Stop teaching cursive writing in schools ?

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: Modelworks

Originally posted by: ric1287

Originally posted by: BassBomb

Originally posted by: TallBill

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
cursive was only a few weeks! easy.

Bullshit, I spent a long time on "handwriting" and cursive is fucking pointless.

Cursive is faster.. I find I can't write cursive neatly though so I don't understand my own writing and have to print. I find printing more time consuming but neater

its faster but you can't actually read it or do anything with it....? Pointless, no?

Then maybe the problem is that people should be taught to write better.

And how do you propose we do that? A lot of people 20-30 years older than me, who went through a school system that definitely had more emphasis on teaching cursive than today's, write in a sloppy cursive script that teeters on unreadability. You can't force people to write legibly. All you can do is teach them how to write properly. By the time their handwriting has degraded to the point of unreadability, it's usually far too late to have more handwriting classes. The best you can hope for is for teachers who receive illegible handwritten assignments to mark them down or force the student to rewrite them if they're actually unreadable.

 

[Howard]

Originally posted by: FleshLight
Cursive is used extensively in the engineering field. Our entire senior project (design a water reservoir) has to be written in cursive.

wtf

 

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: RapidSnail

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca

Originally posted by: blinky8225
The argument about the Declaration of Independence doesn't really apply since it's online anyway.

And I challenge anyone, even a cursive expert, to actually be able to read the original copy. It's practically illegible, cursive training or no.

OP: technology marches on. Deal with it. There's a reason they don't teach math students how to use slide rules.

You can't read this?

Oh, nevermind. I seem to remember it being harder to read than that. Only thing that throws me off is some of the S's are written as "f" instead.

 

[Saga]

Why anyone would butcher the English language with cursive is beyond me. I promptly forgot it once it was taught to me and by the time highschool English classes rolled around we were typing everything on a computer anyway.

Outdated. Needs to go. Period.

 

[Baked]

Cursive is old school. My boss signs his name in cursive. I scribble everything.

 

[CRXican]

my writing is a hybrid of non-cursive and cursive

 

[PingSpike]

It is a pretty useless skill. I've actually forgotten it since I only used it to sign my name after early elementary school. And even that has degraded into a quick scribble that contains no actual letters of any writing style.

 

[MagnusTheBrewer]

People just got lazy because there are few instances today that require legible handwriting. I love reading the old letters my Dad sent to my Mom from Italy during WWII. He was taught Spencerian Script when he was a kid in Minnesota and wrote his letters in a fine hand from the middle of a war.

 

[Aikouka]

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca
Cursive is stupid.

Furthermore, I think teaching it makes people's handwriting worse. Face it, most people have sloppy handwriting, and sloppy print is a lot easier to read than sloppy cursive. I can only read about 50% of sloppy cursive but nearly 100% of sloppy print. And most written forms say "PLEASE PRINT" for a reason.

Keyboarding is more important.

I ended up melding cursive writing into my printing to form a new style of writing that I call "cursing." Fuck.

Originally posted by: Modelworks
I'm curious how you will sign a legal document , print your name ?
How will you leave a note to someone , write in print the whole thing ? It is fine to say use a keyboard, but keyboards are not everywhere.

Any cool kid works on his signature in case he becomes famous, duh .

 

[Zenmervolt]

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca
Oh, nevermind. I seem to remember it being harder to read than that. Only thing that throws me off is some of the S's are written as "f" instead.

Nope, not "f". It's a long "s", or "?".

ZV

 

[SlitheryDee]

Meh, I don't really care. I have no trouble reading either cursive or print, but I like the way cursive looks when it's neat. Seems as though writing in cursive is potentially faster as well. I print everything I write because cursive doesn't lend itself that well to left-handed people. It's not like they're not teaching children how to write.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: FleshLight
Cursive is used extensively in the engineering field. Our entire senior project (design a water reservoir) has to be written in cursive.

What field of engineering? I'm in mechanical engineering, and the only thing that we're to do in cursive is our signature on documents. Everything else is to be in print, and on drawings, all properly drawn capitals.

My signature is the only cursive writing I've done in at least 10 years.

 

[drinkmorejava]

Originally posted by: FleshLight
Cursive is used extensively in the engineering field. Our entire senior project (design a water reservoir) has to be written in cursive.

Who are you?

 

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: drinkmorejava

Originally posted by: FleshLight
Cursive is used extensively in the engineering field. Our entire senior project (design a water reservoir) has to be written in cursive.

