Cursive writing, should it still be taught in school?
 

If you don't learn how to write cursive how can you be taught to read cursive? Also, couldn't this be an indicator for people to learn fine motor skills say for skills that require such a thing for example hand dexterity for the the medical profession?

Personally, I think that it's an important skill. People still write by hand, some people actually write cursive still maybe not many in the circles you frequent, but it is still widely used. It is also widely learned and used in many other countries.

Writing cursively isn't the same thing as typing on a keyboard. I don't see one as a replacement for the other.

From a compositional standpoint, I think it puts someone at a disadvantage if they didn't know how to write cursively. In my own experience, writing something out by hand has a different outcome than if I typed it out.

I also agree with what you say about motor skills. This is something of an issue with children of young ages using computers vs. hands-on learning in terms of their development.

Wish my boss had learned to write cursive esp. writing that is at least legible.
IMO, It makes him look dumb... especially when most of us can't decifer what he has writtien on a message to us and inveribly, we are always going to him to "decifer" the message and/or numbers for quotes to customers etc. This is succh a time waster! It's a real pain in the butt.

I believe that schools still need to teach cursive writing (it's faster than printing, if practiced and used often) and people should be proud enough to write well. It makes you look smarter and "polished". When I hired people for jobs that required notes and reports, hand written 95% of the time - I always bounced the bad writers.

Your signature is a whole "other" elelment - no?

I was required to learn both cursive writing and typing in elementary school, thus I would expect my kids to also be required to learn both of these skills. Schools should be teaching both skills.

What's the point of teaching them to write in cursive if they won't have a chance to practice it? Say, it's a requirement to pass the third grade with fundamental in cursive. Then what? All essays are required to be typed up all the way through college. Peer to peer interaction is done with thumbing on the keypad or touch screen or via regular two handed keyboard typing.

I was taught how to write cursive. Hell, I used to be great at it. Eleven years ago when hand-written essays stopped being accepted. I don't even have to write often unless to fill out forms. Can I write cursive now? Like hell. My handwriting sucks.

On the other hand...

I freely admit my handwriting is atrocious. I did learn in school, but have had little to no practical use for it in my daily life since. Having spent enough time around computers to be able to touch type at 80 or so words per minute, it's generally faster and more convenient for me to bang something out digitally. In the event that I need to put something down on paper I can use block printing. It's serviceable, though hardly pretty.

I won't go so far as to say that cursive writing should be dropped from the curriculum completely, but it certainly doesn't need or deserve the emphasis that was placed on it twenty years ago. Typing is a much more useful skill today.

I was required to learn in 2nd-3rd grade and promptly forgot when middle school was reached and it hasn't been required since then. I print everything I write except for my signature. It's something I can still force myself to do though.

Fun Anecdote:
In college my roommate and I were assigned two page opinion paper that we had to hand write. He turned in the only paper written in cursive. Our prof failed him outright, without even reading the paper, for being a 'smart-ass'.

It has just now occurred to me that I don't know what cursive is. Then I googled it. Then I now realize I was the only student in my class that wrote in cursive.

I don't think it has to be "taught". In fact cursive is somewhat difficult to read if not often practiced and not done well. They should, however, emphasize on HANDWRITING! It is important that you write clearly and neatly with only ONE strike through when a mistake is made. No unnecessary scratches.

As I think about it further I believe that cursive should not be taught. They should hit you on the wrist (like they did me) if your letters are not balanced and have the same height. Cursive is difficult to master as well as read and even harder if the writing is that of 7 chickens.

i've forgotten how to write in cursive. well, for the most part anyways. certain letters throw me off. i forget how capital r's and z's (both lowercase and capitol) are written all the time.

i guess it's important. i mean, as long as you douche-bags continue to use it.


edit: cursive=laziness. pick yer fucking hands up. sheesh.

Yah, I have to write the capital letter "Z" ALL the time and I always have to look that one up.

Damn, dude.

I break a lot of the "rules." I often use a hybrid of cursive and printing, the ratio of which adjusts randomly.

i guess i need to install the sarcmark so people can tell if im being serious or not.

print and tape to your desk...

http://www.mcpasd.k12.wi.us/sunsetwe...es/cursive.gif

It's useful if you want to read through your grandparents' old love letters, but I haven't run across anyone who uses cursive in years. It's the new Merovingian script.

I know a lot of people, like you, who use a hybrid of cursive and printing... then again I think I might know more who print. It is kind of interesting to think about.

