Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back | Hacker News Reader

Cursive Seemed to Go the Way of Quills and Parchment. Now It’s Coming Back

nytimes.com

37 pointsingve66 comments

Typical cursive is a form of connected writing originally designed for pens and quills with flexible nibs. Letters like ℓ have loops because when writing with these tools the downstroke is thicker than the upstroke. The result is a recognizable lowercase L with a thin stroke on the side. It's easy to read even if you've never had to before.

This form of writing was dated as soon as the ballpoint pen was invented, which was in the 19th century. Writing it with a pencil makes even less sense. By tradition we have clung to this terrible writing style instead of introducing something more sensible and modern like italic cursive, which is connected but without loops.

Cursive exists not because of quills and ink but because it’s easier on hand muscles when writing long form.

People used to write hundreds of pages a week. The letters I sent to friends when I was in college were probably 20 or 30 pages each, and several went out each week.

Writing that much in print hurts my hand, even today. Last year I switched back to cursive in my daily work notebook and it’s reduced hand pain greatly.

Cursive in general, meaning letters connected together to minimize pen lifts, still exists because it's easier and faster than block lettering. It's the particular kind of looped cursive taught in America that was designed for dip pens and other older instruments. Writing this script with a modern pen or pencil trades legibility for writing speed and comfort.

My point is that if we want to keep teaching kids connected writing, there are cursive scripts that are easier to teach, easier to write, and easier to read than the one we've clung to for so long.

> This form of writing was dated as soon as the ballpoint pen was invented, which was in the 19th century.

While technically correct, that's all this is. Loud might've invented the ballpoint in the late 19th century, but they weren't of even remotely practical use until the late 1930s with Bíró's refinements, and even then they only took off after WW2.

> By tradition we have clung to this terrible writing style instead of introducing something more sensible and modern like italic cursive, which is connected but without loops.

That's wholly a matter of personal style. Plenty of people learn and use cursive styles that lack loops.

>> lung to this terrible writing style instead of introducing something more sensible and modern

Maybe in how writing is taught in schools, but the wider world has moved on. Most people now use a Frankenstein combination of printed and cursive characters which varies with the formality of the note and need for clarity. I print things that need to be letter-perfect (codes etc) and scribble the stuff that doesn't.

Considering the limited time available to schools for teaching and available to kids for homework I find it very hard to justify teaching cursive in 2019. It is no longer a required skill for being a functional member of society, it's not even in the top half of the "nice to have" list.

How is there time for this, and not a financial literacy class? Kids are graduating HS with no real life skills to speak of yet we have time for this?

There is a financial literacy class.

It is not in the government's interest to strongly support the teaching of financial literacy because a population that is financially literate is going to demand more financial responsibility from government. While there's no conspiracy to prevent teaching financial literacy, there's just little incentive to actually do it because the status quo thrives on its absence.

They teach cursive in elementary school, whose primary function is socialisation and childcare, not education. I taught kindergarten (in English) to children who were native speakers of Chinese for four years. I know you can take a six year old with minimal exposure to English to grade level reading fluency in 50 weeks of 30 minute lessons 5 days a week because I’ve done it. I’m reliably informed by Chinese teachers that you can take a child who speaks Chinese (Mandarin), from illiterate to within the normal range of writing skill within three years, at more or less any age from elementary school to the end of high school. I regret I lost the citation but John Taylor Gatto writes in one of his books that you can teach a nine year old to read English in 40 hours of instruction. I believe it, and the experience of teachers in Sudbury schools is that you can teach the entire elementary school math curriculum to a 12 year old in under 40 hours. The lowest figure I’ve heard for that feat is 20 hours.

Homework in elementary school is just a waste of time, theft from children and their families. The research is clear that it’s ineffective in aiding learning prior to middle school at the earliest.

An institution dedicated to teaching children would look very different to elementary, middle or high schools in any country’s public education system. They’d use mastery based learning rather than age based progression and spaced repetition at the most basic. Those particular educational techniques are more than a century old and used more or less nowhere.