Who are you?

fleshlight

 

[eits]

why not start teaching caligraphy too?

 

[PingSpike]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
I'm curious how you will sign a legal document , print your name ?
How will you leave a note to someone , write in print the whole thing ? It is fine to say use a keyboard, but keyboards are not everywhere.

I can't read anyone's terrible cursive notes, so they could just put a blank post it on my monitor for the same effect with much less effort. And print your name if you want me to know who its from, the only thing harder to read then cursive notes are the signitures attached to them. Its not like this is some new phenomenon either. There was argueably more emphasis on hardwritting when say my parents were in school, and my experience has been that people of generations older than mine have even worse handwriting...they just stubbornly continue to use cursive.

You can sign a legal document with a scribble or print it, no one is going to give a shit. And lets not pretend like the 3 times a week you have to print something with a pen is going to save you hours and hours of labor...thats if we assume cursive is actually faster then the bastard cursive/print hybrid most people (myself included) actually write in. Which it isn't.

 

[SagaLore]

What the hell?

My youngest brother went to a private school. He was learning cursive in 1st grade. Its a lot easier to flow words together than blocky print.

If anything, schools should follow this example.

 

[KeithTalent]

Kids should definitely know what it is and how to read it and maybe write it a bit. It should not be a huge part of the curriculum, but there are many old, and very important documents in cursive and I think it would be good for kids to still be able to read them.

Also, I think it just helps with learning language in general. The written word has already taken such a beating over the past while, eliminating cursive from schools would only further add to the degradation.

KT

 

[ZetaEpyon]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
I'm curious how you will sign a legal document , print your name ?
How will you leave a note to someone , write in print the whole thing ? It is fine to say use a keyboard, but keyboards are not everywhere.

They manage fine in countries that don't use the Latin alphabet at all, much less cursive.

And good lord, what's wrong with writing a note in print?

 

[PlasmaBomb]

Originally posted by: ric1287

How many little kids can rattle off 10 different kinds of dinosaurs but can't multiply 3x12

36 little kids?

Amidoinitrite?

 

[Fritzo]

I'm almost for this. You know, if someone writes something in cursive- I don't read it.

 

[wiredspider]

Originally posted by: Howard

Originally posted by: FleshLight
Cursive is used extensively in the engineering field. Our entire senior project (design a water reservoir) has to be written in cursive.

wtf

Yea, doesn't make any sense... Does your school forbid computers or something?

 

[AstroManLuca]

Originally posted by: KeithTalent
Kids should definitely know what it is and how to read it and maybe write it a bit. It should not be a huge part of the curriculum, but there are many old, and very important documents in cursive and I think it would be good for kids to still be able to read them.

Also, I think it just helps with learning language in general. The ritten word has already taken such a beating over the past while, eliminating cursive from schools would only further add to the degradation.

KT

Yeah, they should teach them just enough so they can read it. Just so they know why the lowercase "r" and "s" (among others) look kinda funny. Make the next generation backwards-compatible.

In my experience, cursive is only faster when the person writing it scrawls so badly that it's unreadable. Well-written, legible cursive is almost as slow as printing and still not quite as legible. But beyond that, the amount of time people spend nowadays actually writing stuff by hand is so small that the total lifelong time savings of using cursive vs. print is probably less than the number of hours spent teaching it.

 

[MrPickins]

Originally posted by: Zenmervolt

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca
Oh, nevermind. I seem to remember it being harder to read than that. Only thing that throws me off is some of the S's are written as "f" instead.

Nope, not "f". It's a long "s", or "?".

ZV

Interesting. I always assumed it was some form of the eszett.

Originally posted by: AstroManLuca

Originally posted by: SnipeMasterJ13
I'm one of the few that does a majority of writing in cursive. It's a hybrid of cursive/print, depending on the letters. For example, I always print Q instead of cursive, but the rest of the word will be cursive. I can write a lot faster doing 95% cursive, and I'm the only one that can decode the chicken scratch that my handwriting is anyway (printing included).

I'm similar but with me it's more like 80-90% printing. It's just that my letters often run together and sometimes I'll use a few cursive-like techniques to make it faster. But it's still mostly printing.

This is exactly what I do when I need to take notes quickly.

 

[xanis]

I don't have a problem with this. I learned and used cursive from 1st to 2nd grade, and have used it probably fewer than 10 times from then until now. In my opinion, it's useless. I agree with the schools on this one... kids should learn how to type PROPERLY.