the private school we just put him in, where all the other students learned it years ago). His writing is much neater, and more legible.

I don't understand why so many people in this thread are making claims about cursive's efficiency, when the article cites scientific investigations that say it isn't.

> Cursive is the most efficient method for writing by hand.

I think people only think this because they have the most practice doing it.

For instance, shorthand is more efficient.

Now that capacitive touchscreens are widely available, I think we should teach children how to quickly and accurately input text on a touchscreen tablet, using a Swipe-style keyboard or whatever current method gives the fastest and most accurate results. Note: We should teach them how to input eloectronic text (as in Unicode), that can then be read in whatever font and size is good for the reader, or through alternative methods such as text-to-speech and braille. Universal access! Of course, such text is also searchable, which is also something we can't practically get with handwriting.

In other words, let's teach kids how to input text in a way that's optimized for this century. And while we're at it, let's teach them to make their written output universally accessible by default. No more handwritten notes on whiteboards during meetings, excluding blind (or low-vision) participants. There should be a way to input electronic text that's just as convenient (or more) for a typical sighted person, but also accessible.

Death to handwriting as we know it!

We should condense the alphabet and get rid of nuisance letters as well as standardize phonemes so that letter combinations must sound the same.

Also - words may only have a single, pre-defined meaning.

While we're at it, everyone go to Esperanto.

Also - this must be enforced globally.

We should have a single, global educational standard for language and math.

While we are at it, we should merge Math and Esperanto into 'Mathsperanto'.

Think of the efficiency and productivity!

Think of the GDP gains!

Forward!

Maybe US cursive is taught differently but I write much faster in cursive than otherwise.

I grew up in the UK, if that matters.

I also think it looks prettier (but that's a penmanship/caligraphy thing, and purely aesthetic)

Oh man how I _HATED_ cursive writing. I was so bad at it, my Dad had to give me special lessons and penalties, which was an awful experience.

You know how much cursive I've written in the last 30 years? Zero. ZERO.

We will not be teaching our kids this, and I will encourage them not to learn it (unless they want to, for some odd reason).

Seems to ignore the fact that picking up and putting down the writing point is actually harder for small children than just sliding the writing implement along the paper. Also consider the popularity of "Swype"-style keyboards, since continuous sliding a finger across a surface is, for many, easier than discrete screen presses.

Sources: personal experience and anecdotes from teachers of 4-6 yr olds (an age range not given the most, if any, time in the article).

I can remember the pain and hand fatigue that cursive writing gave me for around 5-6 years in school until I said fuck it, I’ll write letters convenient way, not “right way”. Teachers could do nothing with it, and I simply wrote letters as you can see in books, but with few shortcuts. All readers say it reads more clear on average than, well, average cursive.

We wrote with “fountain” pens back then, if it makes any difference.

> I can remember the pain and hand fatigue that cursive writing gave me

I remember the pain too, having written a lot, and in cursive, in school; I'm not saying it's easier to write a lot, just that I've heard and anecdotally observed that very young kids have motor skills that seem better suited to the continuous movement of joined-up letters.

I didn't "ignore" that, it directly refuted it. The article sites studies that claim cursive takes far more fine motor skills than non-cursive and was harder to teach to younger children.

Which studies? "Fine motor" appears exactly once in the article:

> And every time I hear of a young child turned off writing because he lacks the fine motor skills needed to master cursive [...] I see [confirmation bias].

...as if that’s a bad thing. I think just about any surgeon would disagree with that assertion.

> So was cursive faster than manuscript? No, it was slower. But fastest of all was a personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript developed spontaneously by pupils around the fourth to fifth grade. Even in France, a quarter of the French pupils who were taught cursive exclusively and were still mostly using it in the fourth grade, had largely abandoned it for a mixed style by the fifth grade.

I was shocked at how cursive could be slower than block letters... but then realized that, yes, if you're doing all the curly things on Q's and Z's and F's then, yes it could be slower.

But nobody does those! A "personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript" is how I write, I just call it cursive, or "partial cursive". But it says that is faster, and presumably students wouldn't learn that if they hadn't learned full cursive at first?

So seems like teaching cursive is useful because in the end students do write faster. Except that maybe we should focus on teaching just the "fast" parts of connecting lowercase letters, and ignore all the fancy curly parts that uppercase letters tend to have?