As for myself, I’ve always been a printer. I guess, like most people I learned cursive in third grade. They had these little green chalkboards they wanted us to practice on. I had another teacher who wanted us to write in cursive in, I want to say, middle school, but that was a fleeting experience. Despite being taught, I never found must use for it as I just continue to print. I never write in cursive, except for those occasional when I have to sign something, and even then my signature varies some.

I remember in college I a took a couple semesters of Russia. The professor tried to teach us among other things how to write Cyrillic in cursive. I’ll admit learning a whole new alphabet can be hard, never mind learning to read and write it in cursive.

Cursive should be taught right alongside the abacus as a relic from a simpler time.

I don't think our motor skills will be any worse for wear; I bet the motor skills required to print are pretty much the same as the motor skills required to write in cursive.

Some scientists don't think so.

But do you think so? (I'm guessing 'yes', if only because I can't verify another member here holding an opposing viewpoint to schools continuing the teaching cursive practice, which would thereby render this discussion as an ongoing listing of differentiating ways to say "I agree".)

I think it could be optional as part of the curriculum, meaning that I don't see it worthwhile in the public school curriculum. Kids coming out of public schools can barely read and write, let alone do maths, english, and cursive handwriting.

BUT I bet the moment that happens those parents that care about handwriting or feel that it benefits their child in some fashion will take it or insist that private schools that offer it are even more superior to the public schools.

AND, we'll have someone shouting disparity and divide to those who cannot afford private schooling.

So it should be kept in.

I am a fan of cursive.
It aids in speedy note-taking.
If typing skills are adequately taught, I will not complain too loudly. Then again, I have no children and my niece has already been taught the skill.

I read that article twice, cyn, and I couldn't find any mention of cursive vs. printed writing. For all we know the scientists didn't differentiate, which makes sense to me, because why would they? The differences between cursive and printed writing seem to be irrelevant to the purposes of the study.

I don't think that there is much difference in terms of intricacy with respect to writing a sentence in cursive and writing a sentence in print.

I agree that kids should be taught how to write it, but the actual value of it is very low. No one ever writes cursive after learning it. Ok, maybe for a year or so they do, but no more. When I was in school, whenever we got an assignment people always asked the teacher what to write in, cursive or normal. Teacher would always say "whatever is the neatest and easiest to read." We always chose writing in normal print.

I think typing skills should be taught over cursive. It's just more useful and practical.

Fine motor control can be taught in other areas.

Texas lowered high school graduation requirements for technology from needing to take a year of a tech class to not needing a tech class at all. Reason: kids use computers so much and pick up on it so easily that it's not needed to teach them. I agree.

Teach both cursive and good printing.

I think cursive is a waste of time, at a personal level. I learned it as a child and quickly dropped it in HS and barely remembered it existed in college.

I would like to see children learn good printing, like an engineer. Children writing similar to print you would see on an exploded schematic would be fantastic IMO.

Not to say that it should be required, not at all. If a child is very literate and has a taste for the arts rather than mathematical thinking, then the cursive they were also taught may come in handy for them. My mom is a perfect example of the english teacher that loves language and fancy styles of writing, while my dad is a mechanical engineer and writes like he's doing a schematic.

I'm pretty sure any teacher can deal with both styles for reading/grading purposes.

Being a lefty, my handwriting has always sucked. While cursive is a good thing to learn, I personally use a hybrid of cursive and printing. It's fast and it's legible.

Cursive? Feh. I sucked at it before I mangled my writing hand. Now even my printing looks like that of a 5 year old. There is a reason the vast majority of professors and teachers no longer accept handwritten papers... Legibility decreases marking time. Typing decreases production time. Everyone wins!

I abandoned cursive writing around grade 4 because I could print faster than I could write and it was more legible.

I found cursive writing more of an exercise to back up stuff like sentence structure and proper punctuation than something to be used on a daily basis.

Should cursive writing be taught in schools? I don't think I am qualified to say given set curriculum's and alternatives offered.

What should be taught in schools is teaching kids how to think independently at an early age and then using those skills to further the learning process.

That would pay dividends down the road.

I disagree. Typing should be taught, at minimum. Most people in my generation didn't learn tot type in any orderly format. They may be able to type quickly, but their ergonomics are bad, leading to repetive stress injuries that could have been avoided.

Yes, I definitely see a lot of hunt-and-peck typists our age, my SO included. I have tried encouraging him to try a program such as Mavis Beacon or Mario Teaches Typing (yes, you can still find this) to learn to type properly.

I don't take notes longhand anymore, and I am often left scratching my head as to figure out why my peers are still doing so. I have a netbook and that is what I use in class. I still see people with study guides written out longhand, despite the fact that typing is faster and things like Microsoft OneNote can make your study guide look all pretty and shit.

