Cursive handwriting going the way of the dodo?

[AdminAssistant]

I had a hell of a time learning cursive. If they keep teaching it, they should at least move it back to 4th grade or so. I learned in 2nd grade, and as others have pointed out, I hadn't even mastered writing in print yet. Well, that and my 2nd grade teacher was an absolute bitch but....

So, my cursive at first was illegible, but by the time I got to high school, I'd figured out my own system that combined cursive and print.

[Ginger Tea]

I art writing this essay in crayon and you are going to like it or lump it

On the whole left handed writing thing, one guy who used to work in the office wrote with the paper sideways so he could see what he had written (given that his hand would cover it if he wrote right side up) anyone else do that or is he in the minority of lefthanded peeps.

[Andara Bledin]

I'm pretty sure my ex was naturally left-handed. But between forced conformity in school as a youngster, and a massive inferiority complex passed on from his dad, he did everything as a right-hander by the time I met him. And he did all of it with a noteworthy lack of any form of grace.

^-.-^

[blas87]

I knew cursive first....I watched my cousin doing her homework and writing in this beautiful script and she attempted to teach me how to do it myself.

Of course, the teacher's aid in kindergarten was enraged when she saw me trying to write my name in cursive instead of printing it, and that didn't help my case with my parents desperately trying to pull me out of special ed.......I was punished for already knowing cursive, and this old bitty was the type of teacher whom, in front of everyone, would take your paper away and give you a new one and tell you to do it over, loud enough for everyone to hear.

[Cats]

I remember when we first started learning cursive, our teacher told us that we would be expected to know how to do this well, especially for high school. High school, she told us, was where we would have to write EVERYTHING in cursive.

HA! WRONG! The only time I ever used cursive in high school was my signature on forms and writing notes to people in between classes. Now, I only use it for my signature and I hardly write notes or letters because I can just walk over to their dorm or apartment (although, over break, I wrote Beloved Bullshit a lovely letter, written in cursive) or in the case of back home, just give them a call or shoot a text.

ETA: The only time my handwriting even looks "girly" is when I use cursive. Other girls have this tendency to write letters in a way that I don't even know where the hell they learned it.

Did you crawl into my head to post this? Seriously, this is all too familiar.

My 3rd grade teacher was a BITCH (for other reasons as well, not just what I'm typing here). Your cursive had to be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. To the point where everyone's paper had to be indentical to how she wanted it. She told us as adults everything would have to be written in cursive. HA! Yeah, right.

My handwriting sucks and looks more guy-ish, but I can give it that girly-type flair that I think you're referring to if I actually try to write neat (though most of the time I'm too damn impatient). My usual handwriting is kind of a mix of print and cursive; I connect and flow a ton of my letters together.



Most people's cursive is illegible (my dad's is chicken scratch since his letters are so tiny).

What's really funny is that my mom has some nice cursive, but she writes in block letters (mainly capitals) for print. I swear she writes everything exactly the same all the time. She's a lefty though too, so maybe you leftys can fill me in on if this a coincidence or more of a lefty thing.


Anyway, I think cursive still should be taught, but not forced down our throats like it was with my 3rd grade teacher. You'd have to understand it to read it, what with some letters not even looking like their print counterparts (z for instance, n looks like an m, blah...). I think it's more imporant for kids to be taught good penmanship in general; some kids I've seen have TERRIBLE handwriting!

[AdminAssistant]

I think it's more imporant for kids to be taught good penmanship in general; some kids I've seen have TERRIBLE handwriting!

THIS.

I always dread grading midterms because there will always be a handful of tests that are damn near illegible. It's very frustrating. I don't care if it's in cursive or print, I just need to be able to *read* it.

[Eisa]

I'm left-handed. And when I write, I turn my paper nearly completely sideways. It looks like I shouldn't be able to write at all, but hey, it works for me.

[Rageaholic]

My 3rd grade teacher was a BITCH (for other reasons as well, not just what I'm typing here). Your cursive had to be ABSOLUTELY PERFECT. To the point where everyone's paper had to be indentical to how she wanted it. She told us as adults everything would have to be written in cursive. HA! Yeah, right.

Yeah, this is why I take the "adult world" stuff with a grain of stuff.