> But nobody does those! A "personalized mixture of cursive and manuscript" is how I write, I just call it cursive, or "partial cursive". But it says that is faster, and presumably students wouldn't learn that if they hadn't learned full cursive at first?

I ended up developing something like that in 2009. By that point, I'd long since forgotten everything I was taught in elementary school and just wrote everything in all caps. But I was starting to develop an interest in typography, and I wanted to improve my handwriting. So I started studying italic serif fonts to see how I could do something similar by hand, with the restriction that most letters should be written in one stroke. I found out that my attempts at replicating serifs in handwriting without increasing the stroke count actually had a technical term: semiserif.

What I came up with looks kind of like D'Nealian, but with some significant differences. The biggest one is that I put semiserifs on the beginnings of letters and not just on the ends. Another is that I use a two-story g (and I wrote it with an ear for a while before eliminating it). And my z is particularly swashy.

ignore all the fancy curly parts that uppercase letters

You could be talking about Roman Cursive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_cursive

You could make a case for that.

It's impossible to say whether those children would develop their own style of short hand if they'd never seen cursive to begin with. You don't need to spend hours writing in cursive to notice that certain letter combinations appear together often, and coincidentally start smushing those letters together into some sort of cursive-ish mixture.

Arguably, if you want people to be able to write quickly, you'd teach shorthand or at least some simplified version thereof. In general journalists, who still often take handwritten notes for various reasons, develop their own idiosyncratic sets of abbreviations and notations to let them take accurate notes/quotes quickly.

> But imposing cursive from an early age is another matter.

Once she saw some cursive writing, our daughter demanded we teach her. I attribute that to our choice to greatly limit screen time. She’s fantastic at it. And even though she now spends a healthy portion of her screen time budget FaceTiming and texting friends and grandparents, she also sends handwritten letters and notes.

It's as if a large chunk of people have values the author can't process at all. "Sure it's beautiful and traditional and ties us to a shared past and culture, but what's the POINT of it?"

Maybe I'm overreaching here, but it feels like the kind of lack of understanding that underlies some of our political difficulties in the US.

I actually favor a classical Western core curriculum in the US. But I don't really see simplified cursive handwriting as a particularly important part of that relative to the amount of time and effort it takes.

> Or is what children learn determined more by precedent and cultural or institutional norms

Yeah, it always is, that’s just how human societies work.

I remember learning how to write official letters at school.

Dear Sir. Dear Madam. Yours faithfully. Yours sincerely. Your obedient servant.

In the classroom, we were told it was so very important to get the language right.

In fact it was a complete waste of time.

I used the language a handful of times - the stylings were already becoming archaic - then email conventions took over.

Now we have "Hi", or maybe "Hello", and "Kind regards" - if email occurs at all, and the entire exchange isn't an informal collection of short text messages.

The Guardians of Culture in schools seem reliably clueless. I suspect their opinions are so definite because they have so little else to offer, and appearing to be right about something is better than admitting the truth about that.

Likewise with cursive. Kids today benefit more from YouTube editing and social media skills - and by the time they start getting jobs, those will probably be archaic skills too.

> the stylings were already becoming archaic

Let's do something about that! :-)

I was taught manuscript print first and then cursive. I went through grade school in the 90's so keyboards and computers where not common. We did not have a keyboarding class until 6th grade. As far as handwriting went, I had very sloppy handwriting. If I really focused, I could make my handwriting legible but it caused me wrist pain from over gripping my pencil. Later in life I realized that a thicker pencil was the solution.

Now days I write almost exclusively in cursive. Through school I found that cursive characters were easier to differentiate from numbers in math (a five and lowercase "s" look very similar when I write them, for example). After that I just stayed in the habit of writing in cursive. I don't believe it is superior or inferior, it is just what I like.

Somewhat related but do you guys know good resources to relearn cursive handwriting? I remember having handwriting notebooks as a kid that came with figures and steps to do the letters but I don't know if there's a better way now, years later.

For all the years kids spend in school, wherein a good deal of it is not very efficient, this is a cultural epitaph that has merit upon it's own, there's no reason to find any other reason than that. It's at least as useful as printing.

