Handwriting: Should it continue to be taught?

[Grayjack]

Yes. In fact, I need to practice my handwriting. My handwriting is fucking terrible.

 

[floppylobster]

Riiiight, we should stop teaching guitar as well. Because you can just make those noises with a synthesizer.

I mean in a way it makes sense, because kids these days have not been taught to speak properly so why bother teaching them to write? Or should I say rite (or right?) amirite?. Those damn kids, mumble, mumble, get off my porch!

God damn whose handwriting produced that reCAPTCHA?

 

[lemby117]

I dunno I'm Dyspraxic so neat writing is just about impossible so I would say that I don't think that it should be taught past year 6 age 11 and that people should learn to touch type but I guess for normal people it's verry easy to jot down notes while iit is easier for me to make a note on my net book.

 

[JochemDude]

Yes, ofcourse we should. For exactly the same reasons we should learn to calculate without a calculator, they can use the spellcheck and operate the keyboard, but can't write and can't calculate.

There is a BIG difference between standard English Handwriting and Chinese calligraphy

Also this, our handwriting is putting a few strokes which'll form words, with them every symbol has to be a fucking rembrand

 

[Dreaming Dan]

Defiently.

I wish some of the pople I work with had better handwriting, although handheld devices are nearly everywhere there are still going to be times where you need to actually write something down.

Hand writing is a very important skill that all sorts of things build on, imagine being taught your alphabet on a qwerty keyboard.. thats just goinging to mess with your head.

 

[Chrishu]

Come on. Writing by hand, yes. We'll never be THAT reliant on computers. Cursive, however, is a waste of time.

 

[justcallmeslow]

I think teaching people how to spell and punctuate better is more important. You can get that wrong even on a computer. I'm not sure which is a greater barrier to communication though, both cause problems.

My handwriting is pretty terrible but mostly legible. I'm chalking that up as a win.

 

[junkmanuk]

As long as they dont tell you that you must write in certain way, when i was in primary school i was always being told to "join my letters" because it looked "neater", not only did i hate it i also couldn't read what i was writing! Now i just write in the normal fashion of un-joined letters that actually look like letters and not an abomination against humanity

My kids have been told they have to write in joined up writing. Their un-joined writing is still not good enough and joined up it becomes a scrawl. I've had conflicts over the teachers because I refuse to let them use joined up until their non-joined writing improves.

I'd rather my kids write legibly than supposed 'correctly'.

 

[azukar]

Another reason not explored yet: practising handwriting is also good for hand-eye coordination and developing fine motor control skills. I (a teacher) see too many kids come through the system with poor fine motor control skills, and it affects so many things beyond just handwriting.

 

[Fightgarr]

We are not at a point in our society where paper has entirely been replaced by screens. This kind of thing also devalues, an incredible amount, the importance of children actually forming the shapes themselves as a learning tool.

 

[Andronicus]

But if there's more people with bad handwriting in the world, doesn't that mean we'd have more doctors? Or have I got my correlations around the wrong way?

 

[Dags90]

There is a BIG difference between standard English Handwriting and Chinese calligraphy

Yeah, I don't strictly see the parallels. Especially with the bits about fueling patriotism.

I think the whole "cursive as a professional form of writing" has sort of fallen out of practice. I don't know though, I still like writing in cursive some times, it's a bit faster because you don't have to lift the pencil/pen as much.

I learned how to write well and in cursive in pre-K so I thought having to learn it in second grade was kinda stupid.

 

[Jake the Snake]

I don't think anyone would care if we got rid of cursive. No one uses it, and the people who do basically scribble it, making it damn near impossible to read. But hand writing will ALWAYS, ALWAYS be important. I think this is a bigger issue in China because of complicated the language is from a writing perspective. Can you imagine having to write each of those thousands of characters JUST right to get your point across? It'd be terrible.

A 26 character alphabet, imo, is a far superior format.

 

[JezebelinHell]

I have read articles talking about dropping cursive handwriting but not printing in the US.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-01-23-cursive-handwriting_N.htm
http://www.parentdish.com/2011/01/21/cursive-handwriting/

Cursive is the faster way to write, that is why it exists. Raising and lowering a pen or pencil repeatedly to the paper takes longer. Although I am sure some people can print faster than others printing is slower in general.

Handwriting should always be taught. Too much of history, personal, national, international is written word. Although you can debate that national and international history will be available in other forms, it is highly unlikely that any of your personal history will be. To deny future generations the ability to read something their great, great, great, great grandparents wrote in scrawled cursive will lead to even less connection to where we've been and how far we have come. You can debate that this will have little impact on most people but try telling that to someone that has experienced it. Nothing like finding notes your grandma has written you in cards you gave her over the years. Even knowing cursive I still have to decipher some of it.

