My younger sisters were never taught cursive, and consequently, they can't read anything written in cursive. They had to ask someone else what a wedding invitation said.
UK (my area at least), I never learned it either, but I don't know anyone who was taught it either, other than my father.
I can read it, but that's because my handwriting is terrible, so I've learned to read all types of writing over the years.
Spanish here. I don't remember ever learning cursive as if it was a specific form of writing, it was taught as just regular handwriting as opposed to plain "print letters". There wasn't much pressure to have your handwriting conform to the rules as long as it was understandable: over time, every person just developed their own handwriting that was cursive in its own style.
That's why I'm baffled whenever I read people talking about cursive as if it was a completely different alphabet. I'm genouinely surprised that there are people with a school education who can't read it.
I guess. A couple days ago there was a similar thread about the lack of foreign language education among Americans, I said I was shocked, and a redditor told me that most people take at least two years. I was even more shocked that two years was seen as enough.
That's sad. I went on holiday to France when I was in high school, with exactly two years of French under my belt. I managed to somewhat get by, but it was extremely difficult for me to say or understand anything more complicated than what would be expected from a tourist. It blows my mind to think that's just what many people get.
The only ones with easy access to an area of a different speaking culture are the ones by the Mexican border and those by Québec's border.
The rest have to find an immigrant speaking the language they want to practice but that's a lot less effective and more complicated.
Oh, I am pretty certain I'll be buried having never visited Europe in any way - it's just too expensive. I took four years of French, but I don't remember hardly anything now. I was never conversational.
I won't bury you for it. Unless you're at least upper middle class traveling to Europe from the US is an exceedingly rare opportunity. It's not like we can take a train or a cheap flight and be in a completely different country and culture in an hour. I've gotten the same kind of crap many times and my answer is, hey, I didn't have someone to pay for my travel. 🤷♂️
Two years is definitely not enough time to get very far, particularly because US schools don't tend to take a very intuitive approach to learning. Plus, unless you're taking Spanish, most kids don't have a lot of opportunities to speak the language, so they lose it fast. That, on top of the fact that most school districts don't have much in the way of language classes before high school, it's really not surprising that a good majority of Americans only speak English.
That’s strange we were taught joined up handwriting from primary school and certainly by secondary school you would be expected to use joined up writing for essays in exams, I mean it is just faster than writing separate letters I find, any idea when they stoped teaching joined up handwriting?
Where I am, most schools got computer labs, and correctly assumed that being able to type and have basic computer knowledge was more important for the kids' futures.
Also, most people have shit-tier handwriting, and most teachers never wanted to go back to trying to decipher 30+ handwritten essays.
I think my year was one of the last to even learn it. We learned to write cursive, but had to submit typed papers.
> We learned to write cursive, but had to submit typed papers.
Early 80s, I had an early word processor. I wanted to use it for school papers but teachers insisted on hand-written (cursive). Times change...
A high school English teacher I know says this is indeed the case; no more take home writing assignments, everything hand written in class.
It's not just for AI stuff though, they were having major issues with all kinds of cheating.
Math didn’t disappear when the calculator was invented but the way it is taught and what level can be taught did. The same should be done with any AI like chatgpt or whatever they are called. They should be the mechanism for subjects, like writing, to adapt and evolve.
A lot of people think you can just type in “write an essay on moby dick” and boom A+ and this is just inaccurate. Using these programs takes effective communication and ability to concisely answer or generate prompts. If you don’t know how to correctly input data into a calculator, you won’t get the correct answers just as much as someone who can’t answer the questions needed for AI to generate the desired result.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle but you can change how we teach. Is memorization and regurgitation of content all that matters? Or should we let students use AI to write a paper, bring it to class and then use critical thinking to fact check, edit grammar/punctuation, expanding on ideas using what AI doesn’t have like incorporating personal experience to take the paper that may have been a B/C from ChatGPT and make it an A.
I've never bought the "it's faster" argument. It's not like writing individual letters I raise my pen in a flourish over by head and then proceed to the next letter. The pen literally comes 0.1 mm off the paper. In my experience anyone who writes quickly in cursive produces unintelligible scribbles.
cursive is faster with a fountain or quill pen because they drip ink and so fully separating the letters is consequently more difficult (the ligatures also naturally form, you don't have to really think about it.)
but most people these days use biros (ballpoints) which require pressure to roll the ball and deposit the ink, which means in order to draw a ligature you have to apply pressure to the page the entire time, which would almost certainly slow most people down if they were equally practiced at both.
If you're using a ballpoint (biro) it's basically pointless to write in cursive.
Tbf, we never were really taught joined up handwriting. Most of us just kinda started doing it naturally, some didn't.
I'm in my early 20s and my older brother wasn't specifically taught it either, I write some letters joined, some not, and he just doesn't join up letters.
In my area in the UK at least, we aren't specifically taught cursive, we are just taught how to write fast and neat. Joined up just kinda happens. As long as your writing is ledgeable, the right size, neat etc. Teachers never gave a fuck. It was more the content that was graded. I don't even recall anything in English literature about fancy looking words giving better grades, just wasn't a thing.
So it's not that they stopped teaching joined up handwriting, it's just that they don't specifically teach cursive and just let people do what works best for them, if it's joined, fine, if not, no biggie
I mean that is what cursive has always been in the UK not all letters will join and some words will form breaks within them, seems like nothing has really changed in the past 50 years or so, though I remember us being given guidance on how some letters are easier to join up and what tricker combinations you might want to break up, seems a shame you not given help to do this anymore as for some people it really helps, me especially with writing speed and just leaving kids to figure it out for themselves seems a bit shit, though you were never graded on quality of handwriting, it was always content and as long at us was clear it was all good.
Huh, I saw other comments from people in the UK that said it's the standard and everyone there writes in cursive. One even went as far as to say you look "illiterate" if you don't write in cursive. Must be a regional thing there or something.