On a less iconoclastic note German elementary schools are mostly half day and French ones full day. There is no real difference in their graduates readiness for middle and high school. And kindergarten as mostly play systems have no worse and often better results than kindergarten as school lite systems. In Finland they don’t even teach kindergarteners to read. They do fine in the end.

Elementary school is not primarily about education. Homework is not about education at all at that level.

Great information here. It's really interesting that Germans only use Elementary for half-day.

I wonder if over-education of younger kids in the US is leading to some kids feeling stigmatized towards education in general. There seems to be a growing trend of trying to teach kids things before they're truly mentally ready. Everyone I know is sending their children to head-start preschool type things instead of normal day care. The result seems to be that children are mostly just being made to conform, and they are merely memorizing for purposes of adult approval and some kind of reward or lack of punishment (similar to teach a dog a trick) rather than actually learning.

I think we should be setting kids up to do things with their hands, but starting much earlier.

Pre-K - 1st grade, let's get them drawing lines and curves with pencils, pins, brushes; with inks and paints. Give them clay to form with their hands, then give them tools to form it. Keep up that practice in years to come. Have them writing letters in various ways: print, cursive, calligraphy.

Do this in their formative years, giving them control other their fingers, hands, wrists, arms; give them creative outlets.

Then, as we introduce abstract concepts, they have tools to visualize their understanding, or creatively express the concepts to their classmates.

The common discussion around this topic reminds me of how people got upset about Pluto being demoted to a "dwarf planet", or how they value spending hours of one's life reading fiction novels while scoffing at shows and video games as lower forms of art. I know older folks who think it's a bad thing that their nieces and nephews aren't being taught cursive handwriting. People have a visceral reaction to change, especially when it comes to things that were romanticized, or at least emphasized in childhood.

Knowing how to write in cursive is like knowing how to churn butter, how to tie a horse to a hitching post, or (more aptly) using a typewriter. Said skills might be selectively useful, but they are generally obsolete. It's great that people want to know that I have to do those things, but don't expect me to have to learn outdated things that have no use for me.

Learning how to write fluently on paper and the ability to read older source documents is a skill.

Learning that Columbus showed up in 1492 is trivia. Public school spends >50% of time on trivia, and skills are being removed.

I consider written language a part of a language culture. Getting rid of cursive writing is like telling people they can't speak Spanish because it's an outdated language and everyone should just use English because it's more modern, and all the computer stuff is in English anyway.

Latin would be a better comparison than Spanish here. It has its uses, but it's very situational these days and most modern people will never need it.

most people will never need Latin in the sense that they are unlikely to read original works written in Latin unless they become a classics professor. you could say the same thing about most classes in elementary through high school. rarely if ever do I directly apply my knowledge from biology, history, english lit, etc.

once we start looking at indirect applications, I think Latin and Greek are easily as useful as any other subject. even if you can't read them fluently, having a firm grasp of grammar and vocab in these languages is a huge advantage when it comes to proficiency in English. complex terminology in other fields becomes much easier to understand when you know the roots.

Even Latin still makes sense to learn in some capacity. It's obsolete(or dead, really) as a form of communication, but it's still helpful to know in order to better understand the words that we use today, many of which stem from Latin. Understanding etymology and some Latin has helped me understand the meaning of words without even having to look them up.

Cursive, on the other hand, still exists for its own sake. It's an obsolete skill because few people write actual letters anymore or rely on handwriting often. We still use English every day, which is why learning Latin is a better use of one's time than to learn cursive.

I imagine it has practical value for historians who have to read cursive documents, and as an art form it's just as valid as any other sort of calligraphy. But yeah, outside of a few narrow areas it doesn't have much modern use.

>> Learning how to write fluently on paper and the ability to read older source documents is a skill.

No. It is two skills. Cursive isn't a language. It is a script, a simple transposition of symbols. Anyone who can read english type can learn to read cursive, to access those older source documents, in a matter of hours. Writing cursive is a totally different thing, a collection of muscle memories that take years to acquire. The former is an important but easy skill to master, the later is difficult but increasingly irrelevant.

