I think you were being sarcastic but I feel a need to comment on this idea that anyone good at mathematics must be a mental calculator. I have an undergrad degree at math but I think slowly and do not bother to do even simple arithmetic in my head if I can help it. Being a mathematician has little to do with being able to do arithmetic in your head.
re: the OP, I have very poor penmanship but I hate to do any writing in any form so my penmanship is probably more due to my attitude than any inherent lack of skill. Cursive writing is faster than printing though so it’s still a worthwhile skill to learn for notetaking. If you have problems with writing quickly though, just get a tape recorder. Cursive writing shouldn’t be a required skill.
It’s easy enough to function without it.
My older son is about to start kindergarten in August. When we went to the school for a get-acquainted affair a couple of months ago, the K teachers told us that they teach a style of handwriting (it has a name) where the letters have large curvy serifs at the last stroke, which looked completely stupid to me. The explanation was that it should make cursive easier to learn later. I would love to have raised a stink about what I see as a dumb reason, but there were many other parents there and I didn’t want to be rude.
So they’re teaching letters that are the wrong shape, and people spend 98% of their lives reading printed letters. They do this to make cursive “easier,” which might help in the remaining 2%, or it might not, because I seemed to have learned cursive just fine even though I learned to print normally first.
Well, at least your son is going to be taught some form of cursive; when I was at school penmanship was skimmed over so fast that I don’t think we spent even a full week on it.
My mother had the most beautiful, regular, clear handwriting and we had a lot of old books at home, so I dug around and found we had a textbook for Parker-style penmanship. I practiced and practiced on my own and never got it right. On the upside, I developed an interest in calligraphy, and, oddly, turned out to be very good at it! 
CurtC, you have brought up something that also bothers me. My son has a learning disability and has lots of trouble with his handwriting and printing. He is now 13. When he was younger, the school taught the form of printing that you described, and when I asked why, they gave the same reason.
Guess what the result was with my son? He never understood the essential elements of a letter. For example, if it was a lowercase “h”, he didn’t recognize that the essential form of the letter was one upright line with a hump to one side. When he would print the letter, he made a very exaggerated upward-pointing loop at the end of the letter. I think he never really understood that an “h” was a simple form, he thought it was this big complicated thing. In my opinion this made it much more difficult for him to learn to print (and eventually write, which he does very little). He was trying to “do too much” when printing the letter, which made it extra difficult for him.
So in my opinion I think that form of printing is a lot of crap!!!
I had an AP English teacher who required all assignments to be handed in in cursive. She was adamant about the importance of neat, legible, and nice-looking script.
I went to Catholic schools for grades K-12. Handwriting (cursive) began in 3rd grade, and was practised daily (for 45 minutes each day) until the end of 4th grade. In 5th grade, you could be marked down if you wrote illegibly (and I’m only 20, it’s not like this was decades and decades ago).
To this day, I generally prefer to print, honestly. But both my printing and my writing are incredibly neat. I’ve had many people glance at my papers and ask, “Did you go to Catholic school?” When I asked how they knew that, they replied with, “because you have excellent penmanship.” 
Oh, and Achernar, I know you weren’t addressing me, but if you want to see my handwriting/printing, I’ll scan a sample. And, I’ll have you know that my math work (I’m minoring in math) is one of the areas where I always write in cursive. Wanna see?
Its known by graphologists that people who DON’T write cursive write faster. Yeap, its against intuition, but true
Its known by graphologists that people who DON’T write cursive write faster. Yeap, its against intuition, but true
Hm … I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of things that graphologists “know” that the rest of us don’t.
Sure, zweisamkeit, I’d love to see your handwriting! There’s not a lot of that on the net for me to compare to, believe it or not. I personally have horrible cursive. I don’t write anything like that, except my signature, which I think I’m going to change over to print.
andy_fl, do you have a cite for that?
No way! I have to spend time remembering how in the world to draw cursive characters, print is easy.
Actualy for some I have to take a poll. . . . can anybody actualy remember how in the world that lowercase z is made? LOL!
[li]Cursive is more personal than print, making personal letters more effective.[*]Cursive is an art form that everyone can enjoy.[/ul]The OP also mentions cursive being the only legally binding way to sign a document. This has been addressed before too: Is it legal to print your signature? The short answer is yes. **[/li][/QUOTE]
No way! I have to spend time remembering how in the world to draw cursive characters, print is easy.
