Because you can write a word in a single, fluid motion, as opposed to printing where you have to lift your pen off the paper in between each letter.
Yes, cursive is still used. I can attest that, when students take the ACT Plus Writing, they have to write an essay—on paper, with pencil, legibly, in a limited amount of time—and that many of them use cursive to do so.
I’ll bet there are plenty of teachers who use cursive for writing things on the board, because it’s faster and easier.
I myself usually use cursive whenever I need to write something down.
The cursive issue seems to come up every now and then here on the SDMB (examples: here and here and here), and I am surprised at how many people insist that cursive is useless and ought to be done away with, and how many other people post in its defense.
River will always take the path of the least resistance. I think cursive will remain in use as forms of font/design element etc but perhaps not in the classic sense.
I learned cursive in elementary school and we regularly had lessons and assignments for it. Even in middle school, all of my English teachers heavily enforced using it and often wouldn’t accept assignments not in cursive. Even with computers and word processing software being virtually ubiquitous by that point, they typically only allowed typed/printed assignments when they were very long.
Personally, even with how readily available computers are, I don’t think it should be completely dropped, but I do think it should be de-emphasized. What are they replacing that time with instead? I don’t think it would hurt to have kids in elementary school continue to learn some penmanship, it just shouldn’t carry into later grades; maybe through 3rd or 4th.
The thing is, even with computers readily available, they’re not always everywhere. What will you do when filling out forms? How will you take notes? Even working a stylus on a tablet or the like requires skills not that dissimilar from writing. Will kids who aren’t learning penmanship be stuck writing like a kindergartener all their lives unless they specifically work on it themselves? And more on skills, I think penmanship does carry over to a lot of other useful skills, particularly those that require hand-eye coordination and muscle memory.
That said, I’d like to see them replace some of that time with ensuring kids can type. The thing is, touch-typing is probably not feasible for a 1st grader, but is probably a skill that can be learned younger than middle school or high school, and I would say that touch typing is pretty close to a necessity in today’s world.
So, maybe in another decade or two, when there’s virtually no paper anymore, signing is done with biometrics rather than a pen, but I don’t think we’re quite at the point where it should be completely dropped yet.
I have printed on every form I have ever filled out. A lot of them say to do so.
I wish I’d printed when I’d taken notes. When I go back and look at my college notes now, I generally can’t read them. When I take notes at work, I always print, because I remember what happened when I took notes in cursive.
This is the only good reason I can think of to teach cursive. But I remember spending forbloodyever on cursive in school. I think, if you’re going to teach cursive, spend a lot less time on it than we did when I was in elementary school.
Wow, when I started this OP, I never thought it would result in so many posts and such a variety of opinion.
I didn’t mention that all my life (except in grade school) I did print, and I can print faster than writing. And far more legibly.
Reading all this, I still wonder about signatures if nobody learns cursive. Not only when you have to cash a check in a bank, but for wills and all legal forms, for your drivers’ license, and who know what else.
I remember in the Army you had to use your “payroll signature” on many forms. As I have two middle names and did not want to write out the entire four names, I just told them I had no middle names, just initials. That worked.
I think the legal profession may be that last to give in and let people print their name. But, who knows, time will tell. But I am too old to live to see that day.
There are so many right-brained activities that are more enjoyable and less repetitive, though. Save the drill and practice for skills that are more useful.
Sorry, I think I misrepresented a few things. I, too, print, as my handwriting is attrocious. However, theoretically, or at least as I’ve been told, cursive is supposed to be faster than printing, because it doesn’t require lifting the pen as often. I have no idea if that is true or not, but whatever. But, even though I print myself and haven’t used cursive since it was required of me, I think that learning cursive did help improve my printed handwriting because of that attention that was spent learning cursive.
But even if we completely drop cursive, will there still be penmenship classes teaching people how to print well? I think kids probably need a bit more practice than can be offered from just learning their letters to actually be able to write effectively, in print or in cursive. And, well, if you’re going to devote time to penmanship, you should probably at least get some exposure to cursive, even if you don’t spend much time practicing it. Then again, maybe touch-typing and videogames are enough to teach the requisite hand-eye coordination to help handwriting improve naturally on its own. I’m glad to learn, at least, that touch typing is something a 2nd grader can learn.
Either way, learning and practicing cursive through middle school is as ridiculous as the no calculator rule for higher math where one should have repeatedly demonstrated at some point before geometry or calculus or whatever that they can do basic arithmetic without one, so why make everyone waste their time. If you can’t do basic arithmetic by that time, you shouldn’t be in that class. And I think it’s the same with writing, where you need to know how to write manually, but if you are utterly computer illiterate after a certain age, that’s something that needs to be fixed immediately.
I think that some form of handwriting class should be taught in elementary school, whether it’s print, cursive, italic, or what-have-you doesn’t really matter. Cursive seems to be fighting a losing battle, and I really hope that it does - I never liked it, couldn’t write fast enough with it (another person who prints MUCH faster than I can write cursive) and I never could read others’ cursive easily either.
