Measure for Measure quoted a fragment from a “KateGladstone” in post #32 above. Following the included link leads to a commercial site for handwriting-improvement products, which makes the missing post seem to be spam.
In defense of cursive writing, there may well be some benefits to both teaching it to elementary and older students and using it when an adult.
When I was working on my teaching credential in 2000-2001, one of the elementary ed professors mentioned that teaching dyslexic children how to write in cursive helped them determine which way letters faced and kept them from reversing or rearranging letters within a word as much. She may have been speaking from experience, because I can’t find a cite for it. She added that she didn’t expect a dyslexic child’s cursive hand to become legible without far more work and frustration than it was worth. She expected a dyslexic child to have reasonable accommodations, such as being able to type all assignments.
Psychology Today has an interesting blog talking about research which finds that writing in cursive activates far more areas of the brain than printing or typing. Makes sense to me as writing in cursive is fundamentally more difficult for most people. Considering that cursive demands far more fine motor control than printing, and that it draws on motor, visual, language, and tactile skills, I can see where someone who masters cursive writing will develop stronger mental resources for anything that touches on those areas.
There’s an article on the New York Times which sheds a little more light on the topic, but what it adds up to is that learning cursive increases both the ability to decode letters, generate ideas, remember what is written down, and even provides more resources for the brain to certain types of brain injury - printing and cursive appear to create and activate slightly different neural networks. Injure one, and the other can fill in.
Most people never really master cursive. Even my own handwriting, which gets frequent compliments, is a mix of printing and cursive that I developed on my own to optimize speed, legibility, and looks. Some of my letter forms won’t be found in any published form of cursive or in printed fonts, but it remains legible both to me and others. Phoukabro Minor, who is left-handed, hates cursive with a passion and occasionally demands to know why schools waste their time on it. I suspect that his frustation is born from an inability to master it, and the exigencies and vicissitudes piled on lefties have left him bitter.
Just resting, perhaps?
I know how to write cursive, but except for signing my name, I never use it. My handwriting is awful, and when I write notes or whatever I always print, or else I might not be able to read my own writing 
Back when I did still write in cursive, there were a couple of letters I never got used to using. Capital F and Q were just too different from from the “real” (print) F or Q. Cursive Q looks like the number 2, and cursive F looked too much like a cursive T (and not the slightest bit like any F I’ve ever seen outside of a handwriting lesson).
I teach it now, and I’ve spent a bit of time looking into the research into cursive; what I’ve seen looks pretty sketchy to me, more like folks trying after-the-fact to justify it than like any real research.
Real research might look at how students in a control group who don’t learn cursive perform on tasks compared to students in experimental groups who do learn cursive, for example, or might engage in regression analysis. Instead, people come up with theories about cursive and then perform qualitative analyses of brain scans.
Who cares if cursive lights up the brain like a Christmas tree? Unless you’re exploring a cave and your only light source is from your EEG, that’s not relevant. What’s relevant is how that translates into real-world learning.
And we should compare learning cursive to the other things we could do with that time. If cursive takes an hour a week, how would students perform if they instead spent an hour a week engaged in simulations of a market economy? writing persuasive letters to local leaders about issues important to them? working in a garden and recording their observations and actions, for later analysis during winter months?
Cursive is, I freely admit, a better use of time than watching LetsPlay videos. But if you compare it instead to learning about the world through active hands-on activities, I’m far less convinced.
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You’ve reminded me of an old Hagar the Horrible comic strip. He was given a prescription by his doctor. Hagar, being illiterate, took it to his wife. Helga said, “I can’t read this.” So the two of them took it to the pharmacist, figuring he could read it. He couldn’t. The final panel showed Hagar, Helga, and the pharmacist facing the doctor. The doctor was looking at the prescription and saying, “I can’t read this.”
For me, it was cursive uppercase G, Q, and Z. By high school I had abandoned the cursive forms of those letters are replaced them with the printed versions. Just the uppercase, though.
ETA: Come to think of it the cursive uppercase S really doesn’t look anything like a printed S, but I had no trouble with that one.
This is never done with spam. I’ve never done it nor has any other mod I know of.
When it’s spam, it’s just…deleted. No note is written about it. Most of the time nobody even knows the spam was there, except the ones who reported it…although in this case some of the post was quoted, which I missed when I deleted the spam.
And yes, she was a spammer. She posted those links many times, in many threads.
In the interest of people wanting to use the tips and links that she had posted, however (since some have found it helpful), I will PM the contents of the posts to anyone who wants to know what the posts said. Just let me know.
I am going to take the link out of Measure For Measure’s post now, which I had missed before.
I’ve long doubted the usefulness of teaching cursive to schoolkids. Our schools spend a lot of time on it; some kids never master it, and most will never use it again. Says I: teach them to print clearly, and to sign their names in cursive. That should do the trick.
I used cursive today in a lecture. The projector suddenly turned off and the screen rolled up. So I continued the lecture on the blackboard with chalk, writing in cursive since that is what I know. I could print, but it would be painfully slow. If there was one one there who couldn’t read it, that’s too bad.
Printing is just as fast as writing in cursive. Trust me, I do i all the time.
The other thing that I want to mention about printing is that it can have just as much “personality” as cursive. My block-printing has just as much personality as my cursive.
I only learned a few years ago on this Board that cursive is no longer taught in elementary schools in the US. That still blows my mind. I can’t believe this would be allowed to die out as if it were just an eight-track tape or something.
I can’t make these letters correctly, either. Which is really unfortunate, because my middle name starts with a G, so I can’t sign my initials. Particularly, I can’t figure out how to make them join to the next letter, or how to stop them from looking like deranged D’s or 3’s.
I hate cursive.
All the more reason to strap your ass down and force it into you. Now get off my lawn!
I write notes at work, and I write them mostly in cursive. Other people have to read them, and I haven’t heard any complaints yet. My boss’s printing is more illegible than any doctor’s cursive.
I hope you aren’t a teacher.
Cursive is still taught and used here (France). In fact, print isn’t (well, you learn to read in print, obviously, but you’re never taught to write using it).
I’m willing to bet that maybe half the people who say they always print actually use cursive, at least sometimes. It isn’t true that a cursive capital-Q has to look like a messy 2 or that a cursive s has to look like a boat. Children in the US were until recently taught two separate writing styles, one of which was print and the other cursive, and so they think that if they don’t use the specific style of writing they were taught for the second that it isn’t cursive. That’s like thinking that if an *a * doesn’t have the stem curve over the loop that it isn’t type. People don’t print their letters exactly like they were taught in school (lifting the pen between each stroke, for example) but they don’t think that means they no longer print.
Now us oldsters can write in code
By the way, here’s a thread I started last year on the subject.