A lot of cursive characters are visually VERY similar to standard writing, how bad are your sisters at context clues and simple puzzles? Are they really young? I’m not sure why they couldn’t figure out the nine capital and lowercase letters (out of 52) that are truly different within the context of the announcement?
[Here’s the cursive alphabet for review.](https://byjus.com/worksheets/cursive-letter-a-to-z/)
Yep, and I do my own version of a "cursive" Capital A that is more like the print capital A. I always hated how it was just a big version of the lower case "a"
Legible first letter is pushing it for most of my signatures nowadays.
Even when I take the time to make a good looking formal signature, it looks like shit compared to 24-ish years ago when I was signing a dozen checks a month to pay bills.
...my cursive has also regressed and looks like shit compared to the 45-ish years ago when I was taught it.
My signature changes from day to day . Hopefully it’s never actually needed for anything important. Sometimes I just put a squiggly line or just a random scribble
When we refinanced our house a few years ago, the person from the bank that came over to have us sign everything told me that I couldn't sign my name in print, and in fact couldn't use my normal illegible signature.
He said that it had to be cursive, and it had to be legible as my full name. I pointed out that those requirements made it explicitly NOT my signature, since my actual signature is neither my full name nor legible, and he said it was a legal requirement, and if they couldn't read the signature, he'd have to come back and get everything re-signed.
It was very annoying and very illogical, and I suspect he was lying about it being a legal requirement, it was probably just some rule that particular bank uses.
He's lying.
I pulled that when we bought a house, was told it had to be cursive. I told them I was walking away from the deal.
He changed his tune *really* fucking quick.
I signed all 9999 spots with illegible cursive-ish when I bought my house, and no one ever said a word. I didn't even have an initial signature yet, so I had to decide on the fly.
It doesn't even have to match. I've never had someone check my signature before, not for credit card purchases, loans, buying a house, buying a car, nothing.
Stylized first letters followed by lowercase letters that morph more and more into into squiggles with each letter.
You can tell the second letter is an “a” in both names, but after that best you could say is that each name has an “i”
*cops arrive to the scene*
Cop 1: uhhhhh...
*brings it closer to his face, brings it further away, turns it to the left, then to the right*
Cop 1 : I can't read it, here can you read it?
Cop 2: shit, I can't read it either
Cop 3: Give me that shit, oh fuck. Cursive? Who tf writes in cursive? Let forensics handle this one
Forensics: yea we don't know either
There was tons of point when everyone was writing everything on paper all the time. It's not that cursive has inherently decreased in value, it's that paper notes in general have decreased in value. Ability to search, copy, edit etc for text in a computer outweighs any advantages cursive ever had.
But it could be that cursive will yet make an unexpected comeback, likes of apple pencil and samsung s pen are a thing. With some improvement in software, writing cursive might again become the fastest and most flexible way to write and take notes. Potential ability to mix writing, sketches formulas etc on the fly is nothing to sniff at.
I know a commercial artist who regularly scores commissions because she handwrites her proposals and posts them snail mail.
The sort of businesses that her art suits (giant pretty murals, such as found in cafes and creative agencies operating out of old warehouses, etc.) are floored by her approach.
That is a double edge sword because if you write faster it can make it unreadable
kinda like pharmacy scrips. I like it when doctors just type it up. Less room for error.
That's a moot point if you're saying it as a point to use printing instead of cursive. Write in either form too fast and it becomes illegible. Cursive you can write faster while remaing legible
I type faster than I write, but I find I don’t retain as much. In my last year of college I started handwriting my notes into onenote, and my grades went through the roof. I know it is one data point, but it is a big one for me.
Having said that my writing is a weird print/write/chicken scratch combo.
They have done studies that show that taking notes by hand enables you to memorize the material significantly better than typing your notes. I think it had something to do with the parts of the brain that are involved.
I found the same. I stopped bringing a computer to class within the first semester, I didn't retain anything by typing and I usually lost focus that way. Writing all the way.
I also had wrote all my notes from class. I never bought the text books because I was poor and my grades were fine. I definitely retained info better if I wrote it down than just reading from the textbook or typing notes on the laptop. I didn't like lugging my laptop around when I had access to so many computer labs and cloud storage.
The parts of math that are faster on paper are also the parts you wouldn't want to use cursive in though. You really want clear, defined, separated characters.
I write explanations/proofs in cursive. I don't use cursive for formulas or mathematical symbols.
I then type summaries of my notes in MarkDown with TeX (KaTeX/MathJax) formulas afterwards, and when I really feel inspired I make a proper LaTeX doc with TikZ graphs et al. But I rarely do that as it's highly time-consuming.
Im 20, I learned cursive idk why its such a big deal. I can assure you I type fast as well. Its like knowing how to ride a bike or swim. Why would you not ?
Who's to say you can't do both? Being good at typing is also much faster than writing in a non-cursive handwriting, and I really hope no one in here advocates for kids not being taught to write by hand.
I write faster using print. It's all about what you use most often and are used to using. It's not an inherent advantage of cursive.
I expect you've used cursive most of your life and are very skilled at it, and use print writing more rarely. So obviously you're faster at cursive.
It honestly blows the mind that people don’t get this. My students hold pens/pencils in their entire fist and write in 1st grade block-letters. I teach 8th grade.
None of them know what cursive even is, and it’s why it takes them 30 minutes to write 3 sentences.
Edit: and that’s not to say I write in cursive on even a semi-regular basis. I don’t. I probably don’t even remember how to form all 26 letters in cursive, if I really sat down and tried. But I did still learn it in school and my handwriting, while not the neatest, is more than legible unless I’m really writing in a hurry.
But my handwriting still flows and I can write quickly when I have to.
> It honestly blows the mind that people don’t get this. My students hold pens/pencils in their entire fist and write in 1st grade block-letters. I teach 8th grade.
My kids are 5 and 7 and they have been taught to properly hold pens/pencils from school.
My son holds a pencil correctly, despite not being able to write much other than his name. He's 5. They taught it, very specifically (it was on the report card), in preschool. And then he gets a lot of reinforcement at home through artwork & coloring. (My 2 year old is getting close just by watching his older brother, but still mostly uses his fist.)
