This blew my mind. I understand the reasoning behind dropping it from the curriculum, but hearing that students couldn't do cursive really, blew my mind. And I'm not even sure why it surprised me so much!
Meanwhile I hate typing notes because I feel like typing forces me to think too linearly. Whereas in meetings I tend to end up with several clumps of loosely-connected notes, and I tend to spread them out somewhat evenly across the page. So even though I can type faster than I can write by hand, I still prefer writing by hand because of the freedom I get on paper. I also think the act of writing somehow helps me remember things better than typing. And e-ink just feels wrong, it's like the worst of both.
That is very false. It’s kind of slow compared to handwriting print-looking letters (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian)
Source: https://theproductiveengineer.net/is-it-faster-to-write-in-c...
And also for many years I wrote cursive, then I switched to something that looks like D’Neal, and it was somewhat faster and easier to read (but not super fast)
The origins of the cursive method are associated with practical
advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to
accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile,
easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also
run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils. [1]
I know that shorthand would decrease the time that I spend taking notes or would increase the quality of the notes.
Shorthand is something different.
[1] https://dlelegal.com/stenography-court-reporter-miami/
[2] https://planetdepos.com/trending/content/what-stenographer
D'Nealian is intended as a teaching script, so the claim is dubious to me.
That said, I definitely don't write in stereotypical looped cursive. I remember that I did learn D'Nealian in school, and my handwriting today is something like a hybrid. The main improvement in speed for me came from the ability to write entire words in a single flowing hand motion, rather than having to pick up the pen repeatedly between letters. Cursive provides a consistent method for doing that.
Every time I've tried to change to print, however, I inevitably get stuck on the fact that I write like a child for months and months before any improvement can be seen. It's just very embarrassing to hand someone a note that looks like it was written by an elementary schooler who just learned their letters.
Why? Because I can't read chickenscratch cursive, but I can read print no matter how badly it is written.
Writing is fundamentally a communication medium, so if the resulting text is unreadable your writing does not serve its most important and fundamental purpose of conveying yourself to others.
As for how to improve: Slow down and write more. That's really all there is to it.
I handwrite with a modified semi-linked italic cursive. It's about twice as fast as my printing, and I can go faster, if I let it turn into a scrawl. That can't be done with printing.
I don't do enough these days where I need something like that but, when I did more journalism where I was quoting people it might have been useful. A lot of meetings I'm in are recorded anyway and recording is pretty routine for interviews anyway.
The other thing with taking written notes versus typing is being behind a laptop screen can be a bit off-putting.
Does anyone else have this experience? Where note taking was deleterious to learning the content?
I swear by Pilot G2 gel roller pens (or an off-brand equivalent, there are a few.) They glide across paper very readily and the writing comes out a lot neater as a result.
The difference in thinking between writing and typing that you noted is interesting. It didn't seem to exist for me, but that might've been confounded by struggling to keep up with the professor — I was too focused on trying to get things written down to actually put any thought into whatever was being said, making it difficult to apply any sort of grouping to the notes on the fly.
It was a great relief when, partway through secondary school, I realised I could just drop it for print as it did wonders for my ability to read my own writing, and reduced the number of "?" markers on homework from teachers too.
But I never had trouble with taking notes. You get pretty fast at writing print if you do it all the time.
I still remember my college professor's surprise when I handed in a handwritten, but totally legible, essay complete with proper use of italics. For some reason people think you can't handwrite italics.
One of my engineer friends has picture-perfect print handwriting, like a gothic sans serif font. It's very impressive at how fast he can write and still have each letter look tidy and uniform.
I was dubious, so I googled.
According to this[1], 21 states require cursive as part of the curriculum, and some admittedly older data[2] suggests that 90% of students get some amount of cursive handwriting instruction.
[1] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/great... [2] https://drs.dadeschools.net/informationcapsules/IC0916.pdf
Honestly, I really do not understand all the complaning about cursive. Learning to read and write was harder (I imagine cause I don't actually remember struggling with it, it just came naturally) . Learning cursive is just a simple extension of it.
My memory of school was everything was required to be turned in cursive, but I was so bad at it that I wrote everything in print, then wrote a version in cursive, and then turned in both versions so there was one legible version and one version to fulfill the rules. It was a pain and I hated it, so it's a bad memory that it still feels cathartic to complain about.
I write by hand so rarely now that it hurts my hand to do. (And I was in the cursive cohort. Pretty useless skill in retrospect lol. It's just a way less legible version of regular handwriting.)
Pencils and ballpoints, and to a lesser but real extent most rollerballs, require so much force to mark the paper that you can't help getting a cramp. Fountain pen ink is thinner and flows more easily, so all you have to do is steer the pen. This makes a very significant difference.
Don't start with a gold-nibbed pen - both of those I named use steel. Gold admittedly feels nicer to use, but you need the transitional step to learn better habits; steel is much more forgiving of excess force, and you'll know on your own when you're ready for a more delicate and expressive nib.
I used to hate to write longhand, too. I've been using fountain pens for about half a decade now. A few days ago I used one to work out a complex idea over eight A5 pages with no need to pause save occasionally for thought, and my wrist wasn't sore afterward. Here as elsewhere, choosing the proper tool makes all the difference.
