With respect, I don’t think whatever happened to you in the late fifties/sixties is really of any relevance; a great deal has changed about the way in whcih the school curriculum is formulated. Maybe I shouldn’t be too hasty - it certainly has changed in the UK - I can’t say for sure that it has elsewhere.
My kids school doesn’t teach handwriting - they don’t teach kindergarteners printing, they don’t teach third graders cursive. The kids are expected to pick it up through exposure.
Then they complain that the kids can’t put their ideas on paper in writing.
If you teach a style of writing (whatever it is) that enables someone to put thought to paper easily and quickly, then they can worry about what they want to say and not the writing of it. It doesn’t have to be Palmer - with its loopy lowercase r’s and s’s.
Keyboarding is a great skill, but we are still dependant on paper and pencil through much of our academic careers. And there are still lots times in life you need to jot a quick note. Maybe, when the school districts can afford to give every student from kindergarten up a laptop, and even the homeless people have Palm’s, we won’t need to teach it. But not teaching it appears to be a mistake from where I am.
Wow, I’m honored with such thoughtful responses to my post!
DrDeth, I wouldn’t be surprised if, twenty years from now, education budget cuts forced our public school system into a dichotomy: teach typing or teach cursive. In that case, typing skills will win out–a logical conclusion.
However, I am on the fence on whether or not we should take a pre-emptive strike and eliminate cursive now. Here are my thoughts:
-
The goal of handwriting instruction at the grammar-school level is to (in my opinion) teach students how to produce letterforms by hand that are 1) legible and 2) efficient. (Note that I’m shoving my calligraphic bias aside and am not mentioning beauty, aesthetics, or even neatness–legibility is a better objective.)
-
Teaching printing fulfills Goal #1. It does not, by its nature (lack of any ligatures, multiple pen lifts, rigid letterforms), fulfill Goal #2.
-
However, here’s where it gets interesting (and where my calligraphic background actually gets in the way). If students learn to print fast on their own, will they eventually figure out how to join letters efficiently to write fast and therefore, as adults, write in a hybrid hand that is both legible and efficient? I would love to see some scientific studies or hear anectodes on how viable this transition is.
-
As much as I love technology, we are still in a transitive state of communication today. Sure, we e-mail, type reports, and participate on message boards via typing. However, for most of us, handwriting legibly and quickly is still a benefitial skill. I had to take notes by hand in college (some professors hate the sound of laptop key-clicking, and many of us are good enough to type notes in Calculus class with all those equations and formulas?) and in business meetings.
-
As far as I know (and I wouldn’t mind being proven wrong if advances have been made in the field), a hybrid cursive form is still the best way to take notes by hand. On one hand, maybe we’re letting semantics get in the way–maybe we should eliminate cursive (with them fancy loops and curls) and instead teach students how to write fast by printing quickly and applying selective cursive techniques.
-
For instance, it may be faster or comfortable writing “th” with two cursive strokes rather than printing each letter separately. It may be more efficient writing a lower case “f” with opposing, rather than facing, loops. How about writing an uppercase G if you start off writing a “C” rather using the Palmer version.
-
Some of my personal examples are illustrated here. Note that this sample is for demonstration purposes only. I normally don’t write like this, and I discourage people from writing like my sample if they value their tendons. (And for the record, my hand felt like cramping when I had to use my long-forgotten Palmer skills.) My point is that students should be informed that there’s no single way to handwrite letters. Students should be able to choose variations that work for them, or come up with their own creative ways to be efficient…as long as people can still figure out what they’re writing.
-
As for the second statement:
Doctor, I am completely with you on this. In this Digital Era, I am extremely upset by the very notion that employers are selecting candidates based upon their handwriting (unless one is applying for a job in the calligraphic arts, then in which case, you better have some pretty writing!)
Any stories that support graphology sound like cherry-picking and weak correlation. Besides, even the more serious graphologists (like the ones hired by the FBI for check writing fraud) will state a whole bunch of exceptions and generalizations that makes them just as wise-sounding and contradictory as astrologers.
For instance, writing an “m” one way means you have “criminalistic tendencies”, unless you’re European, because apparently, most Europeans are taught to write their “ems” this way. Uneven handwriting means you’re mentally unstable–but watch out, 'cuz people with motor disabilities write this way, too!
And remember, if you write the same letter differently each time, it means you have poor centration, poor discipline, and poor mental focus. But King Frederick wrote his “f” in various ways, which indicated his creative thinking and leadership.