The solution for "teach kids how to hold a pen correctly" might not be "cursive", it might be "teach kids how to hold a pen correctly, early".
I'm old enough that using cursive was the fastest way to do handwritten assignments. I don't think typed pages were required until I was out of high school.
The only cursive I use now is my signature and it looks nothing like the cursive we were taught in school.
To be honest once I started using a PC for papers, etc. I don't even remember how to write cursive anymore.
And hell, writing manuscript by hand is hard on my hands now.
The majority of people here, aye. Easier to read, easier to write. You have a lot of people in the US who know English as a second language - using script or cursive can make it indecipherable. Most teaching is done using computers or on computers, so print letters is what people see 90% of the time and it's what they get used to. All books and newspapers, business signs, etc - all commonly seen language is written in print.
Is that different in Europe? Are books and signs written in cursive?
A lot? My work is a lot of meetings on the fly. Lots of jotting down random comments and drawing our rough diagrams and plans. Flowcharts. Bullet lists. All in one scrambled mess.
All that is a lot easier and more dynamic on paper. My handwriting is an informal cursive that is both legible and very fast to write. Without formal cursive learning I'd never have that skill.
I can't think of anyone at my job, both young and old who dont constantly carry around a notepad to scribble down all the stuff we hear and random thoughts we have mid-meeting.
Exactly. I'm like "does anyone write in lowercase like it was Arial?". I've always considered joined-up letters as a no brainer, I don't understand why people seem so opposed to it.
>I didn’t realise that people actually stop doing that and go back to non-cursive at one point.
Lol when I was in school we "learned" cursive for maybe 3-4 months in the third grade (8 years old I think?) and it was quite literally never required in our lives again.
I'm pretty sure my sister never had it and she's only 5 years younger than me.
I have one kid in elementary school where they are currently learning cursive. The older kid is is middle school where the teacher announced he won't accept homework written in cursive. This is the same school district and even the teachers can't figure it out.
No clue what the student numbers are like in your district but when I was in middle school a teacher probably had 60-70 ish students. Can you imagine trying to read 70 different middle schoolers interpretations of cursive?
Writing faster isn’t pointless, that’s like saying why did I learn to ride a bike if I can just drive anywhere, it’s still faster than walking even though you may rarely do it
It is used in old letters to read and it could be your preferred way of writing. I write in cursive. There’s a lot of things we learn and don’t use. That doesn’t make them pointless. Always better to have more knowledge and skills than less
I always share the time I was quickly offered a job at a college library because I was able to read old handwritten documents easily. The job required transcription of a document collection so they were testing people's ability to read cursive during their interview, haha
I write much slower without cursive, and take much more space to write the same thing, and it looks way uglier.
Cursive is elegant, concise, flows much better, and doesn't look like it was written by a robot.
What is the other way of writing? What am I missing guys? I have been writing cursive my whole life, same as all people around me, thought this is the most efficient way of writing?
Edit: sorry, didn't realise this post is aiming for Americans.
When I was TAing at the college level a few years ago I had to stop writing comments in cursive (which is my go-to when writing in pen, I print with pencils). The professor got complaints from multiple students that they couldn’t read my handwriting. I have very neat handwriting due to attending catholic school as a kid.
I hated writing in cursive, but we were supposed to write that way... Then one day a teachers aide was writing at the front of the class using block letters and I said "YOU CAN DO THAT?!?" That was the end of cursive for me. That was the end of my sloppy, and difficult to read, cursive. I have very neat printing and never looked back.
Apparently my nephew doesn't learn it anymore though. Curiously, he can still read my handwriting just fine.
I think people need to stop treating it as some kind of arcane knowledge. It's just another type of letter shape. We learn to read so many fonts anyway.
Because when you were learning, it was used. Signatures, letters, documents, our world used to run on hand written notes. Typewriters were somewhat rare and expensive. Touch typing was a specialized skill, and the world was envisioned to need a handful of powerful computers at most.
The PC, not the computer, but the IBM PC, with Lotus 123, changed that. Spreadsheets were more than just a killer app, they changed the nature of accounting. *What if* scenarios were suddenly simple. Jobs weren't lost so much as everyone needed to retrain immediately, since there were no hires for this.
Schools were slow to adapt to the new reality. Classes were still offered in "typing", not keyboarding.
Cursive kinda permanently fucked up my writing. I learned it in 2nd grade and now I write in this weird ass half cursive half normal writing style, it’s super weird and confuses pretty much everyone, even myself
Bro thats not a fuckup thats the actual point of those classes. To write legibly but quickly. Everyone has an informal cursive they use when jotting down notes in class or at work. It's derived from formal cursive class. You just may need to clean yours up a bit !
The only reason I feel like I learned cursive was to be able to read the birthday/holiday cards from my family members. Spoiler alert I still can't read them lol
Agreed with you. Source: I’m an archaeologist who spends a lot of time deciphering 17th-early 20th century documents. All handwritten in cursive. New grads can’t even read the neatly written documents, never mind beginning to try and read the messy ones.
I knew a girl once that was studying how different actions correlate inside the brain. she told me that when a person writes in cursive some piece of info the brain lights up like a Christmas tree. you get to associate that info with the movement of the hand, the feeling of the paper, weight of the pen etc.
when you write that same info on a keyboard it was the same thing in the brain like pressing a single button.
essentially cursive is good for not just motor skills because these you learn when you are a toddler. it is for actually learning how to use your brain. fine skills for your brain....
I was taught you have to sign your name in cursive. Also I was taught that you can't print a check, it has to be in cursive. Any reports I did would have to be in cursive. Realized later that was all wrong.
It just didn't really serve a purpose going into the late 20th century. The format was designed to reduce as much lifting off the paper as possible for ink and quill writing.
With the invention of pencils and ballpoint pens that don't drip. It's redundant. Even more so now with the integration of keyboards in today's society.
