Cursive is obsolete. People use physical/electronic keyboards for 99.9% of their written communication and, for that tiny 0.1% of the time, they PRINT so people can read what the heck they are writing. Even if people learn how to write correct, legible cursive, it takes too long to do so on paper, so they inevitably become impatient by speeding up the process. This makes their cursive barely legible, if that.
Old timers need to do the world a favor and forget all about cursive. It’s about as useful as carbon paper.
In my understanding, cursive means what we were taught as “joined-up writing”.
I must say, the Zaner-Blose script shown above looks incredibly florid and old-fashioned, rather like the “copperplate” taught over here until the early middle 20th century.
By my time in the 1950s we were taught something more like this “vertical writing”:
AFAIK, there is no nationally prescribed way of teaching handwriting still, but joining it up seems still to be the expected outcome.
Yes, exams is a good case in point. How can you write exams without handwriting? Only multiple choice questions? And when the current teenagers become teachers in turn, what? How will they be able to grade and exam they cannot read, if it really is true they cannot read?
I have seen handwritten texts in Modern Hebrew and it depends on the person, but from a few to lots of letters may be connected; most adults don’t write resembling letter forms separately copied and pasted from a first-grade Aleph Bet poster
I had better let actual schoolteachers answer that one, but, with the caveat that the student should make an effort that their handwriting not be that atrocious if they expect the person marking the exam to be able to read it :), the “standard” handwriting probably does not evolve that quickly.
I was taught to write in England in the 70s. ‘Cursive’ is what we, as small children, called ‘joined up writing’. Italic-leaning, with the letters written in such as way as to loop together. It was smart or formal writing, and was the only handwriting my ancient parents have ever had. Of course, it’s deeply unfashionable now.
From a technical perspective, cursive is distinguished as a running form of writing. Hence the ligature forms.
The idea being that writing in one continuous stroke is faster and more efficient.
The etymology of the word supports this.
The practical meaning of the word has evolved so that “cursive” can mean a non-running script form, but at its base it’s supposed to specifically be a running script.
Well, the article did start off w/ a college student reviewing a book on the Civil War, saying the images of the old writings were useless because they couldn’t read them. And the instructor realized his students couldn’t read the handwritten comments they wrote on assignments.
So - I think it is a LITTLE more subtle than old people just having to get over their obsolete practices.
In my experience (college professor teaching mostly Gen Z nowadays) the “they can’t read cursive” thing is waaay overstated. I have had a few students who claim they can’t read my handwritten comments (always cursive, I rarely print for any length of time because it’s too slow and makes my hand hurt). These days, I give those students the option of submitting their papers electronically so I can type the comments. The vast majority, however, don’t really care one way or the other and seem capable of reading my handwriting just fine. (The only time-consuming part of learning cursive is learning how to form the letters; recognizing them can be taught in half an hour. And we all read writing systems we can’t actually produce all the time, since I don’t know anyone capable of printing in Times New Roman.)
Secretary hand probably requires a little practice to read; Civil War—could be some, but somewhat less? If history is your field, you learn to read it, one way or another.
I was the same 30 years earlier. My joined-up writing was never very good and I always envied people (Like the late Queen) who wrote in an elegant hand. I always print these days as even I have trouble reading my own handwriting.
In the 21st century, it seems that even printing by hand is becoming obsolete as almost all “writing”, including school work, is done with a keyboard of one kind or another.
It really depends on the person but also how much time/effort they put into it.
For example, you’ll see references to letters or memos written “in a fair hand”. Most recently, I saw that reference in a book on the Civil War. Officers would often dash off written memos quickly that a staff member would have to re-write in a fair hand, i.e. well written to be legible, to be distributed elsewhere. Then, as now, legibility was highly variable. Those officers could often do better themselves (and often did when it was for personal correspondence) but it would take time that would be better employed elsewhere.
Always used cursive and script as synonyms. Never liked it, difficult to read and write. Was told in the first grade about using cursive back in the day of quill pens and the like so the pen was not lifted until the end of a word.
I did a lot of handwriting throughout my school years: taking class notes, filling out worksheets, doing homework, taking exams, etc. All of that writing would have been a lot harder if I did not know how to write in cursive. The point of cursive is that, once you learn it and gain a certain fluency with it, it is faster and easier than printing.
There’s also a third way, and I suspect a lot posters here may do it, and that is print-writing, a combination of printing and cursive optimized (usually individually) to where printed letterforms and cursive letterforms are combined. While hate is a strong word for the cursive I was taught, it was horrifically inefficient in terms of letterforms (I’m talking Palmer Method here). Stripping out some of the inefficiencies with printed letterforms is the fastest way for me to write something by hand.
I’d also be curious to see some actual studies showing cursive is faster and how much faster it is, and what styles of cursive are faster – I would be surprised to learn that something like the Palmer Method is faster than printing, due to all its extra strokes and flourishes. Maybe a stream-lined version of it. Like why does everything seem to have extra loops and tails in it?
I’m dubious that’s enough. It takes repetition through practice to get that sort of thing stuck in your head. Unless they’re exposed to cursive on a regular basis, they’d forget.
Plus then there’s the issue of fluency. Sure, maybe you can read it with a lot of effort, but, with print, most of us don’t even really pay attention to the individual letters, as we have so much experience.
Sure, but Times New Roman looks like standard manuscript characters, just with additional serifs. Cursive, on the other hand, has completely different letterforms. It’s more akin to learning Blackletter or Fraktur.
I’d say reading different fonts is more akin to reading different people’s handwriting. As long as it’s similar enough, you can just use what you already know, not learn a whole new system.
