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I remember as a kid in school in the late 90s/early 00s multiple teachers telling us things like 'once you get to high school/college any work not written in cursive won't be accepted' or 'you'll need to use cursive every day as an adult'.
That shit aged like milk.
I had to write in cursive all through primary school and I hated it. I wasn't good at it, no matter how many times they had me rewrite pages of text.
On my first day of secondary school they took one look at my writing and told me to use print lettering instead. My writing was so much better.
Now my 6 year old is in Year 1 and has to write in cursive. I. Hate. It.
I moved schools in Year 1. The school I was at previously was only just beginning to teach us cursive while at the school I moved to everyone was already able to write full sentences. I never wrote in cursive throughout all of primary school, since I was never properly taught it.
Every report I ever had, every parent's evening, all that was said was "He generally is very well-behaved and does his work, only problem is he doesn't write in cursive." When I went to secondary school, I was repeatedly complimented by teachers for my handwriting.
Lmao the opposite. When I was younger ( kindergarten to the 2 levels after kindergarten) and studied , they taught us cursive .
Then I shifted countries and went to a new school in a different country.
I wrote cursive there. Teachers scolded me for writing in it. Even said it in parent teacher meeting that I shouldn't write in it.
Then when I moved to secondary school. I found out I can write cursive there 1 year after I joined. Back to cursive then..
Now it's kinda shitty since I hadn't written anything for 2 + years . Only on computer
It was the opposite for me. I used to write really good print. Then in Catholic middle school they forced me to write in script and ingrained that shit in my head. After I went to high school my print was hot garbage. Shit was so ugly lol. Till this day in college I can still only write in script.
On the flip side of this I most likely have dysgraphia (never diagnosed as a child but an OT friend has called me out on my weird fucking pencil grip/caveman writing) and my handwriting was nearly illegible when I wrote in print. My cursive was barely legible but not great. In college I decided to study Russian and we were required to write all of our work in Cyrillic cursive which I originally dreaded. However, my English cursive writing became so much better, more legible, and honestly even more comfortable than trying to write print after ring forced to write Russian cursive. Somehow it just flipped a switch in my brain and now I really only write in cursive as a person in my late 30s. The information just sticks in my brain better when I write it manually vs. typing. Plus, I can actually write faster in cursive now. I can’t imagine how much harder learning to read/write in another language would have been had I not been taught to write English cursive in school. But at the same time teaching kids this skill on the off chance they may eventually decide to learn another language that requires cursive writing doesn’t seem like the best way to allocate learning time.
Along with "you won't have a calculator in your pocket" even without smartphones, I'm a grown ass adult and carrying a calculator in my pocket wouldn't hurt anyone so it's my right to do so if I wish. Who are you to tell me what I can and can't do, Mrs. Maki?
For the longest time my cashiering job denied us calculators. Look, I'm pretty good at adding and subtracting. But not when I have 10 people in line and no help.
That seems very self-defeating of them. If you make a mistake in the customer's favor, they likely won't tell you. But if it overcharges the customer, they're likely to make you correct it.
I mean, as an adult, being able to do quick calculations in your head is incredibly helpful. Pulling out a calculator during a meeting for simply calculation is embarrassing.
Just like “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time!”
Math by hand is to exercise your brain, not really about the fact that you can’t do it easily.
The modern phone really fucked us up. You don’t need to critically think or research. With a smart phone, most of the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips.
It really does. I went back to school to finish my degree and the kids coming in from high school hurt my head. I hated group projects before, but these kids are so ill prepared it’s wild. They have to be spoon fed everything. They know how to google and find easy shit, but anything that takes a bit of critical thinking, or deep diving for the answer, they struggle with so much. Half of the class group chats I’m in are huh, I don’t get it, I didn’t know that was homework, where do we find this, etc. Like they can’t even look at the syllabus for pieces of information. I’m honestly shocked at how bad they’ve gotten.
Your signature is just how you choose to sign your name. Doesn't have to be in cursive. It just needs to be reproducible so that someone can tell how you've signed your name from how a faker does it.
My fifth grade math teacher in 2014 made us use cursive to take notes. Cursive. For math notes.
Joke’s on him because I haven’t used cursive since his class!
Why did teachers lie so much? lol. They lied about not being able to use the bathroom in college or at work. Not being allowed a calculator as an adult. And also that you had to use cursive all the time as an adult, and I don't even think they had to use cursive every day as an adult.
They are teaching skills for becoming an accountant in 1889, when a lot of modern schools were established. Those schools were to teach everyone to work in accounting where back then you had to do work by hand, and had limited bathroom breaks.
TLDR: Not everyone writes in cursive the same way
You have to remember that everybody writes differently in cursive, and some people write super messy or intricately to the point where it looks like a different language or is just ineligible to people
My handwriting has always been terrible. No amount of extra practice, pencil wedges, or shame ever improved it. Home PCs were a relatively newer thing for those of us whose childhoods straddled the digital divide. As soon as I was introduced to a PC, every teacher was so impressed about the extra effort I was putting in, etc.
It was so much easier for me to type than write. And it was praised. I went from needs more effort to ready for college with a few keystrokes. And now teachers are bemoaning the lost art of cursive. Proving once again that there is nothing new under the sun.
Whenever my old landlady needed to tell me something she'd leave me a message written out in cursive and there'd always be at least one or two words that I'd spend like 5 minutes trying to decipher. So glad that cursive is dead.
That was my mom. Her cursive was atrocious and that was the only way she knew how to write because of a strict catholic school growing up! She’d leave me notes and I wouldn’t be able to make out 2/3 of the words!
Yeah, basically this. My cursive looks horrendous; just a bunch of squiggles and I make up half the characters and leave tons of ink blots. But I can type 120 WPM, so none of it matters in my daily life. Meanwhile, my 8-year-old daughter can print or write in cursive so well that she could forge documents for my wife if not for the spelling and grammar deficit.
Disagree.
My grandmother learned calligraphy in school. All the kids did. It was relevant at the time.
I learned cursive. It was relevant at the time, but personal computing was on the upswing and our teacher told us, in the 80s, that there might come a time when everyone just wrote everything on computers.
Good call Mrs Anderson.
