Be fair—I do not think any committee sat down and decided, “People are writing too quickly and legibly. How can we undermine both of those things?”
They teach little kids some arbitrary standard of handwriting because, according to some theory, if that is what everybody learns then they will all be able to read each other’s handwriting. As for what that “standard” is, it gradually evolves over time, hence why reading the 19th-century letter was relatively easy while the 18th-century letter… not so much.
I agree that it was not quite so explicit as that . But there most certainly are committees deciding all these things, and it seems to come down to historical momentum as much as anything, with a sprinkling of “if I had to learn this stuff, so should the kids” as well as “I’m much better at cursive than print, therefore the same is true for everyone” (neglecting that someone that practiced cursive and not print is obviously going to be faster).
Kinda with Dr Strangelove. I make no attempt to keep my printing completely vertical. It slopes a little. Because I’m left-handed, it slopes in the opposite direction from what cursive does. I really don’t like cursive. I imagine it is easier for some people. But i hate it.
Sure, but you get graded on how close you are to that perfect form, rather than merely on legibility. I do think that is dumb. It is why it took me so long to write as I believe I mentioned above.
That said, it’s possible that Acsenray, having learned cursive most of his life, is unaware that people can write in print with a slant, just like with cursive. That negates the need of a vertical line. And the circles can just be fat loops, like they are in cursive.
Sure, but having to pick up the pen(cil) multiple times is at least a potential time loss versus being able to keep it down on the paper. So not having to do that might make up for the extra lines. (Also, a nitpick: I don’t know anyone who writes a capital i with a single downstroke. They always write it I, to distinguish it from a lowercase L.)
That’s why I wonder if the “joined up writing” that others mention might actually be faster than printing. It would (in theory, at least) have the simple strokes of print, but also avoid the time stoppage of lifting the pen(cil) up off the page.
In my own experience, it definitely seems like not lifting up the pen(cil) saves time. My problem is that, as I speed up my writing, it becomes more illegible. And cursive does so much faster than print. The separated letters actually help make it easier to read, to my eyes.
That is, while some people have been comparing cursive to printing, others have been comparing (cursive) handwriting to typing, and saying that cursive is obsolete because nobody writes by hand anymore anyway.
But math, at least, is easier to do with pencil/pen on paper than by typing everything.
I can’t recall what grades I got in my cursive assignments, but I don’t think they were very good. On the other hand, I did very well on the lettering in my drafting classes (to the point where I was used as an example for the rest of the class), which involved matching print letterforms very accurately. Of course, the style was also made for maximum legibility, so there was no conflict between accuracy and legibility.
I agree that people will come up with their own natural variations on a print style that fits them best, whether that amounts to slanted letters, varying letterforms, some minor degree of linking, etc. No one but the criminally insane would ever replicate the Palmer capitals, though.
If you are talking about these capitals — this is also what @pulykamell was asking about—
the logic there is that all the capitals are constructed out of oval strokes. You are saying it’s insane because you are thinking there should be a straight line in there somewhere, like some sort of draughtsman
Baseline thing to understand: Palmerian or Spencerian script does not constitute the foundational definition of cursive. If your understanding of what cursive is is that it “takes longer to write than print because of complicated and unnecessary loops,” then this is pretty much the prime evidence that it is the American educational system with respect to handwriting that is defective, not cursive. It shows that no one who says this really has the basic understanding to judge what the benefits or deficiencies of cursive might or might not be, because they don’t know what cursive actually is.
For example, saying that one writes with “an opposite slant from cursive”—cursive can slant in any way. So this statement is essentially gibberish. If your criticism is of the specific script that was taught in your school, then that same criticism is in my very first post in this thread. But that ugly script doesn’t define cursive.
I think we actually used D’Nealian, which is only marginally better:
It seems to be missing some of the more obnoxious extraneous loops. But yes: why the resistance to a damn straight line? Even the top of the T (and F) has to be wavy. I doubt I ever wrote it as sin(x) vs. -sin(x) with more than 50% probability.
That’s cursive, not printing. If there are slanted letters in any direction, and any of them are linked together, you’re not printing. You’re writing in cursive.
I would say that cursive writing tends to form ligatures, but I do not agree that it is a formal requirement for everything to be linked together, whether it likes it or not.
I’m assuming we’re talking English, or at least a Latin alphabet, in this discussion. Other languages/alphabets put different demands on their characters and any handwritten script would take that into account. For example, there is Chinese cursive, but it’s more like a form of shorthand than a “typeface”.
I took a class in graphology (hand writing analysis). Yeah, I know its a pseudoscience and filled with woo.
One thing I learnt in that class was that non-cursive writers were more efficient than cursive writers; and that people who print can write faster than cursive writers. Efficient as to time taken to do the same task : like getting dinner ready or weeding the garden bed or grooming etc. I was taught cursive and I too switch to print when I have to take quick notes.
I maybe biased but I’ve noticed this to be true (not validated scientifically though)
And with treading it doesn’t matter if you are left handed. I watch the teacher in my school make the lefties do cursive in such a convoluted cramped manner, it bordered on child abuse.
I was wondering reading this thread why you have so strong opinions about how to write, I have never heard a discussion about writing cursive vs. pseudo-capitals (block writing or printing, whatever you want to call it), in my experience this is not a subject in Europe. A nothingburger if there ever was one. I may have forgoten or repressed that particular trauma, but I don’t think so: I believe we were not graded on how nice we wrote, we were graded on orthography and on the content of what we wrote. Nice writing would have been called calligraphy (which is actually something different, I know), but it was not graded. It seems I have discovered a realm where US-Americans have a traume we in Europe do not have. The sentence: “I hate hand writing / cursive” or “I hope hand writing becomes obsolete soon, as it deserves” seems unthinkable to me in Europe, still several of you have written it here. This seems to me to go in that same sense as well:
Makes me wonder how this evolved to the present state. It is very different from what I remember in Spanish schools, or what I heard of other European or South American schools.
Well, anyway, then there is also:
As I posted above, the terminology is a mess. In Spanish cursiva and in German kursiv are translated into English as italics, and that has a lot to do with the slanting of letters. I think you are writing based on different definitions from different cultural backgrounds.
And there have been times I have used the whole width of the sidewalk available while walking back home from the bar cultural center. I did not judge those who walked in a straight line hoping they would not judge me. I guess some did anyway.
Well, that is quite possible. Cursive from an American perspective consists almost exclusively of one of a few pre-defined styles (the aforementioned Palmer and D’Nealian are two) that are drilled into children as part of their early education. It’s extremely tedious and unfairly disadvantages left-handers and the generally less dextrous (that wasn’t meant to be a pun, and yet…). It’s also totally arbitrary and frankly I think there’s some element of a “cursive lobby” pushing the textbooks.
Children are not encouraged to develop a style that fits them. They have the style forced on them and adhering to the style is part of the grade. This gets relaxed by the time high school rolls around (in my experience), but there was still a big segment of elementary school requiring it.
Calligraphy is a totally different thing. Perhaps some schools offer it as an elective, alongside classes like art and drafting. But calligraphy (at least nowadays) isn’t meant to be the primary way that people put words on paper.
The main types of cursive here are italicized, but that is not exclusive to cursive. In fact there is a D’Nealian print typeface as well:
As you can see, the letters are italic, but not joined. It is considered print, not cursive. I don’t particularly care for the aesthetics but it’s a perfectly acceptable form.
