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The NY Times asks does handwriting matter? The Common Core standards stop teaching handwriting after the first grade, preferring a proficiency in typing after that.
However, studies are showing that children learn faster, are able to retain more information, and generate new ideas when they first learn to write by hand. The process of thinking about how to form a letter and putting it on the page stimulates more areas of the brain. This come from the inherent messiness in free-form writing, which can be a valuable learning tool.
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You should emulate your heros, but don't carry it too far. Especially
if they are dead.
(Score: 1) by gidds on Wednesday June 04 2014, @02:32PM
Not sure if I agree with your reasoning (maybe you'd have got faster if you hadn't given it up 'long before high school'?), but I fully agree with your conclusion!
I did cursive up until my final year at uni, when I had such trouble reading my notes that I did a complete redesign of my handwriting. All the testing I did then suggested that while neat printing takes very slightly longer than neat cursive, printing stays much more legible as I speed up, and so I worked out a style of printed handwriting that's stayed with me ever since, and has gained several appreciative comments.
(I also found that ascenders and descenders were best kept very short, the middle parts of the letters relatively wide and rounded, the letters within each word relatively close, and letters like x and w in simple straight-line forms. Century Gothic is the closest common font I've seen.)
It surprises me, though, just how opposed people are to the idea of printing. It's not necessarily childish, and it's no bad thing to write in a way that's clear, simple, and easily legible! If my experience is any guide, then with practice it's really not much slower than cursive. So there's no good reason to dismiss it the way people seem to.
Also, there are many more styles of cursive to interpret: roundhand, italic, copperplate, etc. etc., some of which are radically different from each other. Printing is more of a common standard!
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by frojack on Thursday June 05 2014, @12:39AM
Ditto this.
My normal writing style is mostly printing, with a few instances of "convenient cursive" thrown in.
Words like "the" and "on" seem to flow from the pen in cursive, while most everything else gets printed. My dad always favored printing, and even as he aged, and his hand shook, you could read his printing, but never his cursive.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.