It takes about five minutes to learn to read cursive script. The hard part is training kids to write it neatly, not learning to parse it.
Gesture typing is much, much faster than pressing individual characters IME.
If you’re teaching thumb typing, you may as well also throw in how to send messages via telegraph 
Huh. Just got back from an SF Con and at one of the science panels the (older) fellow next to me was taking notes on his mini-tablet with an app that let him manually write with a stylus on electronic Post-It squares. Although I was not intrigued enough to ask perhaps that was the reason.
But apparently it is too much trouble to even take that five minutes to teach them.
If that question was a response to my comment about my lecturer friend, it’s because one of the classes she teaches involves specialist software, and while teaching students to use it, she’s noticed that in the last year or so, some of the teenagers are hunt-and-peck typing, and seeming pretty unfamiliar with computers, which is something she’d only previously come across with the odd mature student. Seems they’d managed to use a smartphone for almost everything.
Yes. That’s because school should be teaching important, mind-expanding, and useful things, not obscure arts and crafts.
On a regular keyboard, I hunt and peck, and last I measured, I was over 60 WPM doing it. I’d probably be even faster if I had the discipline to force myself to learn to type with all fingers, but the return on investment isn’t high enough for me to justify it.
And for what it’s worth, I’ve seen high-schoolers who can literally type on their phones faster than I can read. I have no idea how their brains are able to even process words that quickly, but apparently they can.
I wonder if the super-fast phone typists are not using some sort of predictive text input to boost their speed.
The ultimate way to input the most text with the least effort is to get someone else to do it.
Oh, probably, but no matter what your input method, you still need to be able to think the words that fast.
I’m always impressed by that. I’m too fat-fingered to type anything approaching a quick pace on my iPhone or iPad. My keyboard skills are solid. Somewhere just over 100 wpm. But on the phone? Forget it. I constantly hit the key above, the key below, half the time I try to hit the space character I end up hitting the period just to the right of it. It’s a mess. I hate hate hate typing on my phone. I swear I was faster typing even on the old flip-phones.
And once again, I feel older than dirt :o
<Rain Man> I have excellent writing <RM> and I enjoy doing it. Possibly one of the things I do best and it’s virtually useless.
I don’t type with my thumbs, mostly because when I started texting (less than two years ago!)my left thumb had suffered some kind of injury that rendered it useless so I had to learn to do it with my index finger. Oddly enough, now my other thumb is similarly affected (Dr. thinks possibly rheumatism) so it’s still old lady style pointer finger typing for me. That being said, wouldn’t knowing how to touch type, as in, knowing where the keys are, pretty much facilitate knowing how to thumb type? I mean, even with my pointer I can type pretty fast because I naturally know where the proper letter is.
Possibly a bit overstated. Language, spelling and orthography all change over time. Now media formats do, too. Inability of the average person to read historical documents in the original is inevitable. The Constitution is only about 200 years old, and, yes, it’s legible and the language is understandable to the average person of today who was taught cursive. However, you are likely to have a problem trying to read a document written in 16th or 17th century secretary hand, even if it’s in English. Reading one of the original copies of the Magna Carta? Good luck, even leaving aside the fact that once you puzzle out the calligraphy, it’s in Medieval Latin.
Modern Germans have not been taught to read Fraktur scripts or Blackletter typefaces for some decades - a similar sort of thing.
It is not lost to us, however. We are just in the position of having to rely on specialists, usually academics, to transcribe the document into a modern form. If we discovered a new letter apparently written by, say, Thomas Wolsey, and believed to be of historical importance, it would get transcribed into something a person could read without going blind. A few people will have floppy drives around for many decades just so we can read old data stored on that medium.
You don’t have to write your signature in cursive. Your signature is just the way you write your name. Your kids could have very well had a printed signature. Conversely, one doesn’t need to learn to draft the entire alphabet, capital and lowercase, to be able to write their names in a squiggly way.
For that matter, your signature doesn’t even need to be recognizable as your name. Mine originated as my actual name written in cursive, but by now it’s nothing more than a scribble in which one might possibly be able to make out two letters. Nor is that sort of thing at all uncommon.
My oldest daughter is 21. She only learned cursive because the extra curricular group she was a part of after school taught her. The 18 yr old never learned. She did teach herself to sign her name, but that is all.
I am like others here. I quit writing cursive many years ago. I print everything I write and type most things.
My signature is not even close to readable. I would not be able to write a single page letter in cursive any more.
My kids have used laptops to do school work over the years, but for the most part, only for long docs. I think my youngest wrote a paper using voice typing a while back and just edited the few parts that were not correct to begin with.
It is a crazy new world with the technological advancements.
It is almost odd to type on a computer and not have it autocomplete or autocorrect words. If my medium does not have built in spell check, I have to go outside to make sure I am not mispelling words.
See, this is the part I don’t understand. If you know how to write in cursive, why wouldn’t you? The whole point of cursive is that it’s easier/faster to write, because you aren’t lifting your pen from the paper after each letter.
It’s easier to make the marks, but it’s not necessarily easier to make the marks legible. Even to the person writing them.
I graduated in '79. In third grade we were taught cursive and much time was spent on our penmanship. I still prefer to write in cursive. It’s quicker and looks nicer. My son graduated in 2003. Very little time was spent on cursive in any grade. He hated when I would leave him a note written in cursive. He’d say, “Mom, I can’t read that kind of writing.” !!