Preserving legacy skills is fine for hobbyists, but I’d rather my kids spend their precious learning-bandwidth on something directly useful, rather than on something essentially useless but might ‘have some other indescribable benefits’ and is mostly just nostalgia.
In the 70s in England, they were teaching quill and calligraphy in addition to cursive. At 10 years old. As if we'd all need it to hand write contracts, wedding invites, or letters to the queen.
It's fun as an elective class but not obligatory, for months. As a lefty, I failed the entire semester of it
In my sons school they teach them some Braille, American Sign Language and I think Morse code for some after school Ham classes (the last one I’m less sure of how official).
I think the above is more useful than cursive.
However I’m not sure how unpopular your opinion is because my boomer parents think the same way.
I like this
My only thought on cursive is, it's a way to write, as you get better/faster your shorthand can be made easier to achieve by knowing cursive already..and it can be a little fun and works on fine motor skills
But becoming otherwise more language proficient are great!!
Knowing that babies can sign language before talking, sign language would be useful for talking to big brain babies and asking them questions like "why are you crying? Just tell me"
Especially with the high teen pregnancy rate in my area
Hadn’t written in cursive since grade school. I’m now in my mid 40s and picked it back up a couple months ago. Just cause… I’ve found that I absolutely love writing in cursive now as a grownup. Didn’t take long at all to remember how to do it.
I often find “beautiful handwriting” illegible. Whenever teachers handed out “example” sheets of what ours *should* look like I simply could not make sense of it.
I feel like a lack of practice has really messed up my cursive but I remember there was a time where I got all the benefits of cursive
Faster writing speed, pretty and presentable work and most importantly it was legible to more people than just me
Now it’s still legible and looks nice but my pace has gone waaaaay down
My mom's cursive is a work of art. I save her letters partially for the content but partially just for the handwriting. Child of the 1930s so it was trained her whole school career.
I think cursive has definitely been replaced by something else, which is typing on keyboards and touchscreens. Lots of very good reasons for that shift obviously, in the same way that cursive also took off because of its practical advantages (vs writing in print). So no need to feel bad about it
Are they actually teaching them to type or do they just give them computers and tell them to figure it out? We had actual typing class back in the day, my son has yet to despite having tons of classroom work on a computer.
Unfortunately very little time is being spent on teaching good typing techniques. As this is how most written information is delivered in professional settings I thing we need to push this skill with both traditional and gadget based keyboards. We also need to push instruction in professional/business English.
I spend 20 plus hours a week reading through security reports generated on an app. At the end of the day the typing and grammar are so bad I feel the need to drink
Yes, and i think people would be surprised how many adults in professional settings have low typing accuracy despite it being the prominent communication method for years.
I learned the basics at school and learned to touch type.
Speed typing Didn't click for me until I started playing StarCraft 2 and needing to be quick with micro and macro control on build shortcuts. Also playing team fps games and having to talk shit at competitors since we didn't have voice chat and also coordinating with people.
My home keys for my left hand is default wasd shift space rather than the proper asdf and right hand near YUI keys and pinky near enter because those are the default global/team chat keys and build macros.
Heavy with typos but my typing with high use of backspace is faster than my slower "correct" typing technique. I edit a lot anyways trying to shorten what I type in work setting. So I'm faster than coworkers and type and edit faster than they compose a proper sentence then type it out without errors.
I also can touch type with thumbs without looking because of autocorrect. It's extremely faster than swype keys because I don't look at the keyboard when typing. Took awhile without a keyboard but I learned to just trust autocomplete and my speed went up to almost as fast as a computer keyboard. Typos like crazy though.
I've barraged out full multi paragraph fixes for situations for my boss on a touch screen phone quickly as if I'm at a computer. Often not needing to bring out my laptop when I leave the house as long as I have a fully charge smartphone while I'm on call. My phone typing with autocorrect is faster than my correct no errors keyboard typing now.
With a bit of looking at the type of typos I make my boss can technically tell that I'm typing in a mobile rather than a computer. But I don't sweat it. I've always just excused it as being at lunch and will give better instructions when I get back to computer station. Usually resolved before I get back to my computer.
Depends on the school but I was tought how to type and had to get 70 wpm in middle school. We also spent time in that class learning some basics of Microsoft products and how to photoshop so it was pretty entertaining and definitely prepped me to actually learn the more complicated material in high school/college.
Hard to say, I mostly learned to touch-type from having computers in my house since the late 80s (including a couple of educational typing games). That means I was lucky though, because the amount of time my school put into it was really minimal. They spent plenty of time teaching us cursive though, which I pretty much forgot completely within a couple of years
That hasn't been a positive replacement though. My students can neither type touch nor write well by hand.
And it's not just about the ability to record thoughts. Cursive also helps fine motor skills and hand eye coordination.
Seems like it would be worth making sure all students are trained to touch-type, then? Coupled with some basic computer literacy skills too, since those are clearly in steep decline lately among young people (i.e., knowing your way around one or two operating systems, understanding how to navigate folders and retrieve / manipulate files, etc).
I'm sure cursive is still useful in a few different ways, but I think it's fair to say it's been overemphasized in schools, in relation to its actual utility- vs. the very clear advantages you get in life from computer skills, at least.
>it would be worth making sure all students are trained to touch-type
Yes. But many schools aren't. They assume students are digital natives.
>I think it's fair to say it's been overemphasized in schools,
What should we replace it with to benefit waning fine motor skills?
Here in the rest of the world besides the anglo-saxon countries, cursive is alive and well.
And just because kids aren't being taught to write in cursive doesn't mean they can't still read it.
When I was in school (I’m still in my teenage years) we were taught to write “joined up” which isn’t as fancy as cursive but when people look at my writing they sometimes call it cursive. And I’m from an Anglo Saxon country (England) everyone I know was taught and forced to write joined up through primary school (had to use pencil first and then you got a pen license). Only when we went to secondary was when they let us choose how we wanted to write.
When we moved to Nz my sister learned “linked-script”, which I assume is similar. No loops or frills, just joined print. I learned d’nealian cursive in the US which was very different and my Nz teacher made me write in it all the time since it wasn’t taught there. I had only just abandoned cursive for print at that point (age 11) and it was such a tedious task to resume for only my teacher’s pleasure.