These days I mostly use fairly cheap gel pens. I actually prefer them in general to some more expensive pens I own.
This isn't true of handwriting vs. typing.
Also, definitely more volume of work happens on a computer at a keyboard. How meaningful it is is debatable. Recent events have shown what I believe Orwell said long ago, that most of what we write is just mindless concatenation of premade phrases. Computers make that easier, but it's not obvious that that activity is where the meaning comes in to work
That sounds really interesting, but my Google-fu failed me here; what is the full quote?
modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug.
I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
The most obvious response is: sometimes you have to fill out forms on the spot.
Also, I personally find that I have much greater retention for handwritten vs typed information.
Anyone who uses the latin alphabet will have the character shapes memorized, so I'm sure they'd do just fine for emergency use even if they'd basically never written before.
That said, a huge amount of handwriting curriculum is actually motor skills practice, and that's pretty important!
It's also free-form. If I want to include a sketch or some math, it's easy.
Studies support your anecdote: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/taking-notes-by-hand-c...
>https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/05/software-turn...
Are people referring to cursive as any type of manual writing?
Lately, people have been calling printing "manuscript", which is either silly or an attempt to dignify it.
Nowadays, some say, why learn handwriting? Why learn arithmetic? We have calculators and keyboards, after all.
It's sad, but there will be a revival someday.
So I went around for five years with two signatures on my license.
A bit of trivia: the joined letters of cursive were developed in response to the limitations of the feather quill. It was important to keep the nib in contact with the paper at all times to avoid splattering and other faults. Today the only reason to keep joins is efficiency, but the other flourishes of old-fashioned cursive are less important.
I use a simple pelikan jazz (nothing fancy) but still it’s pleasant.
This would be a better thought out argument if I weren't typing it from the toilet.
Our non-dominant hand almost gives us a preview of what this could be like, so it seems that spending time to upskill the articulation of our hands is necessary: so we might as well use that time to learn handwriting since it has the benefit of working without electricity and translates well into the aforementioned tools.
I think we spent a month+ working on cursive writing. Which for me was a waste of time. I did inform the teacher I believed it was pointless, as people would be typing in the future. This would have been maybe 1985, me in 1st or 2nd grade.
I’d die of shame if I were ever caught unable to write. The whole concept is ludicrous.
I doubt I'd be any more advanced in my life if my handwriting were better. In fact, looking back at the kids in school I know with beautiful handwriting and the ones who were messy, I don't see any real correlation. It's pretty random.
Contrast typing which requires an entire machine instead of a simple pencil or pen.
Note that as far as I'm concerned handwriting is different from cursive. We should absolutely teach kids how to write by hand. Teaching cursive as part of general curriculum, however, is a waste of time. Cursive is better relegated to being a hobby.
I hike, often remote and alone. One of the many safety precautions I take is leaving a whiteboard on my dash with my destination and the date. Anyone seeing that will immediately know whether there's a problem. (And there's label tape on there with a bunch of contact information, including the satellite equipment I'm carrying.)
The teachers each said they were unable to read cursive.
There is little need for most people to *learn* cursive these days beyond signatures. However, people should be able to *read* cursive for another lifespan because they're going to encounter it.
You could say the same for Spanish. They teach it K-12 in a lot of districts but somehow the students never become fluent and rapidly lose any skills they gain.
I know that this is wrong and that it's only in my head but I see pretty much all other writing that isn't in cursive as childish.
The sheer possibility that people might finish schools without knowing how to write in cursive is kind of worrying, because I fear that this is walking on a path towards a world where people stop writing by hand and in time even forget how to write...
And you might say that they won't forget because they constantly see and read the letters, but I can read hiragana and katakana, I can't write them though or it takes me quite a lot of thinking to get the image of the "letter" into my mind to be able to write it. And that's just because I don't write in then pretty much at all.
You lose what you don't use.
Handwriting can be just as easily done using print, and is how I've always handwritten everything. The only time I use cursive is when I sign stuff, and only because I followed everyone else using cursive to sign. Print is also generally much easier to read, too; regardless the skill or style of the writer.
This is distinctly different from WorProBaka ("word processing idiot"), where people of all ages (this affects nearly everyone, not just the young) forget how to write certain kanji simply because Kakijun (stroke order) and their overall complexity easily fade from memory without constant reinforcement from common use. These people can all still read the kanji they've forgotten how to write.
There's an informal style that uses printed capital letters connected to cursive lower letters. Solves a lot of those problems.
Also don't forget cursive capital Q.
While I think it will still be many generations before people can get away with not being able to hand write at all, I’m not so sure it’s a negative. I can type an order of magnitude faster than I can write, to the point where hand writing is frustrating. It just feels like it imposes such limits on expression to go so slowly.
That's not even getting into how terrible cursive is the write with ball-point pens.
Handwriting is an action, whereas cursive is a form of writing. Do we call handwriting Japanese "cursive"? Of course not.
You think finding an average American that does cursive is hard, finding an average Japanese that does cursive is even harder. :V