Google cite: " Once letter formation is learned, cursive writing is faster than printing, and for many students it’s faster than keyboarding. 2. The connected letters in cursive result in increased writing fluency (speed and smoothness)."
Also, from personal experience when I was in grade school, my cursive was much faster than my block printing, though not as neat or legible. My keyboarding (60+) is WAY faster than either and MUCH neater. LOL
Okay, that’s the repeated claim that cursive is faster, which I doubt but that’s not my question. I’m looking for a cite that the original reason for cursive was speed and not avoiding ink smears and blots.
Google cite: “The origins of the cursive method are associated with practical advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile, easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils.”
Whatever the reason, I don’t like it. LOL
I’m a little distressed to learn how many kids were striving for good grades and even an honor roll in elementary school. Yikes.
fwiw, Our elementary school grades were “excellent”, “meets expectations”, and “needs improvement” (maybe not those exact words, but those were the ideas) and they weren’t added up or anything. They were just a discussion topic between the teachers and the parents. We didn’t have letter grades until junior high, and we didn’t have anything like a class rank until high school. And no one in my school system was punished by writing out sentences. I thought that was an obsolete and funny punishment when I was in elementary school, something like 50 years ago.
So I just disliked cursive because I didn’t like having to write in it, I didn’t bear it any special hatred. That being said, I am pretty sure it’s true that “kids these days” aren’t learning it, and I don’t see any problems with that.
Ok, so that’s a modified claim. Cursive is faster for quill pens. Too bad we still use so many of those.
FWIW, punishment writing was still infrequently used by some older teachers in our school district into the 90s and we got letter grades in elementary school back more than 4 decades ago (penmanship was one of the consistent B’s I’d get). It was a really old fashioned school system in a lot of ways.
We had punishment writing in the early 90s at my high school. Few teachers did it, but two stand out: one an old-school history teacher that looked like Captain Kangaroo (great teacher, too.); and another was a football coach in his mid-20s who taught religion. (He actually was pretty cool, as well, and later–like when we ran into him in college–apologized for that stuff.)
The worst was my 3rd grade teacher, a middle-aged, spiteful curmudgeon of an “educator.” With little exaggeration, I had to write lines pretty much every single day in class because I just couldn’t keep my trap shut. She was extremely authoritarian and even the littlest of peeps when we were all supposed to be silent was greeted by a sharp “PUT YOUR NAME ON THE BOARD!”, indicating we had to write lines. And, yes, you could get a 2, 3, etc. by your name to do multiple copies.
Yeah - thinking back, I think ours was 3d grade as well. Can’t remember it displacing the rest of the curriculum.
Well, we didn’t have any foreign languages in the Chicago Public grade Schools. No computer science (or computers!) or “career technical education” (WTF?) in 3d grade either. But I think we covered most of the rest on that list.
I’ll get on my soapbox and say too much is made of the need for computer education - at least in early grades, and at least in reasonably affluent communities, where most kids will have access to electronic devices in the home. Hell, nearly every kid in my county has had considerable access to gaming devices, tablets, and cellphones before kindergarten.
Like I said, when my kids were young, they said the kids didn’t need to learn cursive because they would all be keyboarding all of the time. But they didn’t teach touch typing either - so long as the kids used at least 1 finger on both hands, that was deemed sufficient. Stupid us - we taught our kids both cursive and touch typing.
One final point - which isn’t all THAT important, but as I remember it, part of the allure of writing cursive was because that’s how ADULTS and BIG KIDS wrote. Now, it seems the maturing of young people is consistently delayed in many respects. Writing cursive is perhaps a minuscule aspect of this.
I’m on the fence on the question of whether or not cursive writing should be taught to kids as standard in school.
Before I learned to write in English, I was taught by my parents to write in Serbian cyrillic, which is completely phoentic - each of 30 letters corresponds to one sound, so no spelling required! However, I never learned proper cursive cyrillic, I always found it awkward. For example, an upper-case “T” is one horizontal bar under which are three vertical ones. Or a lower-case “t” looks more like a Latin “m”. It made me dislike cursive at an early age.
I can’t remember if it was in Grade 2 or Grade 3 (I had the same teacher), but that’s when we were taught to write cursive. I remember very well how the teacher did it, as it was done quite systematically (and as I didn’t enjoy it much). First the teacher gave us a sheet with one each of all 26 letters, upper- and lower-case, maybe also the digits, and told us to copy it. On it was a picture of a wizard with a speech bubble that said “make a copy”. It was a little bit of an inside joke of mine that the wizard was wicked because he said to make a copy (but really, he wasn’t). Then, we had to write out a practice sheet of every single letter, one letter a day if I recall correctly. Then, when we had done this, we had to write out nursery rhymes, again one a day, over a period of I don’t remember how long. The teacher had a set of cards entitled “Sally Go Round the Sun”, each of which had one nursery rhyme, and I deliberately chose those with only one stanza. After a while, the number of these began to dwindle, and I maybe spent more time looking for a short nursery rhyme to copy than I might have copying one with (gasp!) two stanzas. Finally, one day, we finished this learning unit. At this point, the teacher said: “All right, children. From now on, all your writing is to be done in cursive!”
