Some (most?) left-handed people in my experience, or at least my elementary school teacher who was, hook their left hands around over top so that they’re performing draw strokes with their left hand. I totally can see that especially with cursive writing, constantly pushing the pen instead of drawing it is going to lead to some bad times.
The one thing about cursive that hasn’t been mentioned in this thread is that it’s less tiring. Printing might be faster faster making the flourishes, but those flourishes make it easier on the muscles in your hand to not have to constantly accelerate the tip of the pen in different directions constantly. In cursive there’s generally some flow to every movement without the jerkiness associated with having to lift your pencil constantly to print neatly.
I also agree that the most useful form of handwriting is one that’s a combination of cursive and printing, using the best parts of both. Now, it makes it the least legible, but when you’re writing something for someone else to read in these times, you’re going to be typing it. You were gong to be typing such things for almost the entirety of the time since typewriters were first used. Handwriting since they is mainly for notes to yourself or others you are frequently communicating with who can learn to read your chicken scratch.
I work in a Montessori school, where they do teach it. Since it’s a public school, however, we get new students coming in who never learned it and are past the grade where it’s taught. When I learned cursive in second grade my cursive writing was immediately neater than my printing. I returned to printing in college, and now only write cursive when I sign my name.
Most people’s signatures barely qualify as cursive. There’s also no rule that a signature has to be in cursive, or really even be the same as the person’s name. Mine is ostensibly in cursive, but kinda trails off at the end into an illegible wavy line. Doesn’t matter; it’s just my mark. Anyone can come up with a scribble that they feel represents them and is repeatable enough for someone else to match.
I worked with historical documents in an archive. Knowing how to read cursive was absolutely necessary, as well as familiarity with palaeography.
I also supervised [master-level] interns–hoping to secure archival positions after graduation–who couldn’t perform basic duties because they couldn’t read the documents with which they were working. It was shocking, actually.
The first time I came aware this was an issue was about 15-20 years ago, hanging out with a couple that were about a decade younger than me. They mentioned they had never learned cursive, I asked how they signed their names and they looked befuddled. “Your signature isn’t your actual written name, it’s just your signature!” My friend’s name started with a B, his signature was a capital B with a consistent squiggle after it that meant nothing. They found the fact that I actually wrote my name out to sign things to be quaintly amusing.
In this new electronic age signatures seem to be dying a slow death anyway.
NB the purpose of “cursive” writing is not primarily to achieve super speed, as for taking dictation. That would be shorthand. Of course, a practical cursive style ought to have a natural calligraphic flow, which makes it comfortable to write, and that should influence the model of writing that “they” teach pupils.
Example (Chinese regular vs. semi-cursive):
In English, a practical choice might be some sort of “business hand”.
Personally, the only time I sign my full name in cursive is on legal documents and when I vote (voting is 100% mail-in in this state), because I want my name to be plain and clear on my ballot envelope, and that’s how I signed it when I registered to vote and I need to make sure my current signature matches it.
Otherwise, it’s just the first and last initial with a bit of squiggle after each which vaguely resembles how I’d sign my name if I wanted it to be clear.
If this is indeed the case, that “they” are not teaching students to read and write back as far as the 19th or even 20th century any more than Elizabethan handwriting, that is a significant and possibly deliberate cultural decision.
I did learn cursive in school, but I still don’t think there was ever a situation in seventeen years of education where it was necessary that I be able to directly read some old handwritten document. There are fields where that may be necessary (such as the aforementioned work with historic documents in an archive), but there are lots of fields where there are necessary technical skills that are not taught to elementary school students. Maybe the solution is that people going to grad school for that kind of thing have to take a unit on ancient handwriting, like how someone who goes to grad school to study German history might have to learn how to deal with reading the kurrent script.
I guess you are right, though it sounds like the “old handwritten documents” in question would include my grocery lists, postcards, and anything I might write on a blackboard (if I did not have a computer presentation prepared).
I also learned cursive for a good chunk of two or three years at school, which only occurred after normal writing* was taught; I suspect that reading modern cursive requires much less study than that, if it’s really so important.
*I actually think they taught handwriting three different times. Once for normal writing (“printing”), once for a special form of “printing” that had little tails on some letters to prepare us for the idea of maybe one day connecting the letters, and one final time for cursive. In retrospect, I wonder if the whole thing was designed by some educational textbook lobbyist to make sure they’d get to sell three sets of handwriting curriculum.
Agree with other posters: I’m cool with cursive being an optional thing for someone with interest, not part of the curriculum.
I also think a basic cursive is easy to learn; though I was taught it in school, my handwriting was dreadful until I decided one day to just go through letter by letter experimenting with what is quick but also neat.
There is a style of cursive writing in Chinese as a matter of practicality, but legibility is an even bigger problem than with English. I see people regularly struggle to read handwritten notes, including ones written by themselves.
In theory I get why cursive is considered more efficient. But, in practice, the faster I write, the sloppier it gets. And it seems to me that cursive is much harder to read when it gets sloppy.
Whenever I do write in cursive, it’s usually an aesthetic choice, and I choose to write really neatly, taking more time than manuscript. Well, either that or it’s my signature, and I deliberately try to make it messier to make it faster to write. It’s my capital T that is distinctive, anyways.
Do most students, or interested adults, wind up working with the original archival documents, though? The important cultural info is in the words, not in their font; and people who wrote in cursive haven’t been taught in cursive for many years, anyway. Not only did I not read any Shakespeare in handwriting, I read Shakespeare in printed text back in the 1960’s when we were most definitely expected to read and write cursive, and almost nobody typed their papers until college.
Is it drastically harder to learn cursive in one’s 20’s instead of when one’s 10? (Serious question; I have no idea.) Because, if not, it seems to me to make a lot more sense for those who are going to need it to learn it when they decide to go into such work. I do agree that interns expecting to take such positions after graduation should learn cursive, before graduation and ideally before their internships.
Those who want to read their old family letters could learn it to do so, or could hire someone to transcribe the letters. [ETA: hey, wait a minute. Maybe there’s my winter work-from-home job!]
Nobody’s ever going to read some of my mother’s notes – she made notes to herself in shorthand, which she’d become expert in back in the 1930’s and '40’s. Shorthand is idiosyncratic – while one starts with a standard version, people make up their own shorthand for the particular words they use most.
Writing requires training muscle memory; reading doesn’t. But reading even reasonably modern cursive does require learning multiple versions of some of the letters. I was taught a capital F that seems to have nearly disappeared; though if I write it on a check the amount still seems to come through all right. Maybe they just translate it by the figure version on the same check, though; I’ve never asked.
Is learning to READ cursive really that difficult for someone who didn’t learn to write it? In six years as a History major I can only think of one case where my primary sources hadn’t already been typeset for me. That was facsimiles from John Quincy Adams’ diary. I struggled with the first couple of entries, but quickly learned his “hand”.
I can’t answer that directly, but I did learn to read and write Hiragana (one of three Japanese writing systems) in my 40’s. It did not seem overly difficult at the time, but who knows… maybe my childhood training in cursive helped me get a handle on it quicker.