Actualy for some I have to take a poll. . . . can anybody actualy remember how in the world that lowercase z is made? LOL!
[quote]
[list]
[li]Cursive is more personal than print, making personal letters more effective.[/li][/ul]
True, I use a combination when doing personal letters.
But since I write at about 1 page per hour. . . . don’t do too many of those.
Learning cursive was 2 years of pain for me, even then I only learned about 70% or so of it.
Then again having a fine motor skills disability kind of biases me against the whole entire ‘hand writting’ thing.
Now my name is the only thing I can sign in cursive that does look good. Lots of practice.
Despite being taught cursive in school, I never got the hang of it. To this day, everything I write in cursive looks awful; I hate signing things because my signature is ugly as hell.
OTOH, I can print as fast as most people write cursive, and my handwriting is just as personal and twice as legible.
Uh, yeah. Come up from the previous letter, make a 3/4 circle that ends at the midpoint, make a very small loop and that small loop leads into the bottom elongated loop, which is the same as the bottom loop on a cursive ‘g’. Do it all in one smooth stroke.
And…why are you attempting to ‘draw’ cursive? It’s not drawing, it’s writing.
This thread is certainly a surprising one for me. I had no idea that there was such dislike for cursive.
I learned cursive in the 1st or 2nd grade (same teacher at the same small school for both years, so the details between the two grades tend to blur together). While I don’t have an explicit preference for writing in cursive or print, I find myself almost always using cursive when handwriting…it’s faster for me, and there a certain amount of aesthetic that my printing is lacking.
And, at the risk of sounding immodest, I think my cursive handwriting is excellent, and I’ve never received complaints about it. In fact, there was one teacher that was disappointed that I was going to submit my “writing journal” to her typed instead of handwritten, because she liked my handwriting so much.
To each their own.
This isn’t an answer, just a story:
On the SAT there is a part where they make you copy a statement about how you promise you haven’t cheated in script (they specifically tell you not to print it.) I never write in script so it took me about 3-4 minutes to copy about two lines of computer-printed words. It was very annoying because the proctor tried to resume the test before I was done, and I had to go back and finish the damn statement later. Many of my peers have similar stories. I don’t understand how writing something with little curls attached somehow makes it more legally binding than writing in legibile handwriting. Kind of ridiculous.
Handwriting is easier to falsify than cursive, each one has its own style of cursive, some more harder to copy than others…
Like zweisamkeit, I started learning cursive in third grade, by the second semester of third grade you were on your own, supposed to write in cursive all the works and tests…this continued thru my elementary school, although in fifth and sixth grade they gave us the option to either type the essays or use nice cursive. I used cursive for short essays, and type for longer projects. Oh, and I also learned typing starting in first grade.
Qwertyasdfg, the GRE has a similar statement. Mine looked absolutely horrible, and my friend’s was 100 times worse - I don’t know how anyone could ever use that for any sort of identification.
Well, I assume the GRE has dropped that now with the computerized test, because I don’t remember doing anything like that when I took it about a year and a half ago. I do remember that part of the SAT, in my opinion that was the most difficult part of the whole test.
Sorry, I should have specified this was the GRE subject test, which is still done on paper. I don’t even remember really what it said. Strange, considering they went through all that effort to make sure I read and understood it. One of the last things I can picture myself doing is claiming in court that somebody forged my handwriting on that, whether it’s in cursive or print.
Much of handwriting analysis, I’ve learnt, is through books and not the internet. Here is the book, if you are interested :
MCMENEMIN, BARBERA, VADUS, WHITING - An Investigation Of Cursive Versus Printing Characteristics In Handwriting - A research project. 1985 - 8 1/2" x 11"
On the internet you can see this (The closest reference I could find)
In general, people who write in print are more diplomatic with their head over heart approach and better organized and fast in their life. Whenever, a person who normally writes cursive, switches to print - it means the person is trying to highlight objectively what he or she is writing, print means head over heart. Often, a person when lying will change the slant backwards or write in print.
I can go on hours about handwriting analysis, but, anyways thats the gist.