I had a similar problem with a 4th grade teacher who tried to "mold" me into her idea of a perfect student. Cursive and handwritting were just some of the things that she would not accept that I struggled with. Of course it wasn't that I had a legit struggle, I just wasn't trying hard enough.

[Wingates_Hellsing]

Eh, my handwriting is average at best, but like many who struggle with it it's mostly a matter of spending a little more time when accuracy is important.

That said, my signature is a botched and mutated scrawl leftover from my many grade school teacher's attempts to foist cursive writing on us. Most of the 'cursive' letters it had to start with aren't the right ones and by now the larger part of my last name is just a series of little loopy things.

It just makes no sense to try and hold on to cursive writing. Block printing and type face are the most used and therefore most understood writing formats, hell, more people probably understand 1337 5p34k than cursive by now.

The purpose of language as a whole, to say nothing of the written word, is to make encode messages to be decoded by other persons with as much accuracy as possible. There is therefore no reason to use something that most people don't understand, or understand less than something else.

[Ginger Tea]

At work due to my scrawl, I joke that I kill OCR on PDA's for Bletchly Park, who needs the enigma when all you truely need is someone with bad penmanship to entrust with writing down all your secrets.

[Racket_Man]

being a child of the 1960's cursive was the bane of my exsistance. they forced that on us in the 2d grade. had all of the diagrams with the proper start,stoke direction, and finish. my papers used to be literally filled with red correction marks.

I always failed penmenship both print type block and cursive.

doctors can not even read my writing. looking back at some of my notebooks from HS and early college I can still read them but to anyone else it is chicken scrawl

to this day I find it eaiser to print block letters when I handwrite stuff.

[ExRetailDrone]

I have never understood the concept of cursive writing. I remember learning it in elementary school, having to use those horrendous penmanship pens that I hated so very much, following along with the diagrams. I think that if I needed to, I could still write in cursive, but it would probably be nearly illegible since I haven't really used it since elementary school. It would also be very jittery, since that knowledge is not something that I took with me through the years simply due to lack of use.

Throughout my school years, my writing changed on an almost yearly basis. I would get bored with how I wrote certain letters, and would change them up for a while, until I got bored and switched back. This was for block lettering. My 'cursive' that I used through high school was a mish-mash of some cursive letters and some block letters, all mangled together in a bit letter orgy. Even my signature hasn't been pure cursive for I-don't-know-how-long. It's even worse now, I make the first letter and, unless I'm signing a check, just squiggle the rest. No one ever looks at those things that closely, anyway, it seems.

I agree with what others here have already said, that cursive should be considered part of an arts class like calligraphy instead of trying to force kids to learn it when they will most likely never use it again.

[telecom_goddess]

I think cursive writing is becoming a lost art....most people don't write letters anymore, not when you can email. I'm guilty of that as well. However I learned printing and cursive and all that in school in the seventies, way before I learned to type. The most useful thing I learned in school however was typing in high school in the 80's.

Mow my mother on the other hand learned her stuff in the 20s and 30s, and she was left handed. In those days that was considered very bad and they forced her to write right handed. She would actually get the ruler rapped on her left hand for writing with it In the end she could write with both hands but left handed she could write in mirror writing.

I'm right handed but my oldest daughter is left handed, luckily she was left alone.

[fireheart17]

Down here, they're keeping the tradition of cursive alive, albeit with some differences.

Basically, every state in Australia has their "own" version of print/cursive. My state uses "South Australian Modern Print" and "South australian modern cursive". The general gist is that by Year 7, they have a LEGIBLE writing style. They don't care if its cursive or print, as long as its legible, they're happy. The modern print and cursive are still taught, but usually for about 15-20 minutes, rather than for an hour.

Generally speaking, both styles are almost identical to one another in terms of slant and formation. The only difference refers to whether some letters link or not. For instance, a q will link to the next letter while a g won't.

[Lace Neil Singer]

Funny; I was never taught cursive at school. The teachers at both the primary and secondary did teach us how to do neat handwriting and how to write in a way that meant that your writing was readable, but cursive never came into it.

My writing now is messy, unless I take my time. And I often have to write things; ie, having to renew the health and safety and tanker training every six months or write out a fuel delivery. My writing is perfectly legible; it's rounded and fairly neat. I don't see how putting in fancy loops makes any difference, to be honest, to teaching kids how to write.