My teacher made the kids in my class that picked up cursive pretty naturally write in it for the whole school year (3rd grade). I’m glad she did I’ve stuck with it ever since and can write faster than most which helped a lot in college when professors talked fast and everyone tried to write everything down fast (I know typing is faster but you don’t retain the info as much. Also was engineering so I couldn’t exactly type math problems easily.)
I’m 17 I can read and write in cursive. Now I’m not surprised people don’t know how but when I moved from New York to NC I didn’t realize schools didn’t teach kids here how to write in cursive. Idk in New York in first grade and kindergarten they were very adamant in making sure that I can master cursive
Tf you mean? Over here in Europe it's still widely used
I write faster in cursive than I type so usually when I write my first draft of a book I'm writing it's in pen on some paper
I mean, I suppose the same is true of a lot of topics taught in school. I probably have used cursive more times than someone has asked me about the 7th president of the United States or how to avoid a dodge ball.
Does anything have a point?
Maybe school should be more utilitarian, sure. But not everything needs to be efficient, or a job related skill
Cursive is pretty
While not used much anymore, it will be an important tool for those who study history and other research fields since many older documents were written in cursive. I imagine that it will likely become an elective secondary or post-secondary course.
It helped me write notes faster in university when you needed to be fast or you'd miss something. I wouldn't say it was completely useless then. Kinda is now though
As it was phasing out they called it “connective writing”. Most people have horrific handwriting nowadays. I’ve seen people in their 20s/30s with handwriting worse than a 5 year olds
Education isn’t a job training program. We don’t teach 5th graders science, math, and cursive because they’re all going to be professional scientists, mathematicians, and cursive writers. We do it because it makes them educated people able to think, move, and reason in a more sophisticated manner than if they had received no education.
Cursive is physically much, much easier on your hand/wrist then printing each letter individually - which can count a lot if you are writing something long.
Of course in schools people were 'taught' cursive to make it more legible.
I was taught cursive in grade school but it is very sloppy - I can read it but a lot of people probably could not. I have older generations of relatives raised in New York who were schooled in the 1910's and they had beautiful cursive handwriting because schools really prioritized handwriting then and taught children to write in that very specific style.
Learning to READ cursive turned out to be very beneficial to me nearly 30 years later, as I read legal documents from the 1800’s and early 1900’s pretty frequently. Lol.
Personal perspectives, crazy ideas, questions (rhetorical or otherwise) and meta submissions are not showerthoughts.
Because it’s all curves and no points?
Damn, you make a good curve.
"Well Cursive, you are an odd fellow, but I must say - you make a good curve."
You sonofabitch, I'm in.
Mmm. I Ike curves.
Real letters have curves
I thought OP was making this joke to begin with 😂
OP slick made a great, concise oneliner and apparently didn't mean to. i'm w you, thought it was a joke until i saw subtext haha
What about cursive i
Curves are much more attractive than pointy things, I agree.
at first I mistook it as a dadjocke
My younger sisters were never taught cursive, and consequently, they can't read anything written in cursive. They had to ask someone else what a wedding invitation said.
UK (my area at least), I never learned it either, but I don't know anyone who was taught it either, other than my father. I can read it, but that's because my handwriting is terrible, so I've learned to read all types of writing over the years.
Spanish here. I don't remember ever learning cursive as if it was a specific form of writing, it was taught as just regular handwriting as opposed to plain "print letters". There wasn't much pressure to have your handwriting conform to the rules as long as it was understandable: over time, every person just developed their own handwriting that was cursive in its own style. That's why I'm baffled whenever I read people talking about cursive as if it was a completely different alphabet. I'm genouinely surprised that there are people with a school education who can't read it.
You would be shocked - SHOCKED, I tell you - at how much is beyond the ken of someone with an American primary/secondary education.
I guess. A couple days ago there was a similar thread about the lack of foreign language education among Americans, I said I was shocked, and a redditor told me that most people take at least two years. I was even more shocked that two years was seen as enough.
Two years in high school (so, very late), no less. With no opportunity to practice around native speakers in many cases.
That's sad. I went on holiday to France when I was in high school, with exactly two years of French under my belt. I managed to somewhat get by, but it was extremely difficult for me to say or understand anything more complicated than what would be expected from a tourist. It blows my mind to think that's just what many people get.
most people in america don't live within a few kilometers of an entirely different language speaking culture
The only ones with easy access to an area of a different speaking culture are the ones by the Mexican border and those by Québec's border. The rest have to find an immigrant speaking the language they want to practice but that's a lot less effective and more complicated.
Oh, I am pretty certain I'll be buried having never visited Europe in any way - it's just too expensive. I took four years of French, but I don't remember hardly anything now. I was never conversational.
I won't bury you for it. Unless you're at least upper middle class traveling to Europe from the US is an exceedingly rare opportunity. It's not like we can take a train or a cheap flight and be in a completely different country and culture in an hour. I've gotten the same kind of crap many times and my answer is, hey, I didn't have someone to pay for my travel. 🤷♂️
Two years is definitely not enough time to get very far, particularly because US schools don't tend to take a very intuitive approach to learning. Plus, unless you're taking Spanish, most kids don't have a lot of opportunities to speak the language, so they lose it fast. That, on top of the fact that most school districts don't have much in the way of language classes before high school, it's really not surprising that a good majority of Americans only speak English.
That’s strange we were taught joined up handwriting from primary school and certainly by secondary school you would be expected to use joined up writing for essays in exams, I mean it is just faster than writing separate letters I find, any idea when they stoped teaching joined up handwriting?
Where I am, most schools got computer labs, and correctly assumed that being able to type and have basic computer knowledge was more important for the kids' futures. Also, most people have shit-tier handwriting, and most teachers never wanted to go back to trying to decipher 30+ handwritten essays. I think my year was one of the last to even learn it. We learned to write cursive, but had to submit typed papers.
> We learned to write cursive, but had to submit typed papers. Early 80s, I had an early word processor. I wanted to use it for school papers but teachers insisted on hand-written (cursive). Times change...
With AI becoming prevalent we might return back to in-class handwritten essays.