Cursive is no more 'generally obsolete' than writing in print letters; and it's easier on the hand and more efficient.

Schools don't want to teach it because they're trying to meet standards and cursive isn't required. They also don't want to teach it because their students turn in assignments written on computers rather than by hand. These aren't good reasons.

Yes, it is. Print is clearer and closer to printed typography, and people just don't write enough these days for the efficiency of writing cursive when cursive is much more difficult to read.

Schools don't want to teach it because it's a waste of time. Kids these days are learning and doing most of their work on computers. When I was in elementary school, we had computers, but they complemented our handwritten work. Now they are doing homework on the computer as well. There's simply not enough practical work for children to practice their cursive on; they won't get good at it doing it an hour every day, and the skill will quickly devolve once they are out of school.

Ever since my elders accepted email as a superior communication medium, the only thing I've ever used cursive for in the last 20+ years is my signature. Like most people's, it's just a semi-unique scribble at this point. For most people, the skill of cursive writing serves no appreciable purpose. If we're going to teach kids cursive in the 21st century, we might as well teach them all how to spin yarn, navigate with a magnetic compass, shoe a horse, and balance a paper checkbook.

I was born in 1991. I learned to write cursive in school, but I can't comfortably read it. Whenever I get a card from an older relative I've got to slowly puzzle over some of the words. Apart from the odd instructor who wrote on the board in cursive, these occasional personal notes are my only practice. These days most people default to what used to be called "printing" so it's rarely a big deal.

If we want to bring back cursive, there needs to be more of an acknowledgement that reading and writing are different things, and need to be practiced differently. When I was learning Morse code, it was understood that sending and receiving are different skills (e.g. I can send at 25 WPM but can only copy at about 12 WPM). The same doesn't seem to be true about cursive education.

What's interesting is that difficult to read / "ugly" font text is more memorable than easier-to-read text. Therefore, memory-item checklists, insightful quotes and other bits of important text should use Comic Sans, cursive, etc. to achieve memorability, whereas most ubiquitous affordance labels and signage shouldn't.

Source on this? You'd think that if it worked, all the ads you see would be in ugly fonts, seeing how well adtech optimizes.

https://qz.com/1417818/hard-to-read-fonts-can-help-boost-you...

Here's a font designed to leverage the effect for improving recall

Very interesting! Though it seems like you'd grow accustomed to this font and lessen it's effect if used regularly as part of a study process.

I lasted one semester in Russian class thanks in part to the cursive writing full of what looks like to English speakers as cursive u and w mixed with half-height dotless cursive i's. It was really hard to read and write Cyrillic like that.

I lost the ability to easily write English cursive when I learned to write Russian cursive.

слышу

is my go to word when I want to show people how crazy Russian cursive can be.

Thats exactly the boat I'm in--my grandmothers write me notes and cards and they use beautiful old style cursive. It just looks like squiggles to me--I hand the letters over to my wife and she reads them to me.

It frustrates me that older generations lament the loss of cursive in the curriculum, but refuse to acknowledge that it overall reduces the readability. Not everyone is a born artist, and the evidence is quite clear that it isn't a magic bullet (or else everyone would have readable cursive). I know I don't write that well, but because the letters aren't linked up there's less ability to scrawl, so they tend to be reasonably interpretable.

An artist would make less-readable cursive. To make readable cursive, you need to practice following rules precisely. You need to develop hand coordination, which is probably of general use for things like sewing and surgery and removing slivers.

I think a big trouble is bad instruction. Somebody with a clue needs to carefully study your writing, find the flaws, and insist that you get things correct. Some things about letter forms don't matter much, while other things matter a great deal. For example, the distinction between a rounded curve and a point is usually important. Many teachers won't know this. Also, individualized attention isn't easy to get in a large classroom.

I am left-handed and although my cursive was perfectly fine otherwise (properly sized loops, etc.), I was removed from class and given special instruction (by someone... I think she was not a teacher, but a volunteer aide or something) in order to correct my left-leaning slant. It 'worked', but the cost was my cursive was significantly worse. She frequently was out of the room, so I just went very slowly to get enough 'good' cursive to satisfy them. To this day, unless I am really thinking about it, my right-leaning cursive is much uglier than my left-leaning cursive.