I felt like groaning. But I obeyed. It took until maybe Grade 8 for me to realize that cursive writing wasn’t compulsory for all school writing. Thereafter, as I recall, I continued using it out of habit, but as we had to write more notes in class in higher grades, it got messier and messier, eventually morphing into a half-connected hybrid of cursive and printed. Nowadays, I only print and use cursive pretty much exclusively for my signature.
Just a few years ago, I tutored a 9-10-year old girl, and this included the same kind of practice of cursive as I had had. Her dad, who is about my age, was very happy that they were still teaching it, and he gave as the main reason that children should be able to sign themselves. I don’t know. That is a reasonable argument as long as we have individual signatures as a way of authenticating ourselves. On the whole, though, I’m still on the fence. Maybe I would teach it but not require kids to use it thereafter…
I really don’t think “cursive = adult” in any way at all.
For what it’s worth, @Dinsdale’s perspective rings true to me: when I was that age, learning cursive felt like a rite of passage, an initiation into the secrets of how the big kids (and the adults, like my parents) wrote.
I cannot find it quickly, but there have been studies/descriptions of the way handwriting develops and matures from the beginning, throughout the school years, and into adulthood.
Incidentally, once upon a time, training a group of clerks/scribes to write indistinguishably in the same hand would have been a thing, for when uniformity in official documents was necessary, leaving no room for creativity or a personal touch.
Do you ever make any assumptions - or have any even fleeting reaction - based on a person’s handwriting?
No difference to you if various forms of writing come to you in neat printing, a legible cursive, an illegible scrawl, some mix of printing/cursive…?
Good for you if you don’t. I readily admit that there are some handwritings that make thoughts like “immature” or “childish” come to mind. Not that it really affects any way that I interact with those persons, but the impression does cross my mind.
If somebody dots their i’s with hearts, I’m making assumptions. Other than that, not really
Just did a quick google of “childish handwriting.” No, I’m not saying that everyone should write a certain way, or that anyone should care what I think about they handwriting. But my quick review suggests there are at least a few people who understand what is intended by describing handwriting as childish (or girlish). And at least some folk with such writing wish to change it.
Unfortunately, the only way to change your writing is to spend a lot of time practicing the changes you wish to make, and then USING your new style. So I suspect very few adults do succeed in changing their basic manner of handwriting.
Nor to me, either. There were certainly some things that the “big kids” did that seemed alluring, but cursive was never one of them.
Now that I think about it, there probably was some sense of cursive being a “girly” thing. The male adults in my life used print. My grandfather in particular had a very neat small-caps style. The women used cursive.
Even within the cursive style, there were some gender differences. I had a (male) friend in high school that everyone (including him) recognized as having a “girly” style. No dotting the i’s with hearts, just–curvier, or something.
What do you mean by childish handrwriting? As I said earlier, my own handwriting is terrible. This is not due to lack of effort. So, I’m reluctant to make assumptions based on somebody’s handwriting. Additionally, as I’ve often said, I find most societal norms pointless at best.
I absolutely make assumptions about people from their handwriting. Sometimes my assumption is “lacks fine motor dexterity”.
If someone has a very neat cursive script, my assumption is that they went to Catholic school.
If someone has a perfect rigid print, i think they are a little obsessive and probably have a scientific/technical background.
And if they make little hearts instead of dots, i assume they are an 8 year old girl.
But i don’t judge someone more mature for cursive. Maybe more feminine. Or more Catholic. 
I am quite good at imitating other people’s writing and can change my writing easily. I have my own way of writing, sure, but I can deliberatly change it. It’s fun, like drawing or painting in a different style.
The schools around where I live (Los Angeles) all provide Chrome-books or similar to each of their students. Who are required to use that school-provided equipment. (They also provide two meals a day, so probably not representative of America in general.) Modern life and jobs pretty much require interacting with electronic devices, so I don’t have any problem with children learning it at school. At least it’s an attempt to give equal access regardless of economic status.
That’s interesting to me, because I’ve never heard of such a concept. For me, adults used typewriters and, later, computer printers. Writing was for temporary stuff before typing it. Or mathematics.
I remember as a kid feeling more grown up knowing how to write cursive, but I’m pretty sure that was just because of how it is taught. It was something the older kids knew how to do, and something the adults in my life would use.
But seeing something written in cursive never seemed more mature to me. It was just like print, in that adults just seemed to write differently, having better handwriting and a style of their own, developed over time.
A kid’s cursive still seemed like young writing to me.
Also, inidentally, most of the people who I’ve encountered who say they write like a kid do not. They have sloppier handwriting, but it still has that style to it.