Why do they bother to teach us cursive in school?
I’ve never found that my printing was of insufficient speed. It depends what you’re using it for. For several years I worked in journalism and took notes on the fly, by hand, in reporters’ notebooks. Cursive was invaluable. I can and often do print, block-letter engineering-style, but it would have been impossible to print at the speed people talk. I take pride in being able to take notes verbatim and never had to paraphrase any quotes (which, I’m sorry to say, journalists who can’t write well sometimes do). In this type of work, printing is of insufficient speed. In my coursework and professional life, I sometimes find printing inefficient, as well. That’s because I take copious notes, not outline-style notes. If I were picking out short words and phrases, printing would be fine. But I prefer to come close to transcribing ideas. Shorthand might be faster, but why learn it when I already know cursive and can write it fast enough?
It seems many people here have transferred their feelings about how they were taught cursive handwriting to the actual act of handwriting. “I failed my class in elementary school” or “Mrs. So-and-so was a real *&#(!” do not sound like any reason to seek to abolish one of the fundamental tools of a literate society I don’t think it’s a matter of just hating the way that it’s taught by a single person. The fact is, to learn cursive requires many many hours of tedious practice. How do you propose that we get around that? Also, part of the negative feelings toward cursive have to do with its relative lack of utility – something that I sensed even in the third grade. I would in no way call cursive “one of the fundamental tools of a literate society.” If that were the case, then I would be a functional illiterate. And yes, handwriting can indeed make you smarter. Just as children need to progress through certain movements in infancy to develop areas of their brain, certain parts of cursive w
I haven’t written in cursive(script) in thirty years now. I gave up in junior high school as I couldn’t ever manage to make it even remotely legible and have printed ever since. I’ve never really missed it as a skill, I seldom every have to write anything that anyone else reads. I keep a daily work journal in a notebook but that’s really the only thing that I ever need to write by hand other than my signature on forms. I haven’t sent or received a postal letter in years, if I want to leave someone a note I use email or IM. Checks are all electronic and grocery lists come out of my laser printer. And I took notes during lectures on my laptop.
That’s your business, but that seems an exceedingly odd thing to be proud of — as if you, as an adult, were proud of your dodgeball or hopscotch skills, or of your ability to assemble dioramas inside shoe boxes. The art of elegant handwriting is nothing to be ashamed of! It would be really great if, instead of teaching us kids that half-assed cursive currently employed (which maybe 10% of people really pick up on anyway (I write in a mix of cursive and print, so I can’t really talk)) they taught some really calligraphic hands. I once read an article about an LAPD (I think) officer who had taught himself out of a late-19thC manual how to write in (some form whose name I can’t recall—Morris’, I think), and everyone thought it delightful. Fact is, they spent a lot of time teaching us a lot of useless stuff at school. I’m appalled that people generally leave school having spent a couple years learning French Yeah, French is totally useless.
I think you have to learn to write cursive in order to be able to read cursive. I remember scribbling big connected loops on paper and telling my parents that it was cursive writing, because to me, when my parents wrote something it just looked like scribbled loops. I could only read printing. So I guess we learn it so that we can understand the words of the generations before us!