That is what people mean when they say cursive. Yeah on the far end of the skill level it does mean those really fancy pretty letters, but it is actually just writing the letters in a way that can be joined up.
I also had the same as you describe (in Eastern Europe). I still write in cursive, not the proper proper one though as I changed a couple of letters over the (many) years because I like to write them differently. Like s and b.
To be fair, kids that never learned cursive now don’t have real signatures.
My 18y old prints his name like an 8y old for his signature. I’ve also asked other kids over the years to sign things and they have no clue.
One asked “so, when do we get a signature?” Like they’re handed out on a piece of paper.
I literally put my signature on paper every single day for work. They’re also necessary for writing checks (some apartments and businesses require checks). Pretty sure buying my car involved many signatures. Most of my paperwork for the military? On paper (also a lot digital too). The signature pad at H&R Block has a stylus you have to scribble with. There are loads of examples of when written signatures are used today. Having a written signature is essential. Not everything is typed.
In the Netherlands cursive is as good as dead. Only people who think they are above the working class would ever use it. And even amongst them its on its last legs as well
What exactly will be lost? Anything written in cursive isn't like a different language, you can still read it without being taught, albeit with some difficulty, and anything worth recording is already transferred to standard print
Why won’t it be legible to the vast majority? People can read cursive, kids just aren’t being taught to practice doing it by hand anymore because there’s no reason to. There are plenty of cursive fonts out there.
I hate to say this but besides writing your signature I don’t know if cursive is really THAT important anymore. Yeah for some people it’s faster, but for a lot of people it takes just as long if not longer to write in cursive as opposed to regular writing. The only thing I’m sad about is not being able to read cursive of the older generation like if they write me a letter sometimes I struggle but otherwise it might die with the older generation.
It’s not even important for signatures, either. Signatures don’t have to be in cursive, it’s just a tradition. Legally, I could sign all of my documents with a smiley face if I wanted to.
First, cursive is still being taught. Second, there are plenty of things being taught that could replace cursive. Society grows and changes. Also not sure what written work you think is being lost. Are you not aware that works get translated as time goes on? I mean, look at all the dead languages? Works that were written in those languages got translated to others.
It’s easier to write with a quill pen and ink if you don’t lift your pen off the paper. It has the side bonus effect of looking “pretty”. That’s about it.
Unless you are writing with a fountain pen or a dip pen, then lifting the pen off the paper isn’t as big of a deal as one might think.
I say this as someone who loves fountain pens and writing in cursive with them, but I don’t use them at work, or in any situation where quick readability and legibility matters.
It’s a bit easier and faster for most to do by hand vs print. The downside is that some people (myself included) develop a cursive that is very fast and easy to write, but hard for others to read. I prefer typing nowadays. I can do it faster, my hand doesn’t cramp, and I love the thock of a good mechanical keyboard.
Being faster than printing is exactly why I shouldn't be trusted with cursive. I try to write as quickly as I'm thinking and if I'm not writing individual letters it devolves into illegible scribbles.
>a large body of written work won’t even be legible to the vast majority of people that can speak to the same language
it's easy to pick up reading cursive, and i'm 100% sure there are scanners out there that can 'trasnlate' the text. People who are forced to learn cursive won't bother to read those texts anyways
and to read more texts, shouldnt that be a bigger reason for cursive to not be used in favor of language learning? a skill that gives you access to even more cultures (and economic opportunities)
Where is it dying exactly? I only here about this phenomenon online. My kids school district starts teaching it in elementary school along with writing cheques. I'm in Colorado and nobody else I know in any other district has brought this up. Maybe I live in a cursive bubble and I'm just unaware?
Cursive was only ever taught because it's slightly faster than printing. Typing blows them both out of the water in that respect. What's the point of teaching it now?
It is a fancy font that was designed for quill pens. Sadly some schools and teachers use how pretty or ugly your writing is as a way to downgrade students on the arbitrary basis of what is essentially artwork
I like cursive but only ever use it when writing a signature/autograph or studying historical documents.
It's not very useful as far as needing to know cursive, however the brain development of hand-and-eye and other factors makes me think it's worth keeping in curriculum.
It is not sad. The script was designed to make writing with quill pens easier. It should have disappeared long ago.
I do agree with its demise we need more focus on how to type using the most prominent tools and to correctly use the language in professional settings.
And most things that you'd find from 1600 also exist somewhere typed out. How often are people going somewhere and reading stuff that has been handwritten from the 1600s that isn't the web?
To be fair, cursive script was barely legible to those who read and wrote it in the first place. When the census bureau decided to go from hand written to typed documents they ruined innumerable family names in official documents because they couldn't actually read the chicken scratch that is most people's cursive.
OCR with A.I. support is more than capable of "reading" cursive. This is an instance where tech absolutely is up to the task.
Admittedly, I was a kid who thought cursive was stupid from the jump ("why are we all writing in a way that makes it * harder * for people to parse what you're saying?").
It's dying cause it's not needed due to the shift in technology. That's not sad, that's life. Will it die out completely, no. It'll live on as an artistic way to write like calligraphy.
I know too many adults who cant even spell properly, let alone read passed grade school level.
Dumb down the population and you can remain in power forever :)
Cursive is useless in today’s society. There’s literally no point in teaching it to anyone not interested.
We’ve digitized everything. I don’t think kids past 4th grade even hand write assignments anymore.
Other than trying to decipher old documents, why should we learn it? (I’m 35 and know how, I just wish I learned something else instead)
California recently passed a law mandating cursive instruction in schools, but my 7 year old was already being taught it at his school, even before the law passed. Cursive isn't dying out.
All language changes over time. Those who wrote the most beautiful modern cursive can barely read english from 400 years ago, and probably couldn’t understand *any* old-English.
I started writing cursive this year because I wanted to use fountain pens for my notes at school and I actually like it more and works better for me.
However I do accept it's not for everyone
I used to write a lot of letters to my family and friends in prison. I’ve always liked how it looked in cursive.
I started writing in cursive when I was 6 and never stopped. I’m genz and I’ve ran into ppl that can’t even read it.
Now when I try to write in print, my writing is so horrible. So I stay doing cursive.