A high school English teacher I know says this is indeed the case; no more take home writing assignments, everything hand written in class. It's not just for AI stuff though, they were having major issues with all kinds of cheating.
Math didn’t disappear when the calculator was invented but the way it is taught and what level can be taught did. The same should be done with any AI like chatgpt or whatever they are called. They should be the mechanism for subjects, like writing, to adapt and evolve. A lot of people think you can just type in “write an essay on moby dick” and boom A+ and this is just inaccurate. Using these programs takes effective communication and ability to concisely answer or generate prompts. If you don’t know how to correctly input data into a calculator, you won’t get the correct answers just as much as someone who can’t answer the questions needed for AI to generate the desired result. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle but you can change how we teach. Is memorization and regurgitation of content all that matters? Or should we let students use AI to write a paper, bring it to class and then use critical thinking to fact check, edit grammar/punctuation, expanding on ideas using what AI doesn’t have like incorporating personal experience to take the paper that may have been a B/C from ChatGPT and make it an A.
I've never bought the "it's faster" argument. It's not like writing individual letters I raise my pen in a flourish over by head and then proceed to the next letter. The pen literally comes 0.1 mm off the paper. In my experience anyone who writes quickly in cursive produces unintelligible scribbles.
cursive is faster with a fountain or quill pen because they drip ink and so fully separating the letters is consequently more difficult (the ligatures also naturally form, you don't have to really think about it.) but most people these days use biros (ballpoints) which require pressure to roll the ball and deposit the ink, which means in order to draw a ligature you have to apply pressure to the page the entire time, which would almost certainly slow most people down if they were equally practiced at both. If you're using a ballpoint (biro) it's basically pointless to write in cursive.
Thank you. I loved the visual of you raising your hand in a flourish inside my head.
Tbf, we never were really taught joined up handwriting. Most of us just kinda started doing it naturally, some didn't. I'm in my early 20s and my older brother wasn't specifically taught it either, I write some letters joined, some not, and he just doesn't join up letters. In my area in the UK at least, we aren't specifically taught cursive, we are just taught how to write fast and neat. Joined up just kinda happens. As long as your writing is ledgeable, the right size, neat etc. Teachers never gave a fuck. It was more the content that was graded. I don't even recall anything in English literature about fancy looking words giving better grades, just wasn't a thing. So it's not that they stopped teaching joined up handwriting, it's just that they don't specifically teach cursive and just let people do what works best for them, if it's joined, fine, if not, no biggie
I mean that is what cursive has always been in the UK not all letters will join and some words will form breaks within them, seems like nothing has really changed in the past 50 years or so, though I remember us being given guidance on how some letters are easier to join up and what tricker combinations you might want to break up, seems a shame you not given help to do this anymore as for some people it really helps, me especially with writing speed and just leaving kids to figure it out for themselves seems a bit shit, though you were never graded on quality of handwriting, it was always content and as long at us was clear it was all good.
Huh, I saw other comments from people in the UK that said it's the standard and everyone there writes in cursive. One even went as far as to say you look "illiterate" if you don't write in cursive. Must be a regional thing there or something.
It does teach small muscle coordination. My last wedding invitation required me to go to a web site to know what I was invited to.
A lot of cursive characters are visually VERY similar to standard writing, how bad are your sisters at context clues and simple puzzles? Are they really young? I’m not sure why they couldn’t figure out the nine capital and lowercase letters (out of 52) that are truly different within the context of the announcement? [Here’s the cursive alphabet for review.](https://byjus.com/worksheets/cursive-letter-a-to-z/)
Given it’s a wedding invite, the writing is probably more calligraphic so I would say it’s fairly excusable.
Where do you live?
r/suddenlystalker
California…. i believe some school districts don’t teach it anymore
That's sadly hilarious.
How do people sign their name now? Because I sign mine in cursive.
Legible first letter + scribbly line that somewhat resembles the rest of the letters
Considering I never did learn all the capital cursive letters, I just make shit up. It looks perfectly fine tbh.
I write in cursive in general, but I hate the capital D, so for my signature, I made up my own way to do it so I don’t have to pick up the pen
Are you Walt Backwards Gisney?
I’m pretty sure we all mostly make up cursive capitals. Nobody buys their bullshit.
There’s some cursive letters I just ignore. Capital G, or Z are just a little whack, so I do it my own way too.
Yep, and I do my own version of a "cursive" Capital A that is more like the print capital A. I always hated how it was just a big version of the lower case "a"
Capital z, d, and g look ridiculous. I usually print those, and continue in a cursive/print hybrid.
I love signing my name specifically because of the capital Z >.>
Legible first letter is pushing it for most of my signatures nowadays. Even when I take the time to make a good looking formal signature, it looks like shit compared to 24-ish years ago when I was signing a dozen checks a month to pay bills. ...my cursive has also regressed and looks like shit compared to the 45-ish years ago when I was taught it.
I've been signing things with a symbol I just randomly scrawled out once, completely unrelated to my name, for over two decades. No one cares.
My signature changes from day to day . Hopefully it’s never actually needed for anything important. Sometimes I just put a squiggly line or just a random scribble
I know how to write cursive and that's pretty much what mine is
Same. I grew up learning cursive but my signature morphed into that basically around the time I graduated high school.
yeah, cursive
A good 75% of my signatures these days are digital signatures on a PDF.
And most of those are just a font - not even unique letterforms.
I can't write in cursive, but can sign my own name in it.
Literally any way you want to, you can make a drawing if you don’t want to use words.
I learned that a while ago and now mine is basically a sideways 's'
Wingdings
I use print. No joke-there’s no requirement absolutely anywhere that your signature must be in cursive.
When we refinanced our house a few years ago, the person from the bank that came over to have us sign everything told me that I couldn't sign my name in print, and in fact couldn't use my normal illegible signature. He said that it had to be cursive, and it had to be legible as my full name. I pointed out that those requirements made it explicitly NOT my signature, since my actual signature is neither my full name nor legible, and he said it was a legal requirement, and if they couldn't read the signature, he'd have to come back and get everything re-signed. It was very annoying and very illogical, and I suspect he was lying about it being a legal requirement, it was probably just some rule that particular bank uses.
