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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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(Score: 5, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 02 2016, @03:32PM
This is total BS.
Look, I'm all in favor of manual note-taking. I'm an engineer; I take lots of notes on notepads, green engineering paper, etc. I take notes, I draw diagrams, etc.
None of this requires cursive writing.
In fact, cursive is the worst thing to use, because it's so unreadable. All the engineers I remember meeting in school and in work write in block letters. It's simple, neat, and easy for anyone to read. I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I was able to get away with it in school, because it's such a horrible way of writing. People have long claimed benefits of it, but those benefits are as real as the claimed benefits of smoking back in the 1950s: i.e., they're all lies and mass delusion.
Being able to write legibly on paper is still a good skill to have, I won't disagree. However, "legibly" is the keyword here, and cursive is not legible. Just read any doctor's handwriting from the last 100 years. If you want to teach kids how to handwrite, fine: teach them how to write in proper print and block letters. Fuck cursive.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 02 2016, @06:06PM
I stopped writing in cursive as soon as I was able to get away with it in school, because it's such a horrible way of writing.
Wow, it's like you and I are clones. I wonder how many other people here identify with everything you just said.
The only alleged benefit of cursive I ever heard was that it was easier on your hand because you don't pick up your pencil; that was never the case for me.
I do use cursive for writing elegant notes to my wife, because she likes it. And for a few years I used to use cursive letters for variables in algebra because it looked a little more "italic" and made them stand out on the paper to me, but that habit disappeared and I went back to print.
I don't care if my kids learn cursive or not; I think they will probably want to learn it, but I doubt they will want to use it much. I'm for everybody making their own decisions on this.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday November 02 2016, @09:36PM
The only alleged benefit of cursive I ever heard was that it was easier on your hand because you don't pick up your pencil; that was never the case for me.
That was never the case for me either.
There's only two benefits of cursive I've heard that have any ring of truth to them at all:
1) it's faster. This is debateable, but the physics seem to favor it, but only slightly. Writing neat, legible (sorta) cursive takes more time and effort, just as it does with print. But as someone else here said, print degrades more gracefully: it's easier to read messy print than messy scrawled cursive. So this benefit is dubious at best.
2) This one is likely totally true: cursive is better when you're using an ink pen with a quill (bird feather) or nib which is highly prone to leaking big drops of ink. Since it keeps the tip on the paper most of the time, you're less likely to have ink blobs. This benefit is, of course, completely useless now that no one sane uses a bird feather for writing. Even the nice nibbed pens for fine writing are designed and manufactured so this isn't a big problem, and only people into calligraphy care about those things anyway. With ball-point and felt-tip pens and pencils, this concern is now completely obsolete.
So basically, cursive writing is about as relevant to modern society as having a metal scraper next to your house's front door to scrape the horse crap from the streets off your riding boots. (They still have these things in old cities, but they're completely decorative and historic at this point of course.) It's something that was invented to solve a problem that no longer exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @12:14AM
You had it wrong. Variables should not be cursive. You should reserve cursive for things like trigonometric functions. How else are you to know if "cos" is the multiplication of three variables or an abbreviation for the cosine? Cursive ties the letters together.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Thursday November 03 2016, @10:57PM
In fact, cursive is the worst thing to use, because it's so unreadable.
<sarcasm>So your cursive handwriting is shit?</sarcasm>
Joking aside, it's horses for courses; if you need to transfer textual information to other people, typing it or block capital writing is the quickest way to make it understandable.
Anecdotally: my partner passed away recently after a short illness and that's obviously had a huge impact on my life and wellbeing. I've taken to writing stuff down - with a cheap (3 quid!) fountain pen(1), no less - in a book in the hope of making it all easier to deal with, simply because I find it easier to order my thoughts that way. Being able to endlessly delete text when using a keyboard perversely makes it more difficult to get the right words in the right order than writing them out by hand, presumably because I have to apply thought before I write rather than while I type. I would also like to improve that handwriting, if only to make it more aesthetically pleasing to me.
(1) It's a Platinum Preppy. I think they're even cheaper in the USA. Thanks, Brexit.