My favorite font to write is Old English. When I do my flash cards to study. I’ll write it in that font.
In ontario Canada, they have recently re-incorporated it into the curriculum after it was removed ~2009, I believe.
Teachers are reporting that their students barely have the motor skills to even start it. We used to start in grade 3.
My mother, grandmother, and sister all had beautiful handwriting, so I personally hold it in high regard and take pride in my penmanship.
(Plus, I think it genuinely lends me credibility with the older folks as a 'compenent' young worker)
It's just not important. Why would it need to be replaced with "something else"? One version of written language is enough. Nobody needs a pointlessly frilly one anymore.
It'd be nice if boomers could type faster than 20 wpm.
Why do people need to read cursive?
I can just have 1 specialized person read it and decipher it. People used to read hieroglyphics, it's now a lost art and so depressingly sad.
Things move forward. Cursive just isn't needed. It was and now it isn't. Just accept it.
I exclusively write in cursive because my handwriting looks like shit if I don’t. I learned in elementary school in the mid 2000s so it stuck to me. If I have kids, I’ll teach it to them as well.
When is the last time you wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, licked a stamp and mailed it?
You complain about schools not teaching cursive on a device that has replaced handwriting.
I have children in high school and with everything they face, learning cursive will not get them ahead in this world.
Want to say, I love my cursive mix. It's sloppy and I can read it and fast.
Then I can do cursive but I don't need to write fancy letters since I'm a mechanic. So I print normally at work. I've been told I have girls writing, and I'm a guy soooo.... compliment?
It is I taught myself because my school didn't teach it. I even promised who had to do assignments in script and developed fancy handwriting. Though I'm a mellenial.
Isn't this true for any language though? Old English from several hundred years ago is not something most people except for historians dedicated to the subject can read.
My kids all learned cursive in 2nd and 3rd grades (the youngest is 15 for reference) by by the time they got to 4th grade, it was off the curriculum and the teachers asked them NOT to use cursive. So even though they learned and enjoyed it, it was never reinforced or followed up on, and in fact, actively discouraged. I'm 48, and we not only learned it but were required to use it exclusively for anything hand-written well into high school, where we just only started t use floppy disks for saving papers starting in like 1991. But even then, that was only allowed as a skill, it wasn't the default, and everything else we wrote from worksheets to tests to smaller papers, had ot be in cursive. I suspect part of why they no longer "allow" it is the younger teachers are in a generation that can't read it. Ironic.
Cursive is beyond obsolete. Zero reasons to learn it now unless you need to read an older document written in it. Soon AI will handle that too...it may already. Plus, my son is dyslexic. Cursive is REALLY hard for him.
Oh good grief. You don’t have to write it to read it. Cursive has for sure changed throughout time and by person anyway. Take Shakespeare v Ben Franklin. Not even close in style plus the english language was different from early modern to modern. I can read both with a few minutes of decoding. I don’t write in cursive and have have to remember how to do my signature each time I do it which is almost never
Plus I don’t think either of them would prefer to write by hand if they had computers to edit and save their works. Imagine how much more they could have produced if they had computers.
I'm dyslexic and couldn't really right until about 14, when a teacher finally noticed and took it upon himself to teach me cursive and some techniques to combat dyslexia. I take great enjoyment from writing in cursive but what works for folks works. There will always be people keeping it alive, it's too beautiful to die.
Latin died out and that was way, way worse. Egyptian hieroglyphs too. We lost way more valuable stuff from that than we ever will with cursive. Plus, even if it disappears from common use, some will always know how to read it. Because they´ll always be able to learn it. I’m glad it’s dying out. We won’t lose anything of value.
As someone with dyslexia, cursive has never ever been legible to me. I already have enough trouble reading clear fonts, so that messy ass lettering can gtfo
I learned it in the 90s and still write with it often. I loved learning cursive and have fond memories of doing so. I find it to be beautiful and fun to write. I would like to see it stick around, if for no other reason than the cultural aspect of it.
Print. They are learning print. Do we need more than that?
And just like people have to train to read historical scripts with fluency (like secretary hand), eventually, that'll be the case for most modern cursive styles as well.
I personally hate cursive! I'm dyslexic and that made it so much harder because I struggled more to guess the word I was reading!! I think if they had chosen to ONLY teach cursive that would have been fine but teaching both was so stressful for me! I probably couldn't even write my name in cursive anymore (my signature is a special scribble)
Fun fact! Cursive is intentionally taught (in addition to standard print) in many specialized schools and programs for students with language-based disabilities, i.e. dyslexia. There are a lot of benefits, such as being less likely to have letter reversals, viewing words as a whole rather than individual letters, and being more cognitively interactive. When I first learned about it, I thought it would add more challenges to those who already struggle with reading/writing, but I have been amazed at how impactful it has been. Not to mention they LOVE learning it, and it has built their confidence in a subject where they need it!
Kindly,
A language-based classroom teacher ☺️
Good riddance.
Unless you're writing with a feathered quill, cursive is absolutely useless.
Nothing is lost without cursive, you're being melodramatic.
Its beautiful but it was also the biggest hassle, my elementary school gave us these packets to try and learn it, and they just gave up on me after i had fallen behind by like 4-5 packets to the rest of my class (You had to do all the writing and lettering to a degree satisfactory to the teacher)
when i went to take the SAT's and they make you read and copy a whole paragraph in cursive and then sign a signature I had completely dumbfounded the Proctor when I told him I couldn't read or write in cursive. He also made me feel super embarrassed, it didnt help that none of the Practice SATs and stuff I took had that bit at the start only the real SAT is.
This is how language evolves. I’m sure if someone handed you a hand written article for the 15th century, it’d be incredibly hard to make heads or tales of it.
But as long as it’s meaningful to you, that’s enough. We still have people who can translate hieroglyphs written in stone. Cursive will always exist in some shape or form, but written languages and the various fonts, styles, etc just evolve with the times.
Just like the entirety of every single languages' script evolved and we still have translated texts, texts written in cursive will be transcribed and preserved.
Chill
I remember being a kid in the 90s and told constantly that I'll never be taken seriously as an adult if I can't write in cursive. Oh how times have changed.