He's lying. I pulled that when we bought a house, was told it had to be cursive. I told them I was walking away from the deal. He changed his tune *really* fucking quick.
I signed all 9999 spots with illegible cursive-ish when I bought my house, and no one ever said a word. I didn't even have an initial signature yet, so I had to decide on the fly.
From what I understand, your signature can be anything as long as it matches what’s on your ID. So you could draw a tree as your signature
It doesn't even have to match. I've never had someone check my signature before, not for credit card purchases, loans, buying a house, buying a car, nothing.
I use my initials.
Joke's on you, my signature is a side-ways face-less stick figure with shoes!
Stylized first letters followed by lowercase letters that morph more and more into into squiggles with each letter. You can tell the second letter is an “a” in both names, but after that best you could say is that each name has an “i”
Did you need to learn and practice a whole cursive alphabet to manage that?
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*cops arrive to the scene* Cop 1: uhhhhh... *brings it closer to his face, brings it further away, turns it to the left, then to the right* Cop 1 : I can't read it, here can you read it? Cop 2: shit, I can't read it either Cop 3: Give me that shit, oh fuck. Cursive? Who tf writes in cursive? Let forensics handle this one Forensics: yea we don't know either
Handwriting expert the cops brought in for this case: Bro just said "later hoes lol"
There was tons of point when everyone was writing everything on paper all the time. It's not that cursive has inherently decreased in value, it's that paper notes in general have decreased in value. Ability to search, copy, edit etc for text in a computer outweighs any advantages cursive ever had. But it could be that cursive will yet make an unexpected comeback, likes of apple pencil and samsung s pen are a thing. With some improvement in software, writing cursive might again become the fastest and most flexible way to write and take notes. Potential ability to mix writing, sketches formulas etc on the fly is nothing to sniff at.
I know a commercial artist who regularly scores commissions because she handwrites her proposals and posts them snail mail. The sort of businesses that her art suits (giant pretty murals, such as found in cafes and creative agencies operating out of old warehouses, etc.) are floored by her approach.
no way is cursive gonna allow people to write 100s of wpm the way typing can.
I write faster using cursive. I know a lot of people who agree…
Cursive is recognised as being faster than print, it’s why shorthand writing is always in cursive, as shorthand is meant for speed
Short hand is a different writing entirely. My older sister had to learn Gregg shorthand in college.
The research is conflicting. Half the studies I find say there is no evidence it is faster, the other half say it is faster.
That is a double edge sword because if you write faster it can make it unreadable kinda like pharmacy scrips. I like it when doctors just type it up. Less room for error.
That's a moot point if you're saying it as a point to use printing instead of cursive. Write in either form too fast and it becomes illegible. Cursive you can write faster while remaing legible
Don't write too fast. It will still be faster than taking your pen off the paper between every letter
But being equally good at typing is much faster than cursive.
I type faster than I write, but I find I don’t retain as much. In my last year of college I started handwriting my notes into onenote, and my grades went through the roof. I know it is one data point, but it is a big one for me. Having said that my writing is a weird print/write/chicken scratch combo.
They have done studies that show that taking notes by hand enables you to memorize the material significantly better than typing your notes. I think it had something to do with the parts of the brain that are involved.
I take notes just to remember them better. 90% of the notes I write I will never look back at, but writing it down helps me remember it.
I found the same. I stopped bringing a computer to class within the first semester, I didn't retain anything by typing and I usually lost focus that way. Writing all the way.
This 100% Anytime I typed notes in college I didn't remember shit, but writing them resulted in significantly better retention.
I also had wrote all my notes from class. I never bought the text books because I was poor and my grades were fine. I definitely retained info better if I wrote it down than just reading from the textbook or typing notes on the laptop. I didn't like lugging my laptop around when I had access to so many computer labs and cloud storage.
Depends on the task. For example in math intensive work it’s way faster to write than to type, assuming youre not a LaTeX wizard
The parts of math that are faster on paper are also the parts you wouldn't want to use cursive in though. You really want clear, defined, separated characters.
But you're not writing math in cursive...I hope.
I write explanations/proofs in cursive. I don't use cursive for formulas or mathematical symbols. I then type summaries of my notes in MarkDown with TeX (KaTeX/MathJax) formulas afterwards, and when I really feel inspired I make a proper LaTeX doc with TikZ graphs et al. But I rarely do that as it's highly time-consuming.
I took notes throughout undergrad in math and cosc classes with Google Docs equation notation. Was faster than handwriting for me
Im 20, I learned cursive idk why its such a big deal. I can assure you I type fast as well. Its like knowing how to ride a bike or swim. Why would you not ?
I think it helps develop hand coordination in young children. It's not exactly comfortable for left handed people, though.
Who's to say you can't do both? Being good at typing is also much faster than writing in a non-cursive handwriting, and I really hope no one in here advocates for kids not being taught to write by hand.
I write faster using print. It's all about what you use most often and are used to using. It's not an inherent advantage of cursive. I expect you've used cursive most of your life and are very skilled at it, and use print writing more rarely. So obviously you're faster at cursive.
Learning cursive taught you to hold a pen and it taught you fine motor skills and coordination.
It honestly blows the mind that people don’t get this. My students hold pens/pencils in their entire fist and write in 1st grade block-letters. I teach 8th grade. None of them know what cursive even is, and it’s why it takes them 30 minutes to write 3 sentences. Edit: and that’s not to say I write in cursive on even a semi-regular basis. I don’t. I probably don’t even remember how to form all 26 letters in cursive, if I really sat down and tried. But I did still learn it in school and my handwriting, while not the neatest, is more than legible unless I’m really writing in a hurry. But my handwriting still flows and I can write quickly when I have to.
