I forgot how to write!

In My Humble Opinion
1

Sophia, my daughter, is earning “Excellents” (or whatever) for her cursive penmanship, and it does look great, especially from a 10yo.

A couple of weeks ago she was with a friend of hers who commented on Sophia’s handwriting, adding “You should see my Daddy’s handwriting - it’s bad.” Hearing that, Sophie took up the challenge:

“My Dad’s writing is worse.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Uh-huh.”

The contest thus being offered and met, they approach me with Sophia asking if I could sign my name to show Angelica how bad my writing is. So I wrote my name, but then Angelica made a pretty cogent point:

“All grownups write their name bad, they just get lazy about it.”

Not too sure about that “all”, but many (if not most) of us do. So I responded:

“Well, how about I write a full sentence? There’s a famous sentence that uses all 26 letters - ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ - how about I do that?”

So I bend over the paper, pen in hand, and start to write…

But I can’t. I could not remember how to write cursive!

And I still can’t, weeks later (I just tried - I couldn’t remember how to do a ‘b’ and make it link to the ‘r’.) It’s a skill lost due to 25+ years of typing and block printing on forms. To be honest, other than school, I can’t remember the last time I wrote anything substantial in cursive.

Anybody else have this happen to them?

2

Nope, can’t say it has. Of course, I frequently write (thank you, sympathy, congratulatory) cards to people.

3

Absolutely. I print in capital block letters and have for years and years now.

I can barely even do that.

4

At this moment, I couldn’t write a capital Q in cursive to save my life. And I’m not 100% about capital Z, either. But otherwise, I think I’m good. But I will admit that my writing is much, much sloppier now than it was when I was doing it in 4th grade.

5

I just tried, and wow, yes, I remembered. It has to have been over 25 years for me too. But I did have a problem with the b and the j.

6

Oh, yes! Not talking about cursive though.

I used to have perfect block style printing skills at a job I worked at for almost 30 years where I wrote myself a ‘to do’ list and also sent notes to others. Very legible, clear, readable font type writing.

Then I was un-employed for 18 months and almost all my corespondance was typed on a computer.

When I went back to work in a completely unrelated field, I found that my writing skills had suffered a great deal.

It has taken almost all of those 18 months of writing little notes to get the skills back. I simply didn’t use them and lost them.

7

I learned cursive in fourth grade. I forgot it by fifth grade.

8

I stopped in 8th grade.

I have a problem signing my full name. Meaning, if I have to use my full first name and my middle name, it’s a mess.

9

Y’all are mistaken in equating “cursive” with D’Nealian script or some other gawdawful, curlicue-infested schoolmarm’s scourge. Everyone can have decent handwriting of their own design without having to resort to block letters.

10

Whatever it’s called, I can’t do it anymore.

11

Of course you can. Just do it. You don’t have to remember the letterforms that your third grade teacher taught you. Just make up your own. You don’t have to remember what the b looks like in D’Nealian or how it links up to r. Make your own b and your own r and link them up in whatever way feels comfortable to you. Your handwriting is in your hand, not in some dusty textbook.

12

Yeah, but even when I knew how to do it, my handwriting sucked. And if I made up my own letters, the damn thing would be unreadable, almost by definition. :wink:

13

To the extent that this is true, it’s because you decided it will be true.

14

When letter forms deviate from the standard, people say that the handwriting “sucks” and is “illegible.” So I must conform to the standard so people can read it, correct? Otherwise I can draw a division sign, call it “A”, and tell people they don’t know how to read. :slight_smile:

So I don’t see how making up non-standard shapes is going to solve anything.

And you’re right about one thing - there is absolutely no motivation for me to relearn this skill. I haven’t had to use it in 25+ years, and I don’t think that will change in the future.

15

No, this isn’t true actually. There isn’t a “standard” when it comes to letterforms. There are archetypes and the human mind is very flexible in recognizing forms that vary quite widely. That’s why your word processing software offers you hundreds of typefaces. That’s why that just walking around and going about your business you can see dozens of different letter styles in a day. That’s why even though no two people’s handwriting is the same, you can read almost all of it.

What makes a particular person’s handwriting “suck” is not deviation from a “standard” but rather inelegant shaping, excessive slanting, lack of care, attempted adherence to ugly schoolmarm letterforms, and failure to sufficiently vary one letterform from another.

If you think your handwriting sucks or is illegible, you can change that in five minutes, by looking at a simple, elegant script, such as this one. It will take you a little bit of practice, but not much. You just have to teach yourself to care what your handwriting looks like.

And notice that script. There are no loops, no curlicues, and no letterforms that take any effort to remember. They’re just basic shapes. You decide for yourself how and where you want to join the letters, and no matter what you decide, it’s guaranteed to be legible and less sucky than trying to recreate the script that you were taught in third grade. And it will also be unique, because no matter what, someone else who uses this script will make different decisions about joining letters, and, of course, no two people are going to make these things look exactly the same unless they’re trying to.

And doubtless, there are times when you have to write things by hand, either for yourself or someone else. If you think your handwriting sucks or you avoid writing things because it embarrasses you, there’s nothing easier and faster to fix.

16

Since taking a computer-based job … and then after a few years of that, a different computer-based job … my handwriting has taken a complete turn for the worse. For a while, all I wrote was a running list of tasks at work, and my grocery lists and To-Do post-its at home.

Then I got a grocery list app (so I can synch with the Other Shoe) and now I can barely scrawl reminders to myself anymore. The muscle memory in my hands has been replaced with touch-typing muscle memory.

Relevant Oatmeal comic here.

17

For whatever reason, I never learned to write cursive with slanted letters; I always write them straight up. Not that I have used cursive much, aside from signing my name, since high school, although I still remember how to do it; after all, it has only been 8 years.

Also, I wonder if there are people who have forgotten to write period, whether cursive or print (your name doesn’t count); certainly, in today’s computer/text message/email-oriented society the need to write is becoming less and less.

18

What’s interesting is that cursive is supposed to be easier, and yet so many of us switched back to printing as soon as we could. I remember doing so in 7th grade, wondering what would happen if I just starting handing in my assignments printed instead of the usual cursive. Nothing happened, and I haven’t used cursive since.

And even printing is tough now. I often see notes that I’ve written where the words just sort of end half-way through, and I have no idea what I was trying to write.

I feel confident I could write in cursive, although a few of the capital letters might take some head scratching before I got them right.

19

I use a mixture of cursive and block letters, often pausing, wondering how to do the next letter. Especially now that I’m married and have to add a whole new last name onto the end (I appended it rather than losing any of my previous name).

The results usually end in the UPS guy asking “and your last name is…?”

20

I never learned joined-up-writing (as we called it when I was a kid) at all, it just fell through the cracks as the curriculum was in a state of flux throughout my school years. But I think they also anticipated the future, that as printing was more legible it would be a more useful skill to learn.

I also took typing, but that didn’t take. I’m a two finger typist, though pretty speedy I suppose.