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posted by
cmn32480
on Wednesday November 02 2016, @08:33AM
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
from the heading-for-a-new-dark-age dept.
The New Yorker wonders:
My children know how to print their letters. And they type frighteningly well. Still, I can't escape the conviction that cursive—writing it and knowing how to read it—represents some universal value. I'm not the only one who thinks so. Every year, there are worried articles about the decline of cursive and its omission from school curricula. And there's a backlash, one that I secretly cheer for. When I read that Washington state is now considering Senate Bill 6469, "an act related to requiring that cursive writing be taught in common schools," I gave a little fist pump in the air.
Cursive and handwriting are dead. Communication of the future will be done with pure emoticons.
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TOO BAD YOU CAN'T BUY a voodoo globe so that you could make the earth spin
real fast and freak everybody out.
-- Jack Handey, The New Mexican, 1988.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Wednesday November 02 2016, @01:39PM
I agree there's much to be said for taking manual notes, and it increases dramatically anytime diagrams or any other non-linear information layout are relevant (math springs aggressively to mind). I'm anxiously awaiting the day someone makes a digital pen and tablet that will allow me to write and diagram as nicely as I can on paper, alongside all the wonderful tools computing makes possible.
But what does that have to do with cursive? Even if you're good at it, cursive is only nominally faster than block printing, and generally worse in terms of legibility. If your goal is note taking, why not spend all that time teaching shorthand, which is much faster and more legible, or efficient note-taking strategies? Things that will actually help them learn to take notes more effectively.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Thursday November 03 2016, @05:48AM
cursive is only nominally faster than block printing
I write in cursive. It is much, much faster than any printing. And easier on the hand as well - cursive is optimizing the movements, replacing stop-and-go segments of block font with continuous curves. I have several lab books full of my notes, sketches, drawings, raw data. If you have a pen, you can create any drawing. If you have a computer... it depends on what tools you have, what you know how to use, and how well they behave, and how many hours you can afford to spend on capturing in a computer a freehand sketch that is done with a pen. My lab books are non-volatile, consume zero power, and can be stored for hundreds of years. Who can beat that while making notes in Word, OneNote, or in whatever thingy that the Surface comes with? The most likely scenario is that their notes will be lost forever when that PC crashes and is reimaged. Too few people make backups; even fewer make backups that can be restored; and only a small fraction of those tests their backups.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Monday November 07 2016, @02:56PM
Eh, I've lost notebooks to water damage and pets before, so they're hardly inviolable, and far more difficult to back up. And with the growing popularity of Dropbox and other online sync services, backups are far more common than they once were.
I agree though that current note-taking software is severely lacking in comparison to pen and paper. I'm actually working on an alternative that combines the best of both worlds, might get serious about it once I can get a tablet that offers decent parity in terms of physical detail and precision.