The reason I say teach something handwritten isn’t because I think that people are going to be handwriting a lot (they probably won’t, but people will continue to scratch notes on whatever they can find, and not everyone has access to a touch-screen phone with a stylus) but that there have been a few studies that show handwriting practice makes students learn faster and better how to spell and read, because they’re getting that information in a more physical manner (using muscle memory) in addition to memorization and typing. In a world where literacy is getting more and more important to everyday people, that’s no small advantage, and worth a few minutes a day of practicing some type of writing.
Now, it may be that typing itself accomplishes the same thing (couldn’t find any studies on that), and if that’s the case, then awesome, and a lot of my support for official “handwriting” lessons would fall away.
That… doesn’t really help. It’s just a statement of what cursive is.
To reiterate–for me, at least:
Lifting/dropping the pen takes zero time since it is part of a motion I’m making anyway.
The extra looping is a deviation from the straightest path between two points, and thus takes longer.
I wonder if cursive isn’t fast for some people so much as print is slow for those same people.
When I’m printing carefully, the steps become very distinct: move my pen, drop the pen, draw the line, lift the pen, etc. But if I’m printing quickly, these steps blur together.
Of course, this produces chicken scratchings. But so does cursive when I’m going quickly, and fast print is far more readable than fast cursive. Maybe my s’s and 5’s get confused with print, but I never have to figure out if that little bump is an s, or an r, or an i, or an n.
Is the day coming where all writing by hand (printing and cursive) is obolete? Maybe not completely obsolete, but specialized skills that don’t need to be fully taught in school or just taught as part of art class?
I was going to weigh in supporting the dropping of cursive because we still have printing. That got me to thinking how little printing is needed and how even the smallest notes we can use mobile devices and such. Why right a note that can get lost when you could post yourself a note on your e-calendar?
An exercise in my Intro to Japanese class was to transliterate Japanese from hiragana to romaji using a chart. Everyone finished the assignment and the source was handwritten. Nobody started out very fast, but it wasn’t at all hard.
I find it hard to believe that people won’t be able to decipher cursive if they had any inclination at all of doing so.
I think cursive should still be taught – briefly. There’s absolutely no reason to make it the “standard” and I don’t think it should encouraged much less required for students to write in it.
But I think it would make sense to teach it to kids as an element of history and to provide fundamentals if students are interested in learning to write. I’d suggest a couple weeks of study somewhere around fifth or sixth grade. Teach students the basics of the letterforms, explain how and why the style developed, and have them read some historical passages written in the original hands.
There’s very little practical reason to develop a skill at cursive writing, but I think there’s value to be had in understanding a little about the development of writing and to help students understand the different relationship people had to the written word before typewriters (letalone computers).
A simple question which probably has a complex answer.
If printing is easier as the consensus seems above, why was cursive developed and maintained as the mainstay for so long. And the second part is why was printing adopted as the basis for typewriters and their derivatives.
If you want simple, one answer is more primitive pen technology. Ball point pens weren’t developed until the mid-1930’s and pencils weren’t considered an acceptable formal writing tool. That wasn’t that long ago in school curriculum years. Without ballpoint pens, it is much more important to use a style of writing that minimizes lifting the pen up and down from the paper. Flowing writing is much better with fountain pens but those aren’t used for everyday writing now. It is one of those cases where the need to do things a certain way was removed but people forgot the reason why it was invented in the first place so the idea persisted.
I use a mix of print-cursive that is based on efficiency and minimization of strokes, but cursive as we were taught in grammar school (the Palmer method) is ridiculously inefficient and needlessly embellished. I mean, look at all the stupid loops on most of the capital letters, for instance. I can see how straight printing would be faster for many people vs. Palmer method cursive.
Really. Mr. Palmer had me going :rolleyes: in my schoolboy days. I was not helped at all that between elementary and middle, a change in schools involved a change from a form of Zaner-Bloser to a form of Palmer.
But to be fair, Palmer’s method in his day was [dramatic fanfare!] progress. It was “Business Handwriting”, and meant to be more useful, faster while still legible (and more easily legible) for people who’d have to do a lot of workplace-communication writing (thus the emphasis on hand-movement exercises, in proper Palmer courses), vis-a-vis the then-standard script. The loops and tails were a way of making sure you had proper lead-in and follow-through but were nothing like the grand flourishes of older styles. Nonetheless, Messrs. Spencer, Palmer, Zaner, Bloser et al aside,*** I ***soon adopted the method of doing most of my capitals as just my own brand of stylized block in anything where I would not be graded on that. And I was seldom graded on that.
I tend to agree with Lasciel and Blaster Master – IMO penmanship need no longer have such a prominent share of time in the curriculum BUT I do believe that there should continue to be a goal for the student to develop some form of **legible **handwriting. Not everyone will be always next to an electronic device and at some point someone somewhere will have to figure out if what’s scribbled on the Post-It note is even in the Latin alphabet to begin with and that means both parties (writer and reader) can at least summon up a consistent pattern. Plus there may be benefits other than the strictly practical and immediate - and I can’t help but feel that experiencing the putting down the glyphs that form written language by hand makes the experience not just physical but even *somatic, *and students may still benefit from stimulating these neural pathways.
and that means both parties (writer and reader) can at least summon up a consistent pattern. Plus there may be benefits other than the strictly practical and immediate - and I can’t help but feel that experiencing the putting down the glyphs that form written language by hand makes the experience not just physical but even *somatic, *and students may still benefit from stimulating these neural pathways.