While the argument about fine motor skills is an interesting one, it's not really a good one. By the time a child is at the age cursive is taught, they are engaging in a wide variety of activities that encourage fine motor skills. Using scissors, drawing, painting, and even printing all use fine motor skills; cursive isn't special. Over the early elementary years, legibility and uniformity increase; learning cursive typically comes at the end of these gains (Berk 2008).

I think children would actually benefit more from having a recess instead of a cursive lesson. Now there's something that really needs to be brought back! More recess!

Do you want to know what I'm more concerned about than cursive writing skills? Reading comprehension and written communication.

I've seen the samples of writing from my SO's grade 7 and 8 students. It looked like it was about on par with what I thought should be grade 4. *shudder* And much of it sounded like it was parroted (or outright plagarized) from some anime-style video game or maybe a television show. *double shudder*

If you're going to replace cursive writing instruction, replace it with reading and composition development. Please.

I always want to yell at these people: "Dude, you're only using 20% of your finger capacity! And that's not to mention the possibilities of mental keyboard mapping!"

I hunt and peck. I don't know how to type. Well, I know where all the keys are but I need to look at the keyboard in order to type. I don't have the ability to "ASDF-;LKJ" properly. I never bothered.

I type 80 wpm w/ 90% accuracy.

Same here. I can type pretty damn fast with good accuracy with my two finger approach.

Also, does anyone use a mixture of cursive and print writing like Charlatan? I do, but only for words with Q's in them. And for all letters past the Q in that word. Weird, I know.

Xerx, if you're at 80 wpm you're not hunting and pecking. I'm about the same, and it's pretty much self taught. We're typists dude. Or keyboardists.

My tiny skul districk in North Carolina was awarded a room full of IBM PCs thanks to the plant in Charlotte. What did they do with that raw computing power? They taught keyboarding. Because they couldn't possibly accept the concept some of us might learn C++ or other languages than French.

I know when I was younger (6th grade-ish) I struggled in our typing class. It was your most stereotypic typing class, you look at your hands and you get a mark, you slouch you get a mark (I probably shouldn't have rebelled against that one) but the point was I got a bad grade in that class and the next year was introduced to Yahoo messenger where I could chat with all my friends. While using messenger it took me less than a few months to learn to type fluently.

As for cursive, I learned it in elementary school as well, haven't used it since.

For typing or writing out notes, I've never seen many people type out notes in my classes, but at the same time all my classes are math, chem, physics etc.

I see no reason for typing in elementary school. Children don't need computer skills at that age. Typing skills are useless until they have to write something of length.

I used to type properly and did about 65 words a minute but felt too confined on the board.

My two finger approach nets me almost the same words and I don;t make hallf the mIsteakes.

Learning to write cursive was the bane of my existence as a kid, and this was before computers. I never learned properly. My cursive always sucked, and was always infinitely slower to write than if I printed. To this day, anything I write by hand is printed, and if people don't like it, they can kiss my ass. Even my signature is a fusion of printing and cursive, mostly printing.

I teach high school now, and I demand that kids turn everything in on computer. If they have to write it out, they need to be extra careful about legibility and spelling: so most of them don't bother, and I get most things in electronic format.

Why don't they need computer skills and where do you get the idea that typing is useless for shorter writing?

I am in actuality a hamster that can type.
Cursive writing takes too damn long, and keeps getting ink on my fur.

---------- Post added at 10:45 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:42 PM ----------

seriously though - cursive writing schmursive writing.
I agree with the previous comment where you teach people how to print engineering style. Then more people would have legible writing and communication increases. Oh, and I second the whole teach reading comprehension. I'm slowly watching our youth's level of competency in the English language deteriorate into txt msgs wher u only need 2 typ shrthand....

Well, if you're a guy the only cursive you really need to learn is how to sign the cheques.

Since our educational systems often use the Japanese as a model to judge themselves against, what do they do? I cannot believe that the vast majority of their work is not done on the keyboard.

From what I've read, their symbolic language is able to be understood, but very few write it anymore. Isn't this a parallel?

Cursive can be a beautiful way to communicate with one another, but I doubt it will be a significant part of our lives very soon (if it isn't already).

I had to go through this twice. First, in school, we were taught cursive writing. Mine was so illegible that I always chose to print; now I prefer to type.

Then I went through it later in college, where a quarter of my grade for a Graphic Communication class (and daily homework throughout the semester) was based on learning proper printing for architectural and engineering construction documents (Known as "City Blueprint" font, or something similar, in the modern world). And this was at a time when almost all construction documents were being produced by CAD graphics. Some habits die hard.