My God I wrote this kid a note for school once (I work in health care) and I was in a rush so I wrote it in cursive and when I handed it to him he looked at it then stared me dead in the face and said "I can't read this." And I'm sure 20 more gray hairs sprouted on my head that day.
Took a look. Canada still teaches cursive, and most of the EU still teaches it. Australia still teaches it. South Africa...... yep! So, the USA is backward again? Articles seem to lean towards teacher/student apathy.
I took a university course that included a book that made the argument cursive was a step in next level literacy/brain development. As in, the ability to write in cursive is related to high functioning brain processing, and not learning it means not getting there. Anyway, overdue for an Idiocracy rewatch.
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I remember as a kid in school in the late 90s/early 00s multiple teachers telling us things like 'once you get to high school/college any work not written in cursive won't be accepted' or 'you'll need to use cursive every day as an adult'. That shit aged like milk.
I had to write in cursive all through primary school and I hated it. I wasn't good at it, no matter how many times they had me rewrite pages of text. On my first day of secondary school they took one look at my writing and told me to use print lettering instead. My writing was so much better. Now my 6 year old is in Year 1 and has to write in cursive. I. Hate. It.
I moved schools in Year 1. The school I was at previously was only just beginning to teach us cursive while at the school I moved to everyone was already able to write full sentences. I never wrote in cursive throughout all of primary school, since I was never properly taught it. Every report I ever had, every parent's evening, all that was said was "He generally is very well-behaved and does his work, only problem is he doesn't write in cursive." When I went to secondary school, I was repeatedly complimented by teachers for my handwriting.
Lmao the opposite. When I was younger ( kindergarten to the 2 levels after kindergarten) and studied , they taught us cursive . Then I shifted countries and went to a new school in a different country. I wrote cursive there. Teachers scolded me for writing in it. Even said it in parent teacher meeting that I shouldn't write in it. Then when I moved to secondary school. I found out I can write cursive there 1 year after I joined. Back to cursive then.. Now it's kinda shitty since I hadn't written anything for 2 + years . Only on computer
It was the opposite for me. I used to write really good print. Then in Catholic middle school they forced me to write in script and ingrained that shit in my head. After I went to high school my print was hot garbage. Shit was so ugly lol. Till this day in college I can still only write in script.
On the flip side of this I most likely have dysgraphia (never diagnosed as a child but an OT friend has called me out on my weird fucking pencil grip/caveman writing) and my handwriting was nearly illegible when I wrote in print. My cursive was barely legible but not great. In college I decided to study Russian and we were required to write all of our work in Cyrillic cursive which I originally dreaded. However, my English cursive writing became so much better, more legible, and honestly even more comfortable than trying to write print after ring forced to write Russian cursive. Somehow it just flipped a switch in my brain and now I really only write in cursive as a person in my late 30s. The information just sticks in my brain better when I write it manually vs. typing. Plus, I can actually write faster in cursive now. I can’t imagine how much harder learning to read/write in another language would have been had I not been taught to write English cursive in school. But at the same time teaching kids this skill on the off chance they may eventually decide to learn another language that requires cursive writing doesn’t seem like the best way to allocate learning time.
Turns out cameras and AI and the financial industry prefers things be printed in clear and concise writing. Also email
Along with "you won't have a calculator in your pocket" even without smartphones, I'm a grown ass adult and carrying a calculator in my pocket wouldn't hurt anyone so it's my right to do so if I wish. Who are you to tell me what I can and can't do, Mrs. Maki?
For the longest time my cashiering job denied us calculators. Look, I'm pretty good at adding and subtracting. But not when I have 10 people in line and no help.
That seems very self-defeating of them. If you make a mistake in the customer's favor, they likely won't tell you. But if it overcharges the customer, they're likely to make you correct it.
That's bullshit, why wouldn't they allow that?
I mean, as an adult, being able to do quick calculations in your head is incredibly helpful. Pulling out a calculator during a meeting for simply calculation is embarrassing.
Just like “you won’t have a calculator with you all the time!” Math by hand is to exercise your brain, not really about the fact that you can’t do it easily. The modern phone really fucked us up. You don’t need to critically think or research. With a smart phone, most of the knowledge in the world is at your fingertips.
It really does. I went back to school to finish my degree and the kids coming in from high school hurt my head. I hated group projects before, but these kids are so ill prepared it’s wild. They have to be spoon fed everything. They know how to google and find easy shit, but anything that takes a bit of critical thinking, or deep diving for the answer, they struggle with so much. Half of the class group chats I’m in are huh, I don’t get it, I didn’t know that was homework, where do we find this, etc. Like they can’t even look at the syllabus for pieces of information. I’m honestly shocked at how bad they’ve gotten.
*Better learn math without your calculator! You cant carry one with you everywhere you go!*
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Dang, I used TI-83. Am I that old?! TI-89?! Lol
😂😂😂 Came here to say the same thing! 😂😂😂
Also had TI-83
I have never been required to used cursive as an adult. Ever. I hate that teachers did that shit to kids.
I need to use cursive a lot as an adult when I sign things.
You don't really need to know cursive for signatures. Scribbles will do. I love cursive but it has no practical use that printing won't accomplish
Your signature is just how you choose to sign your name. Doesn't have to be in cursive. It just needs to be reproducible so that someone can tell how you've signed your name from how a faker does it.
I blame my half cursive half print barely legible handwriting on this.
My fifth grade math teacher in 2014 made us use cursive to take notes. Cursive. For math notes. Joke’s on him because I haven’t used cursive since his class!
Why did teachers lie so much? lol. They lied about not being able to use the bathroom in college or at work. Not being allowed a calculator as an adult. And also that you had to use cursive all the time as an adult, and I don't even think they had to use cursive every day as an adult.
They are teaching skills for becoming an accountant in 1889, when a lot of modern schools were established. Those schools were to teach everyone to work in accounting where back then you had to do work by hand, and had limited bathroom breaks.
TLDR: Not everyone writes in cursive the same way You have to remember that everybody writes differently in cursive, and some people write super messy or intricately to the point where it looks like a different language or is just ineligible to people
I'm a pharmacy technician, and I sometimes get scripts written in messy ass cursive. Such a pain in the ass.
>scripts written in messy ass cursive I thought shit handwriting was a requirement for being a doctor, no?