(Argh! The Inconsistency! It Burns!)
dangermom, to be fair, that example of German handwriting is probably closer to my god-uncle’s generation (WW II) than the present day. I wonder if cell phones and text messaging have mangled European teenage handwriting as much as its US counterpart. (As an aside: have you seen cell-phone speak in Italian? Practically incomprehensible to parents as OMFWTFBBQ.)
Unfortunately, I don’t have any studies that conclusively show when is the optimal time to learn Italic. If learning to write is anything like learning to speak, however, I am more old-old-school, in that “younger is better”. Linguists agree that children by the age of 4-7 can learn multiple languages (and have the ability to form all possible linguistic sounds without cross-accents) without any confusion. (As if upper-class English parents were worried that their children would be mentally twisted if they had to learn Latin, Greek, and French in addition to English–the horror! :rolleyes: )
Anectodally, by the time a child is in the sixth grade, s/he should be able to switch to Italic without any difficulty. However, it may be problematic if the child’s schoolteacher insists on an non-Italic hand. I think kids are smart enough to learn that there is more than one way to do something.
ascenray brought up something that made me consider a brand-new tangent:
Now that I think about it, I believe that none of my parents/relatives/immigrant friends even learned “printing”. They may have learned how to form capital/upper-case letters, but they learned the cursive forms of small/lower-case letters from the get-go.
…Egads! The more I think about it, the more I’m certain that they never printed lower-case block letters. It’s either all capitals, cursive, or “spaced-cursive” (cursive letters with spaces between each individual letter). European/Asian educators must have figured out that it’s not important to recreate lower case printed forms as much as to recognize them since they’re related to the forms used in printed books. I don’t even recall seeing a handwriting book on how to print letters from Europe or Asia.
My Og, have we Non-Canadian-North-Americans (NoCaNoAms?) actually been regressing?
Um, what? Orthography means proper spelling, not pretty handwriting, and shorthand is not legible handwriting to anyone who has not studied shorthand. Are you familiar with shorthand?
I had to smile reading your post, because it strikes at the heart of how I started to drift back into hand printing.
In 1963, I entered the Grade 8 history class of a Scottish Highlander. His style all class long, all year long was to furiously hand print his own notes on a classroom wide chalkboard. He was an agressive strong man and you could hear the rapid fire of chalk impacts outside th classroom. If it weren’t for the intervals of pupils asking questions, I wouldn’t have been able to keep up cursively. Later on in high school, recognizing the difficulty in reading my own cursive notes , I drew on the memory of that Brit and gave myself the permission to go back to hand printing. I have never regretted it since.
The essence of my concern is waste. Surely we can recognize that that we don’t need to train in two separate forms of manuscript. The Arabs seem to have maintained their cursive style after the printing press and the Chinese have maintained their non cursive characters.
Cursive hand writing has come down to us through a long process of evolution while hand printing came to us through a revolution in order to adapt to the new aggressive technology of the printing press. To make the letters flow in all the permutations of letter combinations (think cursive r after b) by typeset is impossible. But modern word processers can eliminate these problems, so perhaps we need to think about letting handprinting go the way of the typewriter. and make a cursive font standard for all publication.
Still, even if printing is no longer neccessary and takes somewhat longer to scribe, I’ll bet it is a lot faster read, and theoretically, it is the wishes and needs of the consumer of our literary efforts that should take precedence in our choice.
Fun note:
Imagine writing the word “antidisestablishmentarianism” cursively.
Sure, but that’s what they thought in the fifties. And they were right, the curriculum had changed, and continues to change. But allowing professional educators to drive the change will always put us a couple of decades behind the curve. Educators are taught how to teach, not what to teach. It’s our job as a society to decide what we consider important enought that everyone should know it.
Well, maybe let’s make it a recommended elective.
Yes, graphology is akin to phrenology IMHO.
I can live with that compromise.
I have always printed all caps. Faster, easier to read. The “lower case” should only be taught for reading.
Maybe today. But the writing style that my mother and grandmother learned, and that I assume my grandmother taught (she is a retired schoolteacher), known as the “Bélanger method”, is extremely similar to what you’re calling the Palmer style. It even includes the 2-shaped Q and the “boats” – I used that exact same word when my mother drew examples for me! This would have been in Quebec at least until the fifties (when my mother went to grade school); I’ll have to ask my grandmother until when she kept seeing this style in use.
Luckily I wasn’t subjected to this kind of handwriting, because reading this thread, I get the impression that it has left a bad taste in the mouth of many people. My mother doesn’t write this way anymore, she’s developed her own style. Recently she saw a patient who had been a schoolteacher, but in the English-language school system, probably in Ontario. She had a beautiful handwriting, but different from what my mother was used to. My mother described it as using much smaller letters than the Bélanger method. Maybe one of the anglophone Canadians reading this thread (matt_mcl, maybe?) can tell us what handwriting system he or she learned in school?