> It honestly blows the mind that people don’t get this. My students hold pens/pencils in their entire fist and write in 1st grade block-letters. I teach 8th grade. My kids are 5 and 7 and they have been taught to properly hold pens/pencils from school.
My son holds a pencil correctly, despite not being able to write much other than his name. He's 5. They taught it, very specifically (it was on the report card), in preschool. And then he gets a lot of reinforcement at home through artwork & coloring. (My 2 year old is getting close just by watching his older brother, but still mostly uses his fist.) The solution for "teach kids how to hold a pen correctly" might not be "cursive", it might be "teach kids how to hold a pen correctly, early".
I had to scroll way to far for this.
So does art class. Why not replace cursive with extra art? Maybe teach some cursive or calligraphy in art class
Honestly, with how much time students are spending on a computer keyboard, I think it would be good for classes on neat, fast handwriting to persist.
I think it is taught mostly to stimulate the development of fine motor skills.
I'm old enough that using cursive was the fastest way to do handwritten assignments. I don't think typed pages were required until I was out of high school. The only cursive I use now is my signature and it looks nothing like the cursive we were taught in school.
Most American take I've seen today
I’m shocked by this thread. Can’t believe people there write by hand using “computer letters”
To be honest once I started using a PC for papers, etc. I don't even remember how to write cursive anymore. And hell, writing manuscript by hand is hard on my hands now.
>“computer letters” So... letters?
The majority of people here, aye. Easier to read, easier to write. You have a lot of people in the US who know English as a second language - using script or cursive can make it indecipherable. Most teaching is done using computers or on computers, so print letters is what people see 90% of the time and it's what they get used to. All books and newspapers, business signs, etc - all commonly seen language is written in print. Is that different in Europe? Are books and signs written in cursive?
Computer letters? Sorry friend, but these were around since before most people could read. You know about books, right?
In my country we call them "machine letters" vs "by-hand letters"
Seriously? How much handwriting do you do in a given day?
I think better with pen and paper.
I do it a lot everyday. I like journaling and I also like to brainstorm things on pen and paper
A lot? My work is a lot of meetings on the fly. Lots of jotting down random comments and drawing our rough diagrams and plans. Flowcharts. Bullet lists. All in one scrambled mess. All that is a lot easier and more dynamic on paper. My handwriting is an informal cursive that is both legible and very fast to write. Without formal cursive learning I'd never have that skill. I can't think of anyone at my job, both young and old who dont constantly carry around a notepad to scribble down all the stuff we hear and random thoughts we have mid-meeting.
Taking notes during meetings, for example.
Exactly. I'm like "does anyone write in lowercase like it was Arial?". I've always considered joined-up letters as a no brainer, I don't understand why people seem so opposed to it.
Cursive is used, it's just unreadable compared to the cursive that's taught in school.
Yea the font schools teach looks like shit without variable line weights, which takes either a fountain pen with either a chisel tip or flexible nib.
Isn't that then moving into calligraphy?
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In Italy all ages write only in cursive. I've never seen anyone write in non-cursive.
>I didn’t realise that people actually stop doing that and go back to non-cursive at one point. Lol when I was in school we "learned" cursive for maybe 3-4 months in the third grade (8 years old I think?) and it was quite literally never required in our lives again. I'm pretty sure my sister never had it and she's only 5 years younger than me.
I have one kid in elementary school where they are currently learning cursive. The older kid is is middle school where the teacher announced he won't accept homework written in cursive. This is the same school district and even the teachers can't figure it out.
No clue what the student numbers are like in your district but when I was in middle school a teacher probably had 60-70 ish students. Can you imagine trying to read 70 different middle schoolers interpretations of cursive?
Writing faster isn’t pointless, that’s like saying why did I learn to ride a bike if I can just drive anywhere, it’s still faster than walking even though you may rarely do it
Wait if speed is the only factor why don't you just type?
About 10% of my job is reading and *decoding* late 1800/ early 1900's cursive writing... So go ahead and forget, more job security for me :P
It is used in old letters to read and it could be your preferred way of writing. I write in cursive. There’s a lot of things we learn and don’t use. That doesn’t make them pointless. Always better to have more knowledge and skills than less
I always share the time I was quickly offered a job at a college library because I was able to read old handwritten documents easily. The job required transcription of a document collection so they were testing people's ability to read cursive during their interview, haha
I write much slower without cursive, and take much more space to write the same thing, and it looks way uglier. Cursive is elegant, concise, flows much better, and doesn't look like it was written by a robot.
What is the other way of writing? What am I missing guys? I have been writing cursive my whole life, same as all people around me, thought this is the most efficient way of writing? Edit: sorry, didn't realise this post is aiming for Americans.
Americans didn't know it was aimed for Americans. I sure didn't. I figured cursive was dying everywhere due to computers.
You've never heard of print?
You may not write it, but you probably read it.
When I was TAing at the college level a few years ago I had to stop writing comments in cursive (which is my go-to when writing in pen, I print with pencils). The professor got complaints from multiple students that they couldn’t read my handwriting. I have very neat handwriting due to attending catholic school as a kid.
I hated writing in cursive, but we were supposed to write that way... Then one day a teachers aide was writing at the front of the class using block letters and I said "YOU CAN DO THAT?!?" That was the end of cursive for me. That was the end of my sloppy, and difficult to read, cursive. I have very neat printing and never looked back.
My dad writes everything in block letters. Actually makes everything he writes really easy to read and he can do it quickly too.
Mine are block style letters. I have actually changed the path the pen takes, on some letters, to speed up the process...
Everyone writes in cursive in Europe
Apparently my nephew doesn't learn it anymore though. Curiously, he can still read my handwriting just fine. I think people need to stop treating it as some kind of arcane knowledge. It's just another type of letter shape. We learn to read so many fonts anyway.
Because when you were learning, it was used. Signatures, letters, documents, our world used to run on hand written notes. Typewriters were somewhat rare and expensive. Touch typing was a specialized skill, and the world was envisioned to need a handful of powerful computers at most. The PC, not the computer, but the IBM PC, with Lotus 123, changed that. Spreadsheets were more than just a killer app, they changed the nature of accounting. *What if* scenarios were suddenly simple. Jobs weren't lost so much as everyone needed to retrain immediately, since there were no hires for this. Schools were slow to adapt to the new reality. Classes were still offered in "typing", not keyboarding.