Besides, it is bad enough people come out of school unable to:
* Read an analog clock. This has actually been happening for many years, my cousin is in her 30s and hasn't managed to learn this at any point. Every school I go into has analog clocks so I have no idea how kids are figuring out how much time they had left to run the hell out the door before cell phones.

* Count back change. No this does not mean being able to count back the amount the machine tells you. It means that if someone spent $10.69 and gave you a $20 you could give them proper change. Which would be like this: Take their $20, give them a penny and say $10.70. Give them a nickle and say $10.75. Give them a quarter and say $11. Count ones to them up to $15. Give them a $5 and say $20. Congrats, you have just given correct change to someone without a machine telling you and verified it aloud with the person at the same time. It isn't rocket surgery.

* Properly place a dollar sign. Yea, I know other countries do it after the amount but unless you have lived in another country, you look ridiculous. I know you haven't been taught to put it after at any point in your life so trying to use that as an excuse just fails. And seriously, when it is on a sign in front of a business and no one going by it daily can be bothered with realizing it or correcting it I figure they have a group of lazy morons working there.

 

[DeltaEdge]

I honestly think that by the time that you are learning how to type on a keyboard, you would already know how to write. Even if no one ever really taught you, the letters are right in front of your eyes! If you understand them, then I'm sure that you would be able to write them on paper. It would still be best to teach people to hand-write to ensure that they don't write their letters like "a" and "g" sand "Q" exactly like how they appear in typing to avoid drawing them askew. By the time you are learning to type frankly, I would be shocked if you couldn't write and you were learning how to type. If anything though, I think that they should require a refresher hand-writing skills class in High School to help student's neaten their hand writing and work on their grammar and some vocab a bit. I know that you will say, "That's what English is for genius" but most English classes by High School I see really don't work on much grammar, spelling, and hand- writing. Instead, they make you read books most of the time as well as short stories and analyze and summarize them on a computer. I think that they should either make a separate class, or incorporate that into English class so that way people who graduate from High School and pass English actually know how to speak English properly and can differentiate between words like your and you're and there, their, and they're. It is one of nature's great mysteries how some people are so uneducated, that they cant spell the word spell, yet they somehow graduated from a decent High School with full credits. That just baffles me. Oops, I seem to have digressed. Well the point is that my hand-writing and a lot of other people's hand writing around my age and up is deplorable and most people tend to reflect back when they were about 10 when their hand-writing was at it's peak with all of the spelling and hand-writing tests to keep it sharp.

 

[Dags90]

I honestly think that by the time that you are learning how to type on a keyboard, you would already know how to write. Even if no one ever really taught you, the letters are right in front of your eyes! If you understand them, then I'm sure that you would be able to write them on paper. It would still be best to teach people to hand-write to ensure that they don't write their letters like "a" and "g" sand "Q" exactly like how they appear in typing to avoid drawing them askew. By the time you are learning to type frankly, I would be shocked if you couldn't write and you were learning how to type.

Have you ever tried to write in a language not based on the letters you already learned? It takes a while for the muscle memory to set in when writing new characters. Especially so for children, who have poorer fine motor skills. Learning to write is actually a very good way to teach children fine motor control, and help them assimilate muscle memory into practice. That's a big reason to even keep cursive writing around, it's good learning.

 

[Soxafloppin]

I wish I would have taken more interest in it as a child. I am genuinely embarrassed by my child like hand writing.

 

[ThePurpleCube]

I have always had terrible handwriting, so I'm more inclined to say that people shouldn't forget about it. However, it shouldn't be prioritised.

 

[Sarah Frazier]

If it's going to be a case of lessons on basic handwriting, then I'm all for it since my own handwriting, while still mostly legible, is shameful at times. It's especially important for doctors to be able to write clearly under stress because so many drugs share similar enough names to other drugs that do completely different things. If a pharmaceutical technician can't completely understand what's written, they may not have the time to call up the doctor for clarification and simply grab what they think it is. In fact, anyone who has a job that involves a lot of hand written messages should be able to do it without much confusion.

 

[olicon]

Caligraphy is an entirely different beast than just handwriting. Handwriting teaches you to write neatly--proper caligraphy doesn't even look like normal character. They are more akin to art--drawings, not writing.

I wouldn't take it, and I definitely would never force anyone to take it. It definitely should not be a mandatory class.