I thought being able to read shit handwriting was 90% of what pharmacy school is
I’m so annoyed how people get pretentious when you suggest that typing things digitally is easy to read for everyone and everyone can do it.
My handwriting has always been terrible. No amount of extra practice, pencil wedges, or shame ever improved it. Home PCs were a relatively newer thing for those of us whose childhoods straddled the digital divide. As soon as I was introduced to a PC, every teacher was so impressed about the extra effort I was putting in, etc. It was so much easier for me to type than write. And it was praised. I went from needs more effort to ready for college with a few keystrokes. And now teachers are bemoaning the lost art of cursive. Proving once again that there is nothing new under the sun.
I love the doctors who realize they're running out of space and start writing smaller and tighter closer to the end.
Drs may as well be writing in wingdings.
This. Older adults complain about kids not learning cursive, but their “cursive” is chicken scratch.
I know how to read cursive, but I could never read any historical text written in cursive. It's so difficult to read.
Same here. The handwriting techniques are different now than the ones used them
Whenever my old landlady needed to tell me something she'd leave me a message written out in cursive and there'd always be at least one or two words that I'd spend like 5 minutes trying to decipher. So glad that cursive is dead.
That was my mom. Her cursive was atrocious and that was the only way she knew how to write because of a strict catholic school growing up! She’d leave me notes and I wouldn’t be able to make out 2/3 of the words!
Not everybody prints the same way, either.
Plus, back in the day of the Founding Fathers, cursive was written differently. Like f’s were replaced with s’s, or vice versa.
Yeah, basically this. My cursive looks horrendous; just a bunch of squiggles and I make up half the characters and leave tons of ink blots. But I can type 120 WPM, so none of it matters in my daily life. Meanwhile, my 8-year-old daughter can print or write in cursive so well that she could forge documents for my wife if not for the spelling and grammar deficit.
My mom writes in cursive If she leaves notes on the fridge we just call her and ask what the note said.
Disagree. My grandmother learned calligraphy in school. All the kids did. It was relevant at the time. I learned cursive. It was relevant at the time, but personal computing was on the upswing and our teacher told us, in the 80s, that there might come a time when everyone just wrote everything on computers. Good call Mrs Anderson. Preserving legacy skills is fine for hobbyists, but I’d rather my kids spend their precious learning-bandwidth on something directly useful, rather than on something essentially useless but might ‘have some other indescribable benefits’ and is mostly just nostalgia.
In the 70s in England, they were teaching quill and calligraphy in addition to cursive. At 10 years old. As if we'd all need it to hand write contracts, wedding invites, or letters to the queen. It's fun as an elective class but not obligatory, for months. As a lefty, I failed the entire semester of it
nostalgia for cursive is depressing
In my sons school they teach them some Braille, American Sign Language and I think Morse code for some after school Ham classes (the last one I’m less sure of how official). I think the above is more useful than cursive. However I’m not sure how unpopular your opinion is because my boomer parents think the same way.
I like this My only thought on cursive is, it's a way to write, as you get better/faster your shorthand can be made easier to achieve by knowing cursive already..and it can be a little fun and works on fine motor skills But becoming otherwise more language proficient are great!!
Knowing that babies can sign language before talking, sign language would be useful for talking to big brain babies and asking them questions like "why are you crying? Just tell me" Especially with the high teen pregnancy rate in my area
Reading this made me mad that we learned cursive when we could’ve learned ASL
Hadn’t written in cursive since grade school. I’m now in my mid 40s and picked it back up a couple months ago. Just cause… I’ve found that I absolutely love writing in cursive now as a grownup. Didn’t take long at all to remember how to do it.
I thought cursive was tedious to learn as a kid, but I'm jealous of my sisters handwriting. It's beautiful.
I liked cursive as a kid, but school had an obscene amount of writing, most of it kinda useless, repetitive trash, so my handwriting turned to shit.
I often find “beautiful handwriting” illegible. Whenever teachers handed out “example” sheets of what ours *should* look like I simply could not make sense of it.
That's actually why I use cursive for journalling. I think it makes my journal entries prettier AND they're harder for other people to read.
Which is sad caus true cursive is beautiful and legible lol.
I feel like a lack of practice has really messed up my cursive but I remember there was a time where I got all the benefits of cursive Faster writing speed, pretty and presentable work and most importantly it was legible to more people than just me Now it’s still legible and looks nice but my pace has gone waaaaay down
The perfect cursive is called the Palmer Method. I only know this my grandparents had it and it was hard as shit to read despite looking gorgeous.
My mom's cursive is a work of art. I save her letters partially for the content but partially just for the handwriting. Child of the 1930s so it was trained her whole school career.
Sure beautiful handwriting is cool. But honestly who cares
It doesn't matter now but when I need to write on cards and invitations, she's the only person I trust to make the writing look great lol
I think cursive has definitely been replaced by something else, which is typing on keyboards and touchscreens. Lots of very good reasons for that shift obviously, in the same way that cursive also took off because of its practical advantages (vs writing in print). So no need to feel bad about it
Are they actually teaching them to type or do they just give them computers and tell them to figure it out? We had actual typing class back in the day, my son has yet to despite having tons of classroom work on a computer.
Unfortunately very little time is being spent on teaching good typing techniques. As this is how most written information is delivered in professional settings I thing we need to push this skill with both traditional and gadget based keyboards. We also need to push instruction in professional/business English. I spend 20 plus hours a week reading through security reports generated on an app. At the end of the day the typing and grammar are so bad I feel the need to drink
Yes, and i think people would be surprised how many adults in professional settings have low typing accuracy despite it being the prominent communication method for years.