Reminds me of the long battle I had with my teachers trying to make me write the weird cursive "4", when I was trying to write the "4" I had always seen up to that point in the keyboard of the ZX Spectrum :)

There's a cursive 4? I didn't even realize numbers _had_ cursive forms.

Next you'll be telling me that I should have been capitalizing the first numbers of my addresses.

Well, technically you have probably been writing all your digits in all upper case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text_figures

Yes, IIRC it was similar to the one you can see at https://us.123rf.com/450wm/baksiabat/baksiabat1410/baksiabat... but worse, it had two loops instead of just one.

Can an American give an example image showing a child's cursive handwriting, as is it taught there?

The picture at the top of the article is only about 50% like the handwriting I was taught in the UK.

I was taught something like this [1] (11 year old, England) except without the curly bits before the first letter of each word.

[1] http://stanthonys.herts.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/hw...

Americans are genereally taight D'Nealian cursive.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian

The Palmer method was the standard system taught in the US when I learned: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method

The backward slant ("reverse italics") in that sample suggests the writer is left-handed, or was in an otherwise awkward position while writing that. It certainly stands out and makes for a weird effect...

In 1993, I was taught D'Nealian cursive. It's a derivative of the Palmer cursive that the other commenter mentions.

Does everything taught in schools need to have immediate applicability?

Of course not, but some non-zero eventual utility is a desirable trait. There are a variety of actually beneficial things children could spend their time doing, which are currently being displaced by being forced to learn a useless handwriting style.

For that matter, I'd have zero issue with more classroom time spent on art, music, or other subjects of that type. But the fixation on an aesthetically pleasing copperplate writing style has about the same justification as universally teaching ancient Greek because it's part of a traditional Western upper class education.

> part of a traditional Western upper class education

Such reasons have actually started to become a bit compelling to me, and might lead me to learn Greek, though I might do Latin first. It places you next to others who have learnt the same things through the centuries. Joining the same learning tradition grounds you in a common language and a common literature. It helps you understand intellectual conversations from today and from past generations. So I imagine, at least; I'm still just an ἰδιώτης.

You are assuming that cursive is "useless" and lacks "some non-zero eventual utility". Practicing fine motor control seems like an excellent use of time to me.

I am not assuming. The article contains evidence that it is useless vis a vis block or custom handwriting.

No. But I'd have a hard time making a case that cursive specifically (as opposed to handwriting more broadly) is some important life skill that warrants careful teaching in grade school. Personally my Palmer cursive skills (such as they were) probably peaked in about sixth grade to the point where they're effectively non-existent today.

I recall when taking the SAT in ~2009, that you were asked to copy a paragraph (honesty statement) in cursive.

That took most people 20 minutes because no one could remember cursive. I recall giving up and writing print with little attaching lines.

I don't know anyone under 30 who recall how to write in it. I'm sure there's a few, but for 95% of people it was forgotten before the age of 18.

>immediate applicability

That's a strawman, nobody ever claimed it needed to have immediate applicability.

As for having eventual applicability? Children have finite learning time, and teaching something with zero eventual applicability means not teaching something that will eventually be useful.

I find cursive very difficult to read, let alone write. Ever since I took drafting classes I've used single-stroke gothic lettering for anything I want other people to be able to read.

The question for cursive should be, Can the intended audience--yourself next week, your friend when USPS delivers-- read it? Some of the older generation of my family wrote a cursive hand that was regular, even handsome, but very hard to read. My own is not so handsome, though I think about as legible as my non-cursive lettering, but I don't use it much.

I did learn cursive writing in school, might still be able to do it, but I'd very much prefer my kids to learn a wider array of skills including calligraphy and of course modern typography. They need to see (not master) the wider picture that ranges from art to crystal-clear communcation. Cursive handwriting is just a limited piece of this and killing curiosity through the miserable learning experience.

> But the teachers declared he wasn’t ready because he can’t yet write in cursive.

> To me this symbolizes all that is wrong with the strange obsession shared in many countries about how children learn to write.

That sounds like absolutely what happened. By all means write an article on the pros and cons of cursive, but don't the article with a ludicrous straw man.

I was watching out for a quote from Karin James, and found it! I recently collaborated with her and others on an fMRI-compatible touchscreen, which has been used for studying handwriting in children. Her lab is doing good work.