You are at a disadvantage, and so you'll need more practice. Perhaps it would help to get a writing tool that doesn't need much force.

Funny story:

I'm right handed. In high school, I badly injured my right hand. When I first tried to write with my left hand, I found that it seemed easy. My handwriting was perfect except for one thing: it was a mirror image! Switching to the proper direction didn't degrade the quality, but it really really slowed me down.

My cursive was always absolutely atrocious. I have no idea how teachers could read anything I have ever written.

I couldn't read my own handwriting if I had to write down notes fast or did not 100% focus on the task of just writing legibly.

The result of that was that for better or worse I rarely took any notes in school until University. I think it helped with learning since I was paying attention to remember stuff, but of course I also had to borrow notes from my friends after..

Writing print changed this - my print handwriting is pretty nice actually (I even got some compliments on it) and I never had any trouble reading my notes.

Long story short, I see absolutely no point in teaching something like cursive in schools. It seems like a colossal waste of time.

I've known people whose print is illegible as well. Like anything, these are skills that take practice. Some people need more practice than others. And, like anything, it should be quality practice.

Generally speaking, I write with a combination of print and cursive. When taking notes in university, I generally use cursive and then rewrite the notes in print (also helps with retention).

Not teaching cursive makes the cursive that people write less legible. Also, teaching cursive teaches you how to read it.

Call me uncultured but I say it should damn well stay dead. Cursive is a waste of everyone's time. It adds nothing to the language. Remembering how to do it is about as skillful as remembering all the Minecraft crafting recipes, and it is merely a historical accident that one of these is seen as a mark of education and the other a mark of immaturity.

So it certainly is not a waste of everyone's time, and it does add to the language but only in the sense that it is, can be, and should be, considered a form of art. And last time I checked beauty is not a waste of time (well not always). I learned italics instead of cursive in the 1980s; I was in the first year they dropped cursive. I lamented not learning cursive when I saw my mom's handwriting...but I also lament not learning art when I was young when I see people effortlessly sketch out a dog or some thing like that. Yet my lament is not enough to invest the time to learn those skills; I would rather learn some other thing; but I am not everybody and I know some people that certainly love cursive and have learned different variations of cursive and some have gone into calligraphy. So I think it should be some form of an elective, just like art class. Perhaps that is the proper place.

Then take a college elective and stop wasting everyone else's time because of your lament.

Um...if you read what I wrote, this is essentially what I said.

Is it an american thing not to learn cursive? I'm from the UK, 30 years old and everyone was taught "joined-up writing" as it was called.

Nowadays I write about half and half. Joining up letters where it's natural to, and leaving some unjoined.

32, American, was forced to use cursive almost exclusively through I think the 8th grade. After that, everyone stopped caring what we did.

Most students switched away from cursive almost immediately, though a few adopted a mix of print and cursive letters.

US and Canada use the "Palmer Method", which is much more stylized than "joined up".

There are a lot of loops and odd shapes to keep then quill nib straight. Most people realize that it's a complete waste of time when using a ball point pen.

Yep, UK 'joined up writing' is typically D'Nealian script - although 'z' was/is often simplified.

Thanks to both of you. I thought they were the same thing until now

American cursive is an archaic, artificial form of writing, essentially a calligraphic hand minimally adapted for everyday use. Unfortunately, its existence and the attachment of older generations to it prevent the US from adopting a more practical style along the lines of UK cursive.

I was required to learn cursive as a child in school, since at the time, you couldn't expect everyone to have a computer available. They even enforced the use of cursive for writing assignments all the way up through middle school.

To be honest, for just writing stuff down with a pen, I still use it. I just don't see any point in switching to block print, since anything that needs to be "properly" block-printed, I'll end up typing.

> Part of being an American is being able to read cursive writing.

What?? This is asinine.