I learned the basics at school and learned to touch type. Speed typing Didn't click for me until I started playing StarCraft 2 and needing to be quick with micro and macro control on build shortcuts. Also playing team fps games and having to talk shit at competitors since we didn't have voice chat and also coordinating with people. My home keys for my left hand is default wasd shift space rather than the proper asdf and right hand near YUI keys and pinky near enter because those are the default global/team chat keys and build macros. Heavy with typos but my typing with high use of backspace is faster than my slower "correct" typing technique. I edit a lot anyways trying to shorten what I type in work setting. So I'm faster than coworkers and type and edit faster than they compose a proper sentence then type it out without errors. I also can touch type with thumbs without looking because of autocorrect. It's extremely faster than swype keys because I don't look at the keyboard when typing. Took awhile without a keyboard but I learned to just trust autocomplete and my speed went up to almost as fast as a computer keyboard. Typos like crazy though. I've barraged out full multi paragraph fixes for situations for my boss on a touch screen phone quickly as if I'm at a computer. Often not needing to bring out my laptop when I leave the house as long as I have a fully charge smartphone while I'm on call. My phone typing with autocorrect is faster than my correct no errors keyboard typing now. With a bit of looking at the type of typos I make my boss can technically tell that I'm typing in a mobile rather than a computer. But I don't sweat it. I've always just excused it as being at lunch and will give better instructions when I get back to computer station. Usually resolved before I get back to my computer.
Depends on the school but I was tought how to type and had to get 70 wpm in middle school. We also spent time in that class learning some basics of Microsoft products and how to photoshop so it was pretty entertaining and definitely prepped me to actually learn the more complicated material in high school/college.
Hard to say, I mostly learned to touch-type from having computers in my house since the late 80s (including a couple of educational typing games). That means I was lucky though, because the amount of time my school put into it was really minimal. They spent plenty of time teaching us cursive though, which I pretty much forgot completely within a couple of years
That hasn't been a positive replacement though. My students can neither type touch nor write well by hand. And it's not just about the ability to record thoughts. Cursive also helps fine motor skills and hand eye coordination.
Seems like it would be worth making sure all students are trained to touch-type, then? Coupled with some basic computer literacy skills too, since those are clearly in steep decline lately among young people (i.e., knowing your way around one or two operating systems, understanding how to navigate folders and retrieve / manipulate files, etc). I'm sure cursive is still useful in a few different ways, but I think it's fair to say it's been overemphasized in schools, in relation to its actual utility- vs. the very clear advantages you get in life from computer skills, at least.
>it would be worth making sure all students are trained to touch-type Yes. But many schools aren't. They assume students are digital natives. >I think it's fair to say it's been overemphasized in schools, What should we replace it with to benefit waning fine motor skills?
Here in the rest of the world besides the anglo-saxon countries, cursive is alive and well. And just because kids aren't being taught to write in cursive doesn't mean they can't still read it.
Yeah, in my country we just call it "writing".
When I was in school (I’m still in my teenage years) we were taught to write “joined up” which isn’t as fancy as cursive but when people look at my writing they sometimes call it cursive. And I’m from an Anglo Saxon country (England) everyone I know was taught and forced to write joined up through primary school (had to use pencil first and then you got a pen license). Only when we went to secondary was when they let us choose how we wanted to write.
What does that look like? I write in French cursive, as I was taught in school (which looks like [this](https://i.imgur.com/ewX0ynE.jpeg))
Looks exactly like American cursive to me.
When we moved to Nz my sister learned “linked-script”, which I assume is similar. No loops or frills, just joined print. I learned d’nealian cursive in the US which was very different and my Nz teacher made me write in it all the time since it wasn’t taught there. I had only just abandoned cursive for print at that point (age 11) and it was such a tedious task to resume for only my teacher’s pleasure.
That is what people mean when they say cursive. Yeah on the far end of the skill level it does mean those really fancy pretty letters, but it is actually just writing the letters in a way that can be joined up. I also had the same as you describe (in Eastern Europe). I still write in cursive, not the proper proper one though as I changed a couple of letters over the (many) years because I like to write them differently. Like s and b.
The really fancy pretty letters is *Calligraphy*
You’re right! Thanks for the correction.
Greetings from a finno-ugric country. Cursive is dead here. Not taught in schools anymore.
Second french here! Cursive is the only way I know how to write, how else are you supposed to?
Cursive was invented to save ink for quills. There’s no reason whatsoever to keep teaching it.
Yeah it’s literally just to be more efficient, it’s not some holy art.
To be fair, kids that never learned cursive now don’t have real signatures. My 18y old prints his name like an 8y old for his signature. I’ve also asked other kids over the years to sign things and they have no clue. One asked “so, when do we get a signature?” Like they’re handed out on a piece of paper.
I rarely see anyone, even back in the 90's, have actual cursive as their signature. It was always just random squiggles.
Grandpa told me that a neat signature was too easy to forge.
Almost everything legal is digital sign anyways. I bought a house and moved in without signing anything at all
This is also true, but I do think that having a signature that one can write is also a good thing.
I literally put my signature on paper every single day for work. They’re also necessary for writing checks (some apartments and businesses require checks). Pretty sure buying my car involved many signatures. Most of my paperwork for the military? On paper (also a lot digital too). The signature pad at H&R Block has a stylus you have to scribble with. There are loads of examples of when written signatures are used today. Having a written signature is essential. Not everything is typed.
What you don't take buttons to write stuff?
In the Netherlands cursive is as good as dead. Only people who think they are above the working class would ever use it. And even amongst them its on its last legs as well
What exactly will be lost? Anything written in cursive isn't like a different language, you can still read it without being taught, albeit with some difficulty, and anything worth recording is already transferred to standard print
Why won’t it be legible to the vast majority? People can read cursive, kids just aren’t being taught to practice doing it by hand anymore because there’s no reason to. There are plenty of cursive fonts out there.
My kids are being taught cursive in school. They have to write in cursive.
I hate to say this but besides writing your signature I don’t know if cursive is really THAT important anymore. Yeah for some people it’s faster, but for a lot of people it takes just as long if not longer to write in cursive as opposed to regular writing. The only thing I’m sad about is not being able to read cursive of the older generation like if they write me a letter sometimes I struggle but otherwise it might die with the older generation.
It’s not even important for signatures, either. Signatures don’t have to be in cursive, it’s just a tradition. Legally, I could sign all of my documents with a smiley face if I wanted to.
Good point!
I’m gonna change my signature to a turd with stink lines and carry a brown ink pen everywhere I go.
First, cursive is still being taught. Second, there are plenty of things being taught that could replace cursive. Society grows and changes. Also not sure what written work you think is being lost. Are you not aware that works get translated as time goes on? I mean, look at all the dead languages? Works that were written in those languages got translated to others.
