Is Cursive Dead? Not on Your Life

I think that's ignoring the point. The question to whether or not to teach cursive isn't top down, based on some ideological desire of some school administrators. No, it's because the teachers and administration are noticing that the students aren't writing in cursive, and it's a waste to be expending class time on improving a skill which will never be utilized when there are more productive uses of that time.

I remember in third and fourth grade the teachers kept saying that by the time we reached high school there was an expectation that everyone was proficient in writing cursive, that all our assignments must be written in cursive. That was the last time I've had to write cursive. Sure the plural of anecdote is not evidence but I've yet to encounter a situation where cursive isn't effectively dead.

There's no way you can ignore printed script, because nearly all the text that anyone will ever encounter is print-style. Writing in print and learning to read is a pretty obvious combination. Expecting to learn to read one way and write another is unrealistic.

I can't imagine the argument that cursive is more _readable_. Certainly cursive is often pretty, and that may lend the claimed aesthetic quality, but readability beats aesthetics for content any day.

Cursive is so problematic in the US not because it is hard to learn, useless, or requires a massive investment of time. It is problematic because we are terrible at teaching handwriting!

Almost all US schools have standardized on forms of looped cursive (e.g. Parker Penmanship, Zaner-Bloser) -- a set of letterforms designed not for handwriting, but for the movable type printing press! Looped cursive was made to be attractive with the fewest unique joins possible so that printers needed to stock fewer pieces for their movable type presses. Looped cursive is slower, less legible, and more difficult to learn than forms of writing actually made to be written (such as cursive italic).

Additionally, almost all US schools not only require that young children learning to write use pencil, but a relatively hard lead (HB lead). These pencils require too much pressure to use, and catch on the paper too much, making it much harder to learn to write properly -- especially in cursive, which has fewer lifts.

When I began using fountain pens, and learned to write in cursive italic, my handwriting became effortlessly quick and neat. My RSI even improved! This is how I taught my son to write, and he has arguably the best writing in his first-grade class, despite a severe speech disability which caused a delay in his learning to read and write.

We aren't the only family who have figured this out -- almost all of the home-schooling families we know use the same cursive italic my son and I learned, and I've seen a couple of private schools adopt it. Right now, it seems that the "cursive revival" seems limited to education-focused families with young children, writers, and doctors, but I think that if more people became aware of exactly how kludgy the writing they were taught is, they might give real handwriting a try and love it as much as we do. :)

Note: The italic and cursive italic we learned was Getty-Dubay italic -- I used the grown-up book "Write Now", and my son is learning with the first-grade book. Their web site is: http://handwritingsuccess.com/

This completely misses the point that people won't be writing enough to bother optimizing it with their own cursive style. Nor will they be writing in cursive frequently enough to keep up the skill.

How do I know this? Because this is the life I have lived. Moreover, I was taught cursive and have lost the ability to write legible cursive in high school and have reverted to printing ever since when I absolutely have to write with a pen.

Is cursive dead? No, but it is dying.

In that case, we should definitely kill standardized cursive. Then everyone will have bad handwriting and graders will be obligated to grade based on content.

Of course, they're also out of practice reading anything, but that's a separate problem.

For the people that suggest that cursive is dead and students don't need it: how are you proposing that they take notes and take tests? Computers are still not quite pervasive enough to assume that everyone will have one with them at all times, besides which there are good reasons to keep them out of the examination room if you do sit-down exams. You could tell them to print instead, but why would you force them to slow down like that? Non-calligraphic cursive is faster.

Perhaps the problem with it is that it is too beautiful. In that it is quite unlike vim.

I just wrote cursive for the last hour or so, since reading the article. I haven't written it since grade 6 or so. It was an absolutely bizarre feeling to find that it just came out of my brain the way it did, and when I looked at the page of text I had written, it was covered in what I honestly think is quite beautiful calligraphy.

It's a rather unusual and incredible feeling to learn that you still retain a skill you have not used in decades. Try it, it's pretty neat.