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Cursive is definitely faster while maintaining legibility. It's just that no schools in my country has taught us how to actually write it efficiently. For example when I'm writing cursive I'm holding pen incorrectly (yes, there are more efficient and less efficient ways to hold it), I'm moving my fingers incorrectly, I'm moving my hand incorrectly, and in the end certain muscles required for the efficient writing weren't properly developed.

I've learned all this well after graduating from the university, so there is zero reason to train that skill today. But I do know that my shitty cursive is 100% caused by my own lack of proper training to write. I've switched to the writing print characters nowadays, but only out of necessity, not due to efficiency.

I don't know what your country is but in a few US public schools we had fairly strict teachers trying to get us to correctly hold our pencils. They'd wander around class correcting people holding their pencil wrong, give out special grips that were supposed to force correct holding, and we were penalized on tests for holding our pencil wrong.

Not saying it worked that well, as it was only a handful of teachers who cared so maybe you'd have one year where it mattered. However they did try.

Ukraine. We were taught extensively how to write cursive, for whole elementary school, we were writing in special workbooks which reinforced the correct shape of the cursive letters, teachers were looking at us and helping us write correctly. Only it appears they didn't teach us the writing movement itself.

Quick question - do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes or your pen lies between thumb and index finger? Apparently the former position is optimal, while I hold it between fingers. Also my palm is always touching the table with a wrist so I move the pen mostly with my fingers (which a) strains them when writing a lot and b) produces wavy cursive, less legible that it should be), and the correct way is to move pen mostly with whole arm movement, don't touch wrist on a table and don't move fingers too much, only correct movements with fingers, not do all the work with them.

I think I still write incorrectly, it certainly isn't legible, and I haven't researched the concept recently so all I have to go on is decades old memories. I do recall I was regularly scolded for having my hand on the desk.

> do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes

I remember trying to do this as a kid and wasn't able to actually hold the pencil like that. It would flip up out of my hand every other word or so (grip was tight enough towards the tip, but towards the knuckle I couldn't hold it, so the pencil would swivel around the tighter grip).

This is the difference between theory and practice.

In theory, with proper training, it is better. In practice, it's a mess.

I've said before: If you want to start hating cursive, start doing genealogy. It's takes so long for me to decipher what people were writing (they often were writing very quickly), and I learned cursive when I was younger!

(I sometimes run across census pages where the census taker printed. It is vastly, vastly easier to read).

Signatures have almost nothing to do with normal written script, they are a special mark that

1) is ideally hard to replicate and unique

2) may be performed by somebody who doesn't write much

Fast printing doesn't return anything useful to me (google searches are personalized so I guess we're just seeing different things). I get printshops nearby.

I think cursive it taught very formally in elementary school, possibly to the detriment of adoption, just for the same reason everything is -- grammar is given hard-and-fast rules, math is route memorization or totally algorithmic -- because it is easier to grade that way, and also because people will find their shortcuts as they age. Switching between cursive and print seems fine to me (it can also be used for emphasis).

Cursive (interspersed with print as convenient) is sort of nice because it is a fairly "normal" way of writing that still goes quickly enough. I can write cursive anywhere on the spectrum of nice and formal to quick and sloppy, in one system. Quick and sloppy basically keeps up with by brain, maybe if I was taking lots of meeting notes I'd want to switch, but it is good enough for my current applications.

My experience is exactly the opposite. I used to do printed characters. My writing speed and legibility (especially for quick notes) improved significantly after switching to cursive. Once you realise that cursive is basically just a way to write printed characters in one flowing motion, it's weird to go back to printed.

But maybe we're talking differnt cursive systems, and that might explain our difference in experience.

My guess is the biggest difference is how much you use cursive.

However, just like most skills, some people may be naturally better, so I suppose I could be wrong.

I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than full cursive.

What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions.

And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.

I grew up on cursive, and it always tired my arm so badly. When I learned it took far, far, far less effort for people back in fountain pen days, I felt somewhat cheated. Although they were all forced to use their right hands, never mind their brain lateralization, and that’s unfortunate.

Yes, I think that's pretty much all true, now.

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.

Still waiting for a really good stylus driven computer ecosystem. :(

Even 35 years ago when I wrote exclusively in cursive, it was significantly faster than printing. Everyone wrote in cursive.

It's odd to even see people make the argument that cursive isn't faster. Literally no one wrote in print except young children.

Also If you want to write fast and don’t care about legibility, learn shorthand writing :)

Word. I learned Orthic recently. It's easy to pick up, unlike the other system (at least that's my impression after a day of investigating)

I considered doing that in college--decided against it because overall I decided it wouldn't be worthwhile. Yes, I could have taken notes faster but it's not a skill I expected to have much use for later in life. I could already see that the computer was going to pretty much kill handwriting.

>This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down.

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.

No, you can write cursive faster than printing--that's why it was invented. It's just that it takes enough practice doing it that it becomes muscle memory--it's not something that can be done well as a conscious act because the reaction cycle is too short.

It's like driving stick, you can't consciously operate the clutch and gearshift smoothly. When you're trying to start the system is very sensitive to the amount of pressure, balancing it for maximum power transfer without slowing the engine too much requires a feedback loop shorter than you can consciously do. Shifting gears is a lot more forgiving but if you're going to simply take your foot off the clutch you must have a reasonable match between the RPM of each side--and even if you have both a speedometer and tachometer you can't actively be looking at them while you're trying to drive.

> Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at al

Signatures are not cursive.

In practice it works out great, this is yet another example of the whole "contrarian-means-im-smart" thing that's entirely too prevalent here on HN.

Cursive is there for exactly what the other person said, it's much faster to write than print. There are generations of people who have successfully written and read large swathes of cursive, yet somehow this person thinks they know better, and their explanation for it is akin to a new way of writing (which is what cursive is) and recommendations on practicing it.

queue xkcd reference about standards.

It might be much faster to write when you spend many hours per week writing on paper. I don't even spend spend many hours writing on paper per year! Abandoning cursive should habe been put up for debate already back when phones displaced letters in personal communication.

It doesn’t need to be on paper, taking notes with a tablet and stylus is a use-case as well.

Cursive is dying, at least in the US it's not taught in school anymore.

I was responding to the idea that it's slower to write put forth by the other poster.

* In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down*

And right there is one of the crucial cognitive and proprioceptive benefits of handwriting over ‘keyboarding’.