Do they still teach cursive?

In My Humble Opinion
121

I was forced to learn and use cursive and it was always the slower method for me. I switched to an ordinary print style as soon as I could.

The evidence that cursive is faster is essentially non-existent. Comparisons between students taught different styles show that a mixed style is fastest:

An important issue relating to the teaching of handwriting concerns the style that should be learned at school (manuscript or cursive). Whereas some countries choose to teach both styles (e.g., Canada), other countries choose to teach only one (e.g., France). Our research had three main underlying goals, namely (1) to observe and describe the handwriting styles spontaneously used by fourth and fifth graders according to the first style learned at school; (2) to describe the evolution of handwriting between the fourth and fifth grades; and (3) to examine the relationship between speed, legibility, and handwriting style. The results revealed that the effects of country, grade level, handwriting style, and handwriting instruction were significant. Quebec children wrote faster than French children did, but their handwriting was less legible. Cursive handwriting was the slower style, whereas mixed handwriting seemed to be more efficient. Handwriting speed and legibility improved from fourth to fifth grade.

Not that this one study is the end-all-be-all either, but cursive proponents always trot out this unsupported canard that cursive is faster, even though it makes little sense and in any case there’s no positive evidence for the claim.

122

My only claim is that my cursive is faster than— well, that is what they made us use, and therefore I never bothered to learn any other style!

If you can write faster than me using “mixed handwriting”, whatever that is, then I have absolutely no reason to doubt you. I would be sceptical if you claimed you could write twice as fast, though.

ETA an interesting exercise would be to program legibility + ergonomic+ speed criteria into a computer and derive “optimal” letter shapes under various constraints. I cannot recall seeing that, but it would be very similar to some of the stuff already done in the published literature.

123

So how long ago did they stop hanging the cursive alphabet around classrooms? I can’t believe we actually learned to write that way, including all the bizarre capitals.

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I have an idea that if you are using a quill pen, or a dip pen with a metal nib, or a fountain pen, cursive is better and faster.

Paper today is also ultra-smooth compared with the paper of earlier times.

Modern pens and modern paper make a difference to the style of writing that works better. Cursive is relic of the past.

125

This is interesting to me. They didn’t teach you how to “print” (aka manuscript) first? That’s how I learned. Then I learned cursive, which I used throughout school (except with math or using symbols–e.g. molecular formulas–which is why @Hari_Selon’s post surprised me). Yet I never had any problems returning to print.

It just wasn’t until college that I learned that some people just stuck with print, and that this was common. And I’d noticed that my fast cursive became illegible, and discovered I could write faster more legibly with manuscript. But switching back was like nothing had changed–if anything, my manuscript looks a bit childish.

So did you not learn manuscript at all, or was it just too brief and you didn’t retain it?

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And even it weren’t faster, it might have been more legible with running ink and stuff. Cursive uses the connected lines as part of the letterforms, rather than obscuring them or picking up the pen a bunch to avoid them, which could produce smears.

127

A couple of other interesting constraints: to what degree are you willing to deviate from “normal” letterforms; and how optimal do you want each pair of letters to be?

Regarding the first point, perhaps some people remember “Grafitti” for the PalmPilot. It used mostly one-stroke letters that generally resembled conventional ones, but had some differences, like a T that was written more like a 7. The simplification was for the benefit of the crude recognition technology, but had the side-effect of speeding up the writing.

I haven’t seen anything on the latter, but what I mean by that is that one can imagine different letters based on what came previously (or what’s coming next). For example, the start/end point on an O could be at the top or bottom, depending on whether the previous letter ended up at the top or bottom (for example, an I that could be drawn upward or downward). All this would be harder to learn, but could be faster for someone well-practiced.

It might be roughly 2x for the same level of legibility–but that’s taking into account that even fairly sloppy print is (for me) as readable as accurate cursive. For equal levels of sloppiness I agree, it’s not 2x; perhaps more like 20%.

128

We (I, anyway) could read printed letters, from pre-school, and in any case they made sure we knew them (obviously, we had to be able to read books and other texts), but we never had to write in “print”, and were not taught to do so, no. It was not like the Arabic curriculum (or, evidently, yours!) where you start with one style of calligraphy and suddenly, in fifth or sixth grade, have to master another one.

