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.Cavan said:-Snip-
Most people in the UK don't actually write like that though, for the rest, please see above.elvor0 said:-Snip-
Jesus, I thought that the US was meant to be the ignorant country. Please see above.Ironside said: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.
BiscuitTrouser said:Here in the UK "cursive" is normal.
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.Cavan said: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.
"Still" can't write cursive?TheKasp said: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).
Cavan said: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.
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.LetalisK said: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.
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 .
MILITARY BASIC TRAINING!Aris Khandr said:I cannot fathom a single situation where an adult would be forced to use cursive. Pretty much everything is typed now.
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.Ironside said:Well he damn well does speak for a large majority of the UK.
fellow lefty and I agree to this.ThingWhatSqueaks said: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.
Is it really that difficult to believe that people who write in print hold their pens in the same fashion that you do when you write in cursive? I could show you just as many illegible scribbles in cursive that look like they were done by a 2 year old. And really, do your eyes bleed and think that the internet is run by little children because the font is like this? Please, stop making a fool of yourself.Wicky_42 said:I am genuinely confused that something as basic as joined-up writing can be considered unnecessary. What do you do when you have to jot down notes? Pull out your smart phone and tap away? Ham-fistedly clutch a crayon and scrawl out "T-O D-O: L-E-A-R-N T-O W-R-I-T-E G-O-O-D"?
Though that said, it would have been nice to have been taught to be able to type correctly at any point in my education. I know qwer and asd like the back of my hand, but everything else is kinda a shot in the dark... balance people, that's what we need! Somehow, proper handwriting and touch typing can co-exist, have faith!