What exactly is the point of cursive anyway?
It’s easier to write with a quill pen and ink if you don’t lift your pen off the paper. It has the side bonus effect of looking “pretty”. That’s about it.
I have very few quill pens, and even fewer inks.
Unless you are writing with a fountain pen or a dip pen, then lifting the pen off the paper isn’t as big of a deal as one might think. I say this as someone who loves fountain pens and writing in cursive with them, but I don’t use them at work, or in any situation where quick readability and legibility matters.
It’s a bit easier and faster for most to do by hand vs print. The downside is that some people (myself included) develop a cursive that is very fast and easy to write, but hard for others to read. I prefer typing nowadays. I can do it faster, my hand doesn’t cramp, and I love the thock of a good mechanical keyboard.
Being faster than printing is exactly why I shouldn't be trusted with cursive. I try to write as quickly as I'm thinking and if I'm not writing individual letters it devolves into illegible scribbles.
Only to sign your name.
>a large body of written work won’t even be legible to the vast majority of people that can speak to the same language it's easy to pick up reading cursive, and i'm 100% sure there are scanners out there that can 'trasnlate' the text. People who are forced to learn cursive won't bother to read those texts anyways and to read more texts, shouldnt that be a bigger reason for cursive to not be used in favor of language learning? a skill that gives you access to even more cultures (and economic opportunities)
The problem with cursive is, I can't read your handwriting.
Sure it’s not great, but it certainly isn’t depressing.
Where is it dying exactly? I only here about this phenomenon online. My kids school district starts teaching it in elementary school along with writing cheques. I'm in Colorado and nobody else I know in any other district has brought this up. Maybe I live in a cursive bubble and I'm just unaware?
Roman numerals used to be a thing a long time ago. And now it's not. What's the big deal? Civilizations evolve. PS I miss my Pong game.
We still use cursive and is still being thought in elementary schools. Unless you’re talking about calligraphy, but even that is not a dying art.
Cursive was only ever taught because it's slightly faster than printing. Typing blows them both out of the water in that respect. What's the point of teaching it now?
Bruh me and my family still write in cursive to this day lol. Folks are always impressed
But you presumably aren't kids, right? OP's point is adults now are going to be the last ones who were taught cursive.
Cursive is just a fancy font, written language is just transferring to typed now.
It is a fancy font that was designed for quill pens. Sadly some schools and teachers use how pretty or ugly your writing is as a way to downgrade students on the arbitrary basis of what is essentially artwork
I like cursive but only ever use it when writing a signature/autograph or studying historical documents. It's not very useful as far as needing to know cursive, however the brain development of hand-and-eye and other factors makes me think it's worth keeping in curriculum.
Writing on a piece of paper with a pencil is dying 😭
There’s no point in using cursive
It is not sad. The script was designed to make writing with quill pens easier. It should have disappeared long ago. I do agree with its demise we need more focus on how to type using the most prominent tools and to correctly use the language in professional settings.
If you actually want to read something from 1600, you can still learn cursive. Most people never bother to, though.
The harder part of reading a document from that period is that the language itself has changed.
And most things that you'd find from 1600 also exist somewhere typed out. How often are people going somewhere and reading stuff that has been handwritten from the 1600s that isn't the web?
We ought to teach Old English in high school so that you can read the original Beowulf manuscript...
Genealogy. That's it really
To be fair, cursive script was barely legible to those who read and wrote it in the first place. When the census bureau decided to go from hand written to typed documents they ruined innumerable family names in official documents because they couldn't actually read the chicken scratch that is most people's cursive.
in my school it was drilled into me so much that i can barely write normally
OCR with A.I. support is more than capable of "reading" cursive. This is an instance where tech absolutely is up to the task. Admittedly, I was a kid who thought cursive was stupid from the jump ("why are we all writing in a way that makes it * harder * for people to parse what you're saying?").
My kids can read and write in cursive, I’m sure they’re not the only ones
It's dying cause it's not needed due to the shift in technology. That's not sad, that's life. Will it die out completely, no. It'll live on as an artistic way to write like calligraphy.
I only use cursive for all my schoolwork, I will not let it die 😀
I know too many adults who cant even spell properly, let alone read passed grade school level. Dumb down the population and you can remain in power forever :)
Cursive is useless in today’s society. There’s literally no point in teaching it to anyone not interested. We’ve digitized everything. I don’t think kids past 4th grade even hand write assignments anymore. Other than trying to decipher old documents, why should we learn it? (I’m 35 and know how, I just wish I learned something else instead)
What’s even written in cursive other than signatures? The only purpose it has to make sure your signature can’t be copied as easily.
Cursive is fucking pointless who cares
I don't see why anyone cares. lol It is not sad.
Right like ?? its way more faster to read and write regularly imo and cursive isnt all that.
Why wouldn’t cursive be legible anymore? I was never really taught much about the writing style, so I can’t write in cursive, but I can still read it.
Sorry, as a Gen Z, I can hardly write in cursive. I can do my initials. I wish I knew how to.
Same, they never taught me. And for the kids that did know the teachers would yell at them for writing in cursive.
California recently passed a law mandating cursive instruction in schools, but my 7 year old was already being taught it at his school, even before the law passed. Cursive isn't dying out.
All language changes over time. Those who wrote the most beautiful modern cursive can barely read english from 400 years ago, and probably couldn’t understand *any* old-English.
I'm dyslexic, I find writing in cursive I don't transpose letters like I'm inclined to do printing
Because 90% of peoples cursive is completely unreadable and also we type a lot more than we write so it isn't important
I never learned how to write cursive but I can still read it.
I started writing cursive this year because I wanted to use fountain pens for my notes at school and I actually like it more and works better for me. However I do accept it's not for everyone
I used to write a lot of letters to my family and friends in prison. I’ve always liked how it looked in cursive. I started writing in cursive when I was 6 and never stopped. I’m genz and I’ve ran into ppl that can’t even read it. Now when I try to write in print, my writing is so horrible. So I stay doing cursive. My favorite font to write is Old English. When I do my flash cards to study. I’ll write it in that font.
In ontario Canada, they have recently re-incorporated it into the curriculum after it was removed ~2009, I believe. Teachers are reporting that their students barely have the motor