Kansas may halt cursive education

[Ryotknife]

Meh, cursive takes a lot out of my hands. I cannot write in cursive for very long before they start to cramp up.

Although, as an engineer I SHOULD be using....I dunno what they call it....engineering writing? Not as popular as it used to be. Basically you write all your letters like capital letters, but the lower case letters are smaller. It is suppose to eliminate terrible hand writing.

 

[WanderingFool]

I will laugh at the day when people are so used to computer typing for written work that when in some strange situation, they are force to use cursive writing, their hand writing will be awful!

While I do agree that cursive are being less these days but I do feel they hold some important heritage wise.

Hell, my handwriting is horrible, and I had 3 years of learning cursive and 4 years of being forced to use it.

I dont even think typing is all the important now and days.

 

[DugMachine]

Well he damn well does speak for a large majority of the UK. Cursive writing as it is called in the States is just called writing here - virtually everyone writes like that and those who don't are either very young children or possibly have some kind of brain impairment. I must admit i didn't actually know until this thread that you guys across the atlantic have such a problem with joining your letters up - it must take you forever to make notes especially in lectures and whatnot where you have to get a lot down quickly.

I don't get how you're not seeing this.

-Write in joined lettering almost your whole life = fast at said joined letters

-Write in print almost your whole life = fast at print

And people claim the states are in their own little world and that the world revolves around them *eye roll*.

 

[disgruntledgamer]

Call me when they decide not to teach evolution (A subject that actually matters.)

 

[Lunar Templar]

replacing a less useful skill for a more useful one.

about time a school some where started thinking ahead

 

[elvor0]

We don't exactly use "cursive" per say here in the UK, but we are encouraged to do "joined up" neat-ish hand writing from a young age at school, so it's just sort of the normal way for people to write, our normal hand writing is likely what America would consider cursive. It just seems more efficient than block writing, it flows, for want of a better word.

Personally though, my hand writing is atrocious, mainly because well... I barely ever write anything down anymore, I do tons of typing on the PC, and writing odd notes down on my phone is easier than having to carry around pieces of paper, as I'm less likely to misplace my phone.

 

[Elate]

-Snip-

Yeah sorry, but I'm also from England and we do have cursive (Myself being 19) we just don't call it that by name, y'know those years in primary school where you have to practice joined up writing, those terrible horrible years for people like me who cannot write neatly in cursive and then get told off because my writing isn't legible? We are taught it, and frankly it was one of the biggest waste of times I've ever had, and again I'm 19. Once I hit essay writing level, it was almost always typed, or I wrote faster in print by that point because it was easier for other people to read, and thus easier to mark.

So yeah.. I got no idea where you're coming from. If people want to write/use cursive, fine, I do occasionally use it without thinking, I just mix it into usual writing in a mish mash of what is fastest. But teaching it? Completely pointless, that time would be better spent teaching kids how to read, or hell just write normally.

-Snip-

Most people in the UK don't actually write like that though, for the rest, please see above.

Well he damn well does speak for a large majority of the UK. Cursive writing as it is called in the States is just called writing here - virtually everyone writes like that and those who don't are either very young children or possibly have some kind of brain impairment. I must admit i didn't actually know until this thread that you guys across the atlantic have such a problem with joining your letters up - it must take you forever to make notes especially in lectures and whatnot where you have to get a lot down quickly.

Jesus, I thought that the US was meant to be the ignorant country. Please see above.


Edit: Looking at the replies from people claiming to be from the UK/England I feel like I need to apologise for the amount of monumental dumb asses posting in this thread. Sorry about that folks. God save the queen.

 

[tautologico]

I never thought a thread about a particular style of writing would be so filled with drama.

OT: here in Brazil I was taught cursive as simply "writing", but I basically dropped cursive writing after the technical drawing courses I had to do in university (engineering). I don't know if you'd call it "engineering lettering" or print, but I can write in this style almost as fast as in cursive, and the end result is much easier to read and better-looking. Although I only very rarely need to write, I like to write first drafts or outlines on paper, and then do the rest of the writing on a computer.

From my experience many people my age here have also abandoned the use of cursive writing, though basically everyone is capable of writing and reading it. I don't think it's terribly important, really.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

Here in the UK "cursive" is normal.

You know what we call cursive writing in England? Writing(yes I know this is quite a douchey thing to say). I genuinely did not know the word 'cursive' until I spoke to Americans many years later. I cannot comment on how younger people who are in the early stages of school now are being taught, but I have a friend who is 17 and for everybody he is around it is considered a basic form of writing that is the norm.

Really? Everyone I know writes in print or block capitals and even then, only in the extremely rare instances that they're not typing. I live in Manchester and am in my early 20s, for reference.

 

[el_kabong]

I use cursive all the time, but I don't think that it's a shame to drop it from schools, as long as it's being replaced by useful things (see also: NOT creationism).

 

[Stu35]

No, it is not 'just' America, it is nearly whe whole fucking world (except England where most of the people still can't write cursive according to this thread).

"Still" can't write cursive?

No, not "Still" can't write it.

Many schools appear not to bother with it any more. It appears to be something that has kinda died out in our education system in certain schools. It's certainly not a skill that's required.