Penmanship takes a few years to really master, and all of our assignments were done in cursive, so that is what got retained. I suppose you may have had a lesson (not in first grade, but sometime) where you had to write your name and/or a couple of words in blackletter, but that one day did not make you a Carolingian scribe, right? Because practice makes perfect.

Mathematics is an interesting case, because you then have to learn all the Greek letters (plus the odd Fraktur, Hebrew, whatever). But you are not writing words, so the exact handwriting “style” is not that relevant. Though a few of the letters do have “variant” shapes you must recognize and you also have to be able to distinguish ϖ from ω, ν from υ, ζ from ξ, etc. You pretty much just have to deal with it…

Each letter (potentially) has an initial, medial, and final form; as for pairs, you can have contextual ligatures where the individual letters change shape. No idea if that is systematically taught anywhere, but it naturally occurs in some people’s handwriting. At the same time one is not forced to join up every (or any!) pair of letters, nor must a single letter consist of only 1 stroke.

Some old papers experimented with various cost functions like minimizing the mean square of the third derivative of position, fourth derivative, derivative of the torque, and similar. There must be some more up-to-date models eliminating much of the guesswork.

This still does not address legibility. It would be fun to design a completely novel alphabet as an aside, and I feel we should allow some degree of originality/flexibility, but there should probably be a training set with a baseline of normal handwriting (modern + possibly some older) so that the computer does not start making up glyphs from scratch. We will need a handwriting-recognition module (with tuneable parameters) to estimate the difficulty reading it. A generative adversarial network would (also) be useful here, especially as far as it can extract some data about the acceptable variation of letterforms as well as figuring out words in context.

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Huh. Maybe that’s a Montessori thing. I had assumed it was done everywhere, as, even when cursive was still taught, I always saw kindergarteners and first graders (ages 5-7 for non-Americans) writing in print. I was definitely taught the print letterforms first, and didn’t get to cursive until second grade or so.

What I find weird with Greek and other forms are all the conventions that differ from the printed forms, and how I don’t really see anyone teaching these. I had to just pick them up via osmosis, seeing various math teachers writing them on the board, and seeing which ones were the ones most commonly used.

“Lowercase” zeta seems to get the most variations, though any attempts to make the Greek letters distinct from similar Latin ones is interesting. As for Fractur–that’s when I most often see Cursive come back out. Well, that and for lowercase L to distinguish it from 1.

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For me, writing in cursive is slower. Partly due to the fact I rarely do it. The assumption is that slower is automatically a bad thing. Speed is efficiency.

Slower handwriting is much more likely to be legible, so it may be a trade off. I take a lot of notes - in a sort of printing shorthand. I write a lot of notes that others may need to read, and these tend to be printed slightly less quickly. The script writing of other people tends to be harder to read. Sometimes very hard.

Only a few of students, when I was a student, taped lectures. I am willing to concede people learn in different ways. For an average class, it would not help me much. I guess it could in theory for a specific class if it was tricky, had no textbook, or the prof was a poor communicator. It is more likely the student has a learning style they think works for them than merely taping lectures to impress others. (Would you be impressed?)

Probably wrong, but I think Latin has six declensions and have read some Baltic or East European languages gave up to eighteen. Yikes. Not sure Japanese has tons of declensions. There are more verb than noun changes as you go from polite to very polite to excessively so. But my knowledge is admittedly basic.

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My youngest (14) has never learned it.

I think it’s only use nowadays is actually be able to read it. I mean, some people’s handwriting is hard enough to read anyways, throw in some script that you’ve never seen before and it’s gotta be tough.

To me it’s only useful for extended writing and hardly anybody does that anymore.

132

She teaches in a state school, not very competitive for entrance. From what I gather, her students take a hairdresser/Starbucks approach. “I want XYZ and I’m paying to be here (I’m the customer) so it’s on you to accomodate me.” She pushes back of course.

She tells the parents that it’s illegal for her to discuss the kid’s grades with them, which is true. After that first test, they drop the issue I guess.

She also tells me that today’s B.A. is about equivalent to a HS Diploma of 30 years ago.

