Tough one. I put cursive, but I don’t write in cursive – I have my own style of handwriting which is quick (very quick, actually) and mostly legible (to me). Printing I do fine, but it takes a long time. Oh, yeah, my signature is basically a big squiggle. Some cunt cashier where I was signing a CC receipt said, “Nice handwriting!” I had to point out that it was not handwriting, and that I’ve seen how to do a tracheotomy with a pen, and also, you fat bitch, stay the fuck out my way or else you will die. Also, me and you, “woman,” let’s have a Pepsi challenge on who has the better handwriting, you dumb bitch who can’t even finish a Sunday NYT crossword in 20 minutes? So, screw her, and screw all you too.
I’m sure you’re all fine – just ventilating is all. Forgot about that ho is all.
Well, the question was originally sparked off in my mind by a thread on another board bemoaning the fact that, apparently, the West Australian school system is about to drop the formal teaching of cursive altogether, to focus more on typing. Two camps quickly appeared, the “what a good idea, typing is a useful skill and cursive never did ME any good.” camp and the “ZOMG our children will be incapable with a pen and paper, civilisation as we know it is finished” group. Given my description of the two camps, no prizes for guessing which one I fell into
So the question behind the question is “does the fact that you were taught cursive at school currently have a positive impact on your handwriting?”, which I figured “can you do it legibly faster than printing” was a good proxy for, without potentially biasing the results the way reading the backstory might.
In that context, I would count “joined up printing” the same as “printing”, unless you feel that your exposure to formal cursive at school helped you measurably in forming your style. My printing is somewhat joined up, but I don’t feel like it has anything much to do with cursive - I just join up the ones that “naturally” join, without making extra strokes to do so.
So is my handwriting just “joined-up printing”? I learned to write at a British school in the 1980s and we were taught a system called Nelson Handwriting, which I think is still widely taught today. It has simple letterforms which are fairly similar to printed letters, but with “tails” to join (most of) them together. “Cursive” wasn’t a word that was used - the art to master was joining up your writing so it no longer looked like infants’ individually drawn letters.
Obviously very few people write much like this as adults (my wife does, but she’s a teacher!) but I’d say most British adults of my age have handwriting that recognisably stems from it. (Mine probably less so than average.)
I started out life as a lefty, but the Catholic preschool and kindergarten I did in Germany screwed me up trying to turn me into a righty. I can actually produce perfect cursive, but it takes me forever. I can do calligraphy [uncial and copperplate are my favorites] but the dip pen takes forever to do without blobbing everywhere. My drafting training makes printing much more facile for me as printing got way more practice and actual usage. If I do noncalligraphic cursive now it sort of resembles an EKG trace.
Why not? That’s similar to the style of “cursive” I was taught as a kid, and I still use it – it’s just very, very stylized. I’m influenced by Husserl’s self-invented shorthand, though.
Cursive. I’m 26. We had to do cursive in elementary school and it was required for our papers. (Um, we weren’t typing yet.) But cursive is on the outs everywhere. I think it’s a shame. I didn’t have classes in elementary school that taught me how to use tablets and type. I learned it as that stuff came along.
Isn’t their shit watered down enough already?
Most of my students tell me, “Miss, I can’t read that kind of writing” if I write in cursive or a cursive/print mix. For shame. I admit, I look upon them with pity.
Yeah, for me there’s no real distinction. It’s a ridiculously false dichotomy. Jeez.
If your writing isn’t joined in some way, then either you’re one of those girls who is a perfectionist or… actually I don’t know what else you’d be. Come to think of it I have seen perfectionist males doing the same thing.
I’ve always thought my cursive looked forced and/or pretentious. I have always resented it for that. As such I use printing exclusively (even my signature) because I’ve used it so long I got pretty quick at it. Also I don’t remember how to make a few of the cursive letters.
Cursive and joined up letters aren’t (necessarily) the same thing. This is cursive. Not this. The latter you will pick up on your own, as the article says. The former can only come if you’ve actually seen it.
And of course some stuff does wind up joined in my “print,” but that doesn’t mean it’s intentional. It’s really not any slower to pick up the pen than it is to draw a stroke, and the stroke is more likely to make a mark that makes the letters harder to distinguish. Getting into the general habit of picking up the pen rather than leaving it on the paper makes it less likely I’m going to make my writing illegible.
IF I don’t care about legibility, then I can write in cursive a lot faster, as that’s exactly what it’s designed for.
I have struggled with poor handwriting my whole life. It’s not neat, never has been and not from lack of trying. Believe me, I suffered in grade school, had to redo things and never got extra marks for neatness. If I’m the only one who has to read it, my cursive is pretty fast. If it has to be legible to someone else, then it has to be printed. I print all capitals
Same here–that is essentially the thread I was going to start if I didn’t find one already expressing this thought.
I am a GenXer, and learned Palmer cursive in school. Well, I think it was Palmer, anyway; online samples differ. It was this type of cursive, in any event. (A lot of other samples are similar for most letters but make the capital P differently.) And I still write this way, albeit sloppier–but I even make the capital Q to look like a big 2, the whole nine yards.
I am however married to a Millennial and have four kids with the oldest about to start high school, so I’m well aware of the precipitous decline of cursive. Here’s the thing: I totally get why writing *anything *by hand would be less and less common–I myself mostly type things or dictate them into my iPad or iTouch. But if you are writing more than a couple of words with pen and paper, I can’t understand not using cursive. It’s just so much faster, the way the letters are designed to flow into each other. (I understand that it won’t be faster if you don’t really learn, or have forgotten, how to do it; but that’s beside the point.)
I learned cursive when I was 6. That’s 62 years ago. Then I used it for several years, with declining legibility. That still leaves several decades. If I had to, I could probably re-learn it, but it wouldn’t be pretty.