Much like Latin, it's pretty much a waste of time.

 

[Jared Domenico]

I think I remember spitting at my teacher's face when I was demanded of to write in cursive. Something about learning a whole new alphabet for the sole purpose of writing slower and making what I completely fucking illegible didn't quite compute to my 8 year old brain.

I already learned the alphabet. It looks nice with its constrained curves and straight lines. It can communicate my ideas effectively. What was wrong with it? Enjoy your mucous.

Correction: still doesn't compute.

 

[NightHawk21]

I find it strange that cursive writing is considered some additional unnecessary skill in America :/.

You know what we call cursive writing in England? Writing(yes I know this is quite a douchey thing to say). I genuinely did not know the word 'cursive' until I spoke to Americans many years later. I cannot comment on how younger people who are in the early stages of school now are being taught, but I have a friend who is 17 and for everybody he is around it is considered a basic form of writing that is the norm. So unless the schooling system has so radically changed within the past 5 years as to be unrecognizable to me..

It's perhaps unusual to have 100% joined writing but totally separated writing to me would be the sort of thing you see young children doing. Do so many people genuinely labour at writing in such a way?

The fact that some people consider something to basic so be in need of phasing out..baffles me.

Good. Cursive is an artifact of the past. On the off chance that there is something that isn't computer text, it's almost always normal print text. I have never been in a situation where cursive was necessary. You don't even need to use it for your signature if you don't want to.

The problem with cursive is that it tends to get really hard to read if you do a shitty job at it, while even bad type-written text is still somewhat legible. Still you could always do what I do and just combine the both, using single characters most of the time and sometimes just joining them up. Still my personal problem is ommitting the last few letters of a word if I'm thinking faster than I can write.

Responses like this make me think of those segway machines. I know it's totally unfair but I can't help but think "walking is a relic of a bygone age..what modern human being would need to walk when you can ride?". It's a basic way of making writing more efficient for those times when you may want to write.

On a personal level:I can type at about 100 wpm, but the tactile sensation of writing is nice for me and I find that when I want to scribble notes and reminders and anything like that it is much easier to personalise and accentuate things in such a way that it makes reading it again much more visually distinct and easy to do than if I had typed my thoughts out and printed them out.

Edit: I apologise to the person I misquoted, sorry .

 

[Raven_Operative]

I cannot fathom a single situation where an adult would be forced to use cursive. Pretty much everything is typed now.

MILITARY BASIC TRAINING!

Yup, that's right. One of the officers on my BMQ course ordered everyone to write a biography of themselves in order to get to know us better. He also stated that we had to do it in cursive, and that printing was unacceptable.

Needless to say, it ended with the entire course sitting in a certain girl's room (the one person in the barracks who actually knew cursive), getting penmanship lessons.


OT:

Despite my above story, I do agree that cursive is obsolete and serves no purpose aside from people writing their signatures. Trash that stuff, it's hard enough to read when the person is a neat writer, but if their writing skills are anywhere below the level of 'extraordinary', it is impossible to decipher.

 

[fuzz]

Welsh guy here. I first learned joined up writing at age 7. To not write this way seems childish to me, it's just the done thing. However if you're going to be advised to use print anyway then I don't see any point in teaching it.

 

[J Tyran]

Well he damn well does speak for a large majority of the UK.

No he doesn't, he speaks for a portion of the UK. Certainly not a minority but certainly not the largest either. Generally only the upper end of the middle class and A level and university students use it. The real majority where never even educated in it let alone have it fallen out of favor, many of those who where educated in it have also abandoned it. Exam papers and course work often insist on "print only" now as well, so do many forms and documents. Even in official capacities it is almost dead, apart from English papers I suppose. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has lead to many documents being digitized for storage purposes rather than storing the original paper document, this always leads to "print only" and further decreases Cursive use.

Immigrants over the last 40 years never use it either, neither do the faith schools teach it and place a larger emphasis on their cultural languages like Arabic and Urdu. Between those that where never educated in it and those that no longer use it Cursive is almost dead, to quote someone involved in the debate in the UK "Cursive hand writing is as relevant as Latin".

Biometrics like finger prints will soon replace signatures too.

 

[TwentyPercentCooler]

Since I'm left-handed, fuck cursive. I wouldn't miss it.

(for you righties that don't understand why lefties hate it - to get it to look right I have to slant the paper at a ridiculous angle and it always gets smudged anyway)

 

[Ljs1121]

I don't think getting rid of cursive in education would cause any problems. As others have said, it's rarely necessary to use. Might as well focus on educating kids on what will be prevalent in future years, which will likely be computer script.

Also, am I the odd one out since I exclusively write in cursive? I'm not sure why, but I've preferred it to print for as long as I can remember.

 

[Wintermoot]

As someone who is left handed all I have to say is: fuck cursive. Also fuck the shitty paper that I forced to use when learning how to write in cursive. So...um, yeah. Go Kansas.

fellow lefty and I agree to this.
Cursive is only useful if you learn something like Calligraphy.

 

[teqrevisited]

I'm not too bothered either way, but I think it does look a lot more professional when written documents are written properly. Not mine, though. My handwriting looks like a large family of anorexic spiders has died in a long line across the page. Often I'm the only person that can read it.