Every designer or achitect I've known has beautiful printing and it's a joy to read. It makes me respect them for being concise and well trained. This, of course, makes me re-think my statement that cursive must be taught in all our schools. If you can't write well in cursive, at least be skillful and legible in print. But let's not skip the mastery of at least one or the other.

My most skilled computer tech (fresh from the Navy) prints so well it looks like it was typed! His reports are the best in-house and he makes my job easy when I have to type those into a dBase for billing or other reports.

ps - font - City Blueprint rocks, BTW. It's also the name of a few terrific printing companies in the Bay Area near San Francisco, CA. Or at least they used to be there....not a lot of "blueprints" out there like there used to be in the 70-80s.

When I was in the 1st and 2nd grades, back in the early 70's, I kept asking my teacher why we needed to learn cursive. I was very confused, because we were reading in print. Apparently it became a problem, and the school called my parents for a conference. My mother told me afterwards that I had to learn it because I needed to learn how to sign my name and read other people's names. I stopped being a pain about it and did the lessons, and of course I eventually learned how to write.

After the 11th grade, however, none of my papers were allowed to be written. As college prep, they were to be typewritten. It worked for me, as I had just inputted a program (found in a magazine) in BASIC for my Commodore 64 that was a basic word processor. Between that and my old Smith-Corona, the cursive style was relegated to the back seat. In college, nothing was handwritten, ever. So, since 1984, I have only used the cursive style to write my name, and that only in legal or formal situations.

The only time I need to read cursive handwriting is when someone of my parents generation or older sends me a letter or a postcard, or when I am looking at another persons signature. As a result, I have - for all intents and purposes - forgotten how to write many of the letters of the English alphabet in cursive. I tested myself once, and discovered that it took me close to a minute to write a few simple sentences in cursive!

As you can probably tell, I fully support phasing out this outmoded format. There have been other handwriting scripts in the past, and society has moved past them as time and progress changed our modes of communication. This is really no different in my opinion.

I personally never understood why cursive was taught. Most the time you can't even read it, since everyone writes it differently. Good ole print is good enough for me.

Just an old historical fact: cursive was created to be a faster way to write. Supposedly because it was all connected and flowing - this was a time saver.

Really.

If people print well. That's a good thing, too.

No, no need for it to be taught. My kids have a lot more to learn - such as computers - that I never did. Just because I had to learn it over 30 years ago is not a valid reason for my kids to have to learn it. Printing - yes. Keyboard skills - yes. Cursive - no.

I think it should be taught, but it doesn't have to be as important. I love writing by hand and I think printing is pretty boring. I use a mix of printing and cursive and still know how to write cursive for the most part.

I think a lot of people's writing is atrocious so they should definitely learn to write by hand, and well.

I don't see the value of learning to type over learning to write by hand. I don't think we should rely on machines for everything. I also don't see why people need to learn to type since I type very fast and nobody taught me. Seems pretty straight-forward, it's just punching at keys and learning to find a way to use both hands at a regular rhythm.

Maybe if your job entails typing fast you should take a course in it, but teaching kids? I also don't get how kids nowadays do all their work on computer. I think that writing things out yourself is far more conducive to learning than typing it out and watching it appear on a screen. I don't think it helps in connecting with your work and really understanding it. I don't think making thing easier for kids is always the best option. A lot of people these days turn out bloody lazy and it's easy to see why.

There is also a sense of pride in something written or drawn by you that is not quite as strong when you have made it with the aid of a machine. At least, I felt that as a kid, sometimes even now as an adult.

Typing is essentially a method of increasing the speed of our readable writing, and it's benefits are increased with larger documents.

What amount of research does an elementary student need to conduct where computer skills are useful? What amount of writing, or problem solving, is so large that is must be done on computer? How far behind will students actually be leaving secondary school if they take up computer skills in high school rather than in elementary?

How disconnected from their work will students be from typing rather than writing? How much more crappy field notes will I have to endure because no one took the time to teach them?

A computer is an advanced tool, for advanced students. Elementary students are not advanced in anyway.

I think penmanship is an important/useful art form and communication tool. The traditional Palmer method cursive that was originally taught in PDX schools was transformed by two calligraphers in PDX, Inga Dubay and Barbara Getty, in the 80s by introducing italic, which is so legible and beautiful it is a pleasure to see. Handwriting Tips Penmanship - NYTimes.com

Around the same time, there was a new program instigated in the schools callled "Writers' Workshop". This had nothing to do with penmanship and all to do with expressing yourself on paper. The key to this program was "peer editing." This program, and similar ones, I believe have contributed to a breakdown in our writing skills as a society in re punctuation, spelling, and other written communication standards.