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.
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.
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.
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.
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
// 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.
There are less and less needs for this, so I think this is a good development