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Slight hijack: I suspect there are plenty of students at universities, even competitive ones, who don’t know why they are there; except that everyone around them assumed that of course they’d go to college.

I’d actually suspect a smaller proportion of those are at community college; those are probably more likely to have students whose friends and/or family didn’t make that assumption.

We were taught printing first, then cursive; which I think was pretty much the standard, at least in the USA. Printing was thought easier for young children to manage; we weren’t expected to develop the coordination for cursive till, I think it was second or third grade (USA, about 7 or 8 years old) but don’t remember for sure.

134

Latin has 5 noun declensions. Finnish has 51 (or something like that). In Japanese IIRC nouns basically do not change when adding postpositional case markers. Not sure what we can conclude, but would love to hear more about the respective handwriting curricula. The Romans had wax tablets. Old Roman (majuscule) cursive [ripped from Wikimedia:]

In Finland, AIUI handwriting (at least the modern cursive style) has been dropped in favor of typing.
Don’t know about Japan (pencil? fountain pen? brush? computer keyboard, like Finland?) I found some photos of kids practicing Japanese-style calligraphy with a brush, but have no idea how compulsory that class is.

135

That class might be art and not handwriting? A similar defence might be made for cursive. I admit it is not very useful. But it is not useless.

Latin has a nominative and vocative declension, but the latter is not always spelled out as they tend to be the same. So six is not wrong, nor is five. I misused the word declension, though, thinking nouns were declined while verbs were conjugated. This is not so, conjugation is a subset. In some languages adverbs are also declined. I decline this idea.

136

It’s a mix of writing and cursive. I’m not sure there’s one official mix, but my own writing is a mix of the two; it has a lot more breaks between letters, I cross and dot my letters as I go along, I use connecting strokes when it makes sense in efficiency and I use printed forms when it doesn’t.

For example, Palmer method (which I was taught) has all these unnecessary loops and squiggles and backtracks that slow me down. Why must a capital L start up top, go from left to right, loop, go down, loop back around from left-to-right and finish? In my method it’s just down-right, like the printed L. What the hell is up with that capital I? Just one simple stroke! Why do we have this madness that in no way resembles an I? What drugged-out design was that?

Lowercase “e” I like in cursive. When I write “the” I don’t start with a lead-in stroke for the “t” because why? I make a printed “t” and then use the cross bar of that “t” to flow into a cursive “he” because there it makes sense to do so. Essentially I have a type of “th” ligature.

So those are examples of print-writing. Looking through some notes, it looks like I’m at around 30-50% printed forms and 50-70% connected writing, depending on my mood, although not all by-the-book Palmer method cursive.

137

Still is. Back in the sixties, like you, I was taught printing first, and then cursive.

My oldest child, in second grade, hasn’t started with cursive yet. Next year (or would have been next year - we’ll see how the third-grade curriculum is altered to deal with the educational disruption of the previous year).

The various cursive hands were developed so that people could write faster. I don’t think the ability to take notes at a good speed, in real time, in a variety of circumstances, will ever be obsolete.

You won’t always have your laptop with you. And even if you do, batteries die, and there won’t always be power source. But you can always have a notebook and a pencil with you. I always do.

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Sanskrit is older than Latin and one of my pet peeves was learning by rote the declensions. Hindi on the other hand is simple and the declensions are easy to pick up.

One can learn to speak Hindi pretty well just by talking to others. A lot of Indians from non-Hindi speaking regions of India do this. But not Sanskrit : you have to formally memorize declensions / conjugations to learn it.

139

Hence my “extended writing” caveat. You, certainly could have a notebook and pen on you all the time in case you need to take copious notes. But most people don’t. Maybe if you have a profession that requires it? I literally cannot remember the last time I hand wrote something other than a signature or something else that could fit on a sticky note. Probably college, eons ago.

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Absolutely, not everyone will have to do it all the time. You don’t. I do, sometimes, at work. And I suppose I don’t have to, outside of work, but it’s quite useful at times to be able to do so quickly.

And who could know, as a child, what their need will be, if any, to take notes ten or twenty or thirty years down the road?

So I think it’s a skill worth teaching to children.