If writing in manuscript is faster why do the most used shorthand systems (Gregg, Teeline or Pitman) use cursive? I can't believe it's just because of an supposedly erroneous cultural habit

If you can't write in cursive I won't hire you.

That is fine, most likely I will just work elsewhere.

There is probably some value in being able to read the original founding documents of your government. In the United States those are written in cursive.

Reading and writing are two different skills. I can read a variety of different calligraphy styles, for example, but would be hard-pressed to reproduce them well.

Normally the way people learn to read cursive is by having some exposure to writing it. Most kids who haven't learned to write cursive can't read it. But I agree with your overall point. Kids could probably learn to read cursive with significantly less effort than what is required to write it.

I guess we should all start writing those s's that look like lowercase f's again then. Or people in the UK need to start getting fluent in Middle English to read the Magna Carta

Why? I mean, if anyone really wants to read the originals, they can learn cursive then. But why aren't transcripts enough for the average person?

It was the only way to write that I can remember being taught (until we had typewriting classes). Do we need to teach any other way?

I stopped writing cursive in 6th grade because no one could read my stuff.

Folks interested in the history should read Rosemary Sassoon’s book Handwriting of the Twentieth Century. It mainly focuses on England, but is quite comprehensive and America and other countries writing in Latin scripts are also discussed.

(a) The particular “cursive” styles taught in American schools are often pretty crappy and overly ornate and slow/difficult to write, evolving out of writing which was intentionally slow for the sake of uniformity, ornament, and legibility, because it dated from an era when all business communication was handwritten, later simplified so that it would be easier for children. It also was originally designed for quills or dip pens, which are pretty much never used today. Students are seldom taught that the writing style appropriate for a 6-year-old student just learning to hold a pen is probably not appropriate for a 10-year-old or a 15-year-old student.

(b) No instruction in handwriting should rigidly force students to all exactly follow the model instead of allowing for individual variation and comfort. In particular left-handed students need very different instruction than right-handed students, but everyone has individual anatomy and preferences. Much of the handwriting teaching materials from decades past was aimed as much at enforcing discipline and punishing unruly students as at writing per se.

(c) The most important aspects of teaching handwriting are to teach a comfortable posture, help students find a comfortable pen/pencil grip, and help students learn to produce writing which is fluid and legible and fast enough, without too many strokes per letter and without too many awkward movements, but also which matches the student’s own personal style.

(d) What type of pen students learn to write with makes a big difference. #2 pencils and ballpoint pens are not very good tools for learning to write, IMO.

But with that said, teaching “print” writing (i.e. strictly separated letters that look like printed letters – usually except for a and g, which are more like upright versions of italic letters) is pretty stupid. It’s slow, usually devolves into something uncomfortable and illegible in adulthood, is typically not taught in a way such that students understand where the beginnings and ends of strokes for letters should be or have a sense of the logical construction of their letters, and usually isn’t taught any better than joined-together writing styles. (For example: I was never really taught handwriting, and we were mainly encouraged to write with a strictly separated letter style. My pen grip was uncomfortable and my writing was slow and not terribly legible all the way through school. After every long written high-school exam my hand would hurt. Some judicious instruction and better practice at age 5–8 could have saved a lot of grief.)

There are a wide variety of efficient and legible handwriting styles based on italic or cursive writing. Students should aim for joining letters together in groups of 2–4, putting joins and breaks where comfortable (not strictly joining every letter, or strictly separating every letter). Students should be allowed to tweak whatever writing style they are taught by their personal preferences, and not graded or punished on how strictly they can follow the model. Handwriting teachers need to have great powers of observation and great empathy, to see what kinds of posture, pen grips, letter forms, etc. are working for students vs. which ones are causing problems which will plague the students throughout their lives.

As a left-handed writer, I hated being forced to learn cursive and resented the teachers that forced me to use it, especially on timed writing, since I was always much slower at cursive than print writing. Although to be fair, none of my teachers had any specific advice for left-handed writers.

I think the overall difficulty and pain of left-handed writing was part of what pushed me to computers at an early age.

Either classroom time is limited, or it isn't.

Which is it?

If the question is "Should we continue to teach cursive handwriting," well, there's your answer.

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