The argument, such as it is, is that many of the founding documents of the US were originally written in cursive. But they were eventually printed for distribution so the argument doesn't really make sense. It would be like saying Britons should not only learn medieval handwriting but medieval Latin as well given that their Magna Carta was written that way.

I recommend cursive italic, a form of writing that is beautiful and fast to write, but much easier to learn than looped cursive, since it reuses the printed letter forms and avoids complicated joins.

As a bonus, your handwriting resembles Shakespeare's.

That is a fine recommendation for people in the UK. It will be readable there. Americans aren't usually used to it.

Americans normally use D'Nealian. It is similar to the older Palmer Method, which in turn is similar to the older Spencerian script.

Do you have any examples? I might have adopted one of those methods but don't remember where my style came from.

Edit: Found examples on Wikipedia. That's not how I write. I guess mine is less cursive-y and more print-y.

Do you have recommendations for exposing/introducing/teaching some kind of cursive to an American home-schooled 15 year old?

On the one hand, he's in college chemistry & physics on the side... on the other hand, we have funny gaps like this that we know we should do something about.

[Or maybe not...]

I did exactly that. I had kids studying for AP Chemistry ages 10 to 16, and I think that is when I sat them all down to learn handwriting. I hadn't planned to teach it, because I thought I never used it, but then one day I wrote a non-technical essay (something I hadn't done in many years) and felt a strangely strong urge to use cursive.

I sat everybody down at a table and had them copy my text from a whiteboard. I wrote sentences about random crazy stuff. I would then go over their text, making them fix each spot that could create ambiguity. Explain the ambiguity so that they understand why it is a problem. (if your 'f' has a lower loop that is wide or doesn't descend much, it could be confused with a 'b', etc.) Most days we'd do a few dozen sentences. It wasn't long before they started to be decent at it.

I sure know what you mean about the funny gaps. It is easy to forget something while focusing on other stuff. At one point I had a 14-year-old who couldn't really read. I threw him into AP Chemistry, making him read the book out loud so I could correct him. That worked! It was miserable at first, because he needed correction every few words, but now he reads well.

Thumbs up. It not just easy to write, but beautiful, and there are research that tells that it is easier to write in a mix of connected and unconnected letters than exclusively cursive.

BTW, taking notes by hand is better to remember: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/17/474525392/attention-students-...

I remember in high school I tried to write a letter to my older brother in California. I had forgotten how to write in cursive - too much hand-lettering on my computer printouts etc. So I just hand-lettered the letter.

Today (decades later) I use cursive exclusively for signing things. And that's a mess.

How often do you handwrite?

Almost never. Maybe a note in a notebook, and I hand-letter.

Same here. My wrist hurt when initialing and signing a long contract recently, and the notary said it's a common experience.

I've said for years, the American system gets itself all tangled up because we (want) to teach two entirely different writing systems to children: we start with manuscript (printing) and then once the kids are used to that, we consider slapping them with cursive (and a hideous Palmer hand or a derivative to boot).

You want to teach cursive effectively? Drop manuscript training entirely and start kids on the joined-up writing in first grade.

Why would you pick cursive over print? Making kids practice cursive is insane enough to me; making them only learn cursive is a virtual non sequitur.

Isn't cursive writing still required in certain social situations? I recall having to write a statement in cursive when I took the LSAT. Presumably, so they could verify I was the person who the test if necessary. I kept making mistakes cause I was used to writing Cyrillic in cursive. Muscle memory turned all my p's into n's :-)

Just vomit out some squiggles. There's no legal requirement in any situation for your signature to correspond to anything.

I imagine if I were to fail to reproduce my handwriting on demand, the test result would be deemed fraudulent.

Then learn to make a reproducible squiggle vomit that's unique to you; it's more secure than using the common alphabet of squiggle vomits and wastes less of everyone's time.

Alternatively, you could use your knowledge that you were just tested on to construct an argument for why deeming a test fraudulent based on some asinine squiggle vomit system is kind of complete bullshit. I mean, for fork's sake, you are training to be a lawyer after all, so do some got dang lawyering in such an instance.

Do they not teach cursive anymore in schools?

That’s a new one for me.

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