By the way, twopiecesofeight, your handwriting is very beautiful. Your “hybrid style” is quite nice, but is it the one you discourage us from using? Because to me it looks perfect.
FWIW, in Manitoba in the late 1980s I learned the Palmer method or a near relative. What I write now has little to do with that, heaven knows (as a kid I always thought the I’s looked like toilets), but nevertheless I write cursive; quite a neat cursive when I put a little time into it, and still rather legible when I don’t.
I wish they would discard Hebrew cursive because I never learned to read it, and only about half the letters are recognizable. My friend in Israel only learned cursive in school, and says she can’t print square Hebrew letters. I taught myself how to write the square letters, but the Hebrew cursive isn’t even cursive really, the letters in a word aren’t joined, they’re still separate letters, just deformed beyond recognition. What’s the point of that? I can square-print Hebrew as fast as people who learned the usual way can write cursive, and mine is more legible.
In English, I gave up cursive many years ago, probably about the time I graduated from college. Since then (except for my signature) I’ve always printed. I do it so fast and smooth it looks almost like cursive, except for the difference that it’s still legible.
All Arabic writing is cursive in its connected flow. But I’ve always written Arabic in the most legible style, called naskh, the equivalent of printing. I taught myself to write in naskh because all the books are printed in it. Everyone in the Arab world is taught in school to use the ruq‘ah style for handwriting, which is functionally the equivalent of our cursive, and is a lot harder to read.
So while it’s sad to see an old skill disappearing from our schools, I have to admit I have no use for script handwriting in any language! It’s possible to live an interesting, fulfilling life without it. The only exception is I still use it for my signature. Is there a way around that?
(Palmer learner here)
By the time I finished high school in 1984, I had eliminated not only the uppercase Q, but also the uppercase G and Z from my cursive handwriting. Every other cursive capital letter resembles its printed counterpart, why not those three? For some reason, I kept the cursive lowercase z, though.
It rarely comes up any more, though. After taking two years worth of architectural drafting classes during my junior and senior years of high school, I pretty much switched to writing everything in printed, uppercase, block letters. For capitalization, I simply write the letters a bit bigger. This makes my handwriting perfectly legible to everybody. My roommate, a man my father’s age, writes everything in cursive, and it’s barely legible. He once left me a note in which I literally could not figure out a single word he’d written.
I consistently use cursive for only two things: my signature and, for no apparent reason, writing the name of the month on my bank deposit slips.
Of course we don’t know what we don’t know, just like the folks back in the fifties didn’t know what they didn’t know, but it can’t possibly be the case that we have not made progress in the actual methodology behind the development of curricula (not just the content of the curriculum, once developed).
Educators are actually taught (by education authorities) how and what to teach; that’s what a curriculum is. Society doesn’t decide what that comprises - it delegates the decision to education authorities.
Aside from the obvious signature details, people do send hand-written thank-you notes (Right? We haven’t all gone to the that evil thank-you Email, have we?). We still need to jot down lists, take notes from phone calls, etc.
I didn’t really have an opinion about this until this summer, because I don’t find cursive faster myself. However…95% of the student writing samples we see at work are hand-written rather than typed. Many schools still teach cursive, and I’d estimate that almost half of the kids use it while composing their essays. My job is to supervise the people reading those responses, and this summer I met some very young people (ages 21-22) who could not read cursive! I spent way too much time translating perfectly legible script for them. Fortunately, people even a year older than them had had enough experience seeing other people’s writing to be able to read it themselves.
So now I have an opinion. We should either continue to teach it, and to all children, or discontinue it all together. Even if we stop teaching how to write it, time ought to be spent learning to read it, since there are going to be people who use it for at least 50 years after it’s removed from school curriculums.
I don’t really care whether or not we keep cursive in schools, but we do need to teach kids to produce something legible.
I use a style that is mainly print with a little cursive mixed in, because it’s the perfect combination or fast and legible for me. If I’ve got time and am going for even greater legibility, I print with no connected letters.
I work in a hospital, though, where most everything is written by hand. Patient charts, prescriptions, everything. It’s awful. I can spend several minutes on one page of notes, just trying to decipher a paragraph of messy writing. What did the x-ray show? I have no idea! Prescriptions are worse, because misreading them and using the wrong medications can be at best ineffective, at worst deadly. Most doctors write in cursive for speed, but accuracy is sacrificed. The doctors who print are a different story–I can usually read everything they write. Even when it’s messy, I can read print much better than cursive.