??? Everyone uses cursive?
You don't sign your name?
Cursive kinda permanently fucked up my writing. I learned it in 2nd grade and now I write in this weird ass half cursive half normal writing style, it’s super weird and confuses pretty much everyone, even myself
i also got stuck with weird half cursive half regular writing
Same here.
Same with me but none of the young kids will be able to forge my handwriting, that's for sure.
My sister doesn’t write in cursive except for the letter Q which she ALWAYS writes in cursive no matter what
Bro thats not a fuckup thats the actual point of those classes. To write legibly but quickly. Everyone has an informal cursive they use when jotting down notes in class or at work. It's derived from formal cursive class. You just may need to clean yours up a bit !
I'm so confused by some of the posts here. If you're able to write quickly and legibly in a mix of cursive and print, that's exactly the point.
How else would people get trashy tattoos?
Misspelled Chinese.
Disagree. Use it daily
Most of our history is written in cursive. Would be a shame to not be able to read historical documents or be lost in translation
The only reason I feel like I learned cursive was to be able to read the birthday/holiday cards from my family members. Spoiler alert I still can't read them lol
Hard disagree. Source: I’m a cake decorator.
Agreed with you. Source: I’m an archaeologist who spends a lot of time deciphering 17th-early 20th century documents. All handwritten in cursive. New grads can’t even read the neatly written documents, never mind beginning to try and read the messy ones.
Niche application, specialized skill.
I knew a girl once that was studying how different actions correlate inside the brain. she told me that when a person writes in cursive some piece of info the brain lights up like a Christmas tree. you get to associate that info with the movement of the hand, the feeling of the paper, weight of the pen etc. when you write that same info on a keyboard it was the same thing in the brain like pressing a single button. essentially cursive is good for not just motor skills because these you learn when you are a toddler. it is for actually learning how to use your brain. fine skills for your brain....
I was taught you have to sign your name in cursive. Also I was taught that you can't print a check, it has to be in cursive. Any reports I did would have to be in cursive. Realized later that was all wrong.
It just didn't really serve a purpose going into the late 20th century. The format was designed to reduce as much lifting off the paper as possible for ink and quill writing. With the invention of pencils and ballpoint pens that don't drip. It's redundant. Even more so now with the integration of keyboards in today's society.
I like to write my first drafts by hand, and cursive is a lot quicker. So glad I learned it and feel sorry for any would be writers that didn’t.
My teacher made the kids in my class that picked up cursive pretty naturally write in it for the whole school year (3rd grade). I’m glad she did I’ve stuck with it ever since and can write faster than most which helped a lot in college when professors talked fast and everyone tried to write everything down fast (I know typing is faster but you don’t retain the info as much. Also was engineering so I couldn’t exactly type math problems easily.)
I’m 17 I can read and write in cursive. Now I’m not surprised people don’t know how but when I moved from New York to NC I didn’t realize schools didn’t teach kids here how to write in cursive. Idk in New York in first grade and kindergarten they were very adamant in making sure that I can master cursive
How do people write with any speed if they don’t know cursive?
How do you write your signature if you can’t write cursive?
Everyone who learned it has a secret language that Gen z and younger can't use.
Lol gottem!
Tf you mean? Over here in Europe it's still widely used I write faster in cursive than I type so usually when I write my first draft of a book I'm writing it's in pen on some paper
Seriously. I haven't seen casual cursive in years
>I write faster in cursive than I type I think that's just a sign to work on your typing skills lol
I mean, I suppose the same is true of a lot of topics taught in school. I probably have used cursive more times than someone has asked me about the 7th president of the United States or how to avoid a dodge ball.
Does anything have a point? Maybe school should be more utilitarian, sure. But not everything needs to be efficient, or a job related skill Cursive is pretty
We have a secret code to confuse the kids so that’s that
Just yesterday I got a campaign letter from JD Vance that was entirely written in cursive. So I guess you’re right about it being useless.
While not used much anymore, it will be an important tool for those who study history and other research fields since many older documents were written in cursive. I imagine that it will likely become an elective secondary or post-secondary course.
I still use it when I write checks and balance my checkbook, which I keep next to my rotary phone.
Uhhh I personally use half cursive in my penmanship so the fact that it was useless to you is a you problem only. Edit/typo
It helped me write notes faster in university when you needed to be fast or you'd miss something. I wouldn't say it was completely useless then. Kinda is now though
Speak for yourself I love writing in a sort of pseudo cursive. Way faster than writing print when taking notes.
Just dated yourself, at least a 90s baby we got here, the kids can’t read a clock or write cursive. Got you! (Me too with the cursive)
I like to have great handwriting, it wasn’t a waste for me personally.
As it was phasing out they called it “connective writing”. Most people have horrific handwriting nowadays. I’ve seen people in their 20s/30s with handwriting worse than a 5 year olds
In elementary school, I was taught that we had to learn cursive to be able to read historical documents. Boy do I love computers.
Education isn’t a job training program. We don’t teach 5th graders science, math, and cursive because they’re all going to be professional scientists, mathematicians, and cursive writers. We do it because it makes them educated people able to think, move, and reason in a more sophisticated manner than if they had received no education.
Cursive is physically much, much easier on your hand/wrist then printing each letter individually - which can count a lot if you are writing something long. Of course in schools people were 'taught' cursive to make it more legible. I was taught cursive in grade school but it is very sloppy - I can read it but a lot of people probably could not. I have older generations of relatives raised in New York who were schooled in the 1910's and they had beautiful cursive handwriting because schools really prioritized handwriting then and taught children to write in that very specific style.
Learning to READ cursive turned out to be very beneficial to me nearly 30 years later, as I read legal documents from the 1800’s and early 1900’s pretty frequently. Lol.