I don’t think this is inherent in cursive. Maybe it’s the way cursive is taught, or maybe it’s because some kids are never allowed to outgrow it if they want to. In any case, most adults in my workplace seem to have abysmal cursive handwriting.
This is the most compelling post in this thread for excising the use of cursive handwriting in our society. Think of the waste of valuable medical resources labouriously deciphering handwriting nevermind the consequences if a nurse or pharmacist misreads a doctor’s instruction. Our health and our expensive health care system is being compromised.
Writing is the foundation of human communication. It involves the writer and the reader. What is gained when the writer is 10% faster in cursive but the reader is 50% slower in reading? What is gained when the reader can’t even read.
And now it appears that everyone has developed their own script from print and several different forms of cursive. One would think that such a communication foundation should require uniformity to be efficient.
I also think that unless you constantly write cursive you will lose the co-ordination neccessaryl to maintain legibility. 11 year old children’s writing looks much better than an adult’s. Since the word processor arrived, adults are spending less time handwriting and I suspect the general quality of cursive writing has deteriorated as a result. This is not a problem with hand printing.
I understand matt_mcl’s desire to swiftly take notes in class that he can read. But sometimes the individual needs to take a back seat for the benefit of society.
There was a Hagar the Horrible comic strip some years back, in which Dr. Zook writes Hagar a prescription. Hagar is illiterate, so he gives the prescription to his wife. Helga looks at it and says, “I can’t read this!” So they take the prescription to the pharmacist, who looks it over and declares, “I can’t read this!”. The three of them take the prescription back to Dr. Zook. Zook looks at it and admits, “I can’t read this.”
Or, they could just ask health workers to use only block letters in the course of their job. We often have to fill forms with block letters, this is just another situation where it would be useful.
Doctors have a whole lot of writing to do. Maybe a doctor can chime in here and give us an opinion on this. I’m not a nurse (yet, at least! I do clinical trials research), but I know I spend a lot of time deciphering. I can’t imagine this doesn’t come up in fields other than healthcare. Doctors usually can’t take patient notes at a computer, because they move from place to place all the time. However, this is changing, and a lot of charts are going online. Computers are appearing in clinic exam rooms and in inpatient rooms too. Then again, change is slow, and I know some doctors who still write up their notes by hand and keep them all week and then have their notes “transcribed” into the database every so often–by someone else. Yeah, it’s less helpful than just putting them in a paper chart to begin with. No, they don’t care.
Regarding the Hagar the Horrible cartoon: when I was in high school, I worked at a pharmacy, and the pharmacist was always having to call the doctors for clarification. And then you have to get in touch with the doctor him or herself, and we all know how available doctors are. You want to know why it takes forever to fill a prescription? This is the kind of thing pharmacists do all throughout the day.
I apologize for bumping this thread. I’ve been on travel earlier this week and internet access was sporadic. You can read my most recent post on what I was thinking about at the airport.
severus, thanks for the informative response. I wish I could find a handwriting primer that covered the “Bélanger method” (a web search turns up nothing). It would be interesting to see if the style is identical to Palmer or if it contains some deviations.
Be thankful that you weren’t subjected to this institutionized form of punishment.
The reason why I don’t recommend my “hybrid” style is that it is rather eclectic. In my last post, I recommended that handwriting should be practical, namely, speedy and legible. The thing is, I myself don’t write speedily nor legibly. The calligrapher in me likes fancy and attractive writing, which means I rarely practice this hypothetical “fast cursive” style that I’m championing in this thread. The hybrid that I displayed is a non-field-tested version that I came up with. I don’t want to be responsible for Dopers developing RSI based on my hypothetical example 
Another thing is that I have weak writing skills when it comes to writing with a slant–something that school teachers encourage from first grade. A slant is supposed to make it easier to write. My friends don’t have problems writing with a slant, but my writing looks all uneven when I do it. My lettering is usually completely upright; I admit it doesn’t look as pretty as slanted writing.
Phase42, it wasn’t until college that I learned that lettering is an important skill in architectural drafting. My favorite book is Lettering for Architects and Designers, 2nd Edition by Martha Sutherland. Her books covers a style of printing that is more graceful and practical than the “stick and ball” alphabet taught in grade school.
On a tangent here…I had the opportunity to visit the National Archives in Washington, D.C. a few days ago. I saw the Declaration of Independence. The writing on the original has almost faded away, but the reproductions show some of the most beautiful handwriting I’ve ever seen (JPEGs here). Weird, isn’t it, that the printing press was already invented more than 300 years earlier, yet George Washington still answered his letters by hand. (Yes, when the letters got to be too many, he had a secretarial pool–or was it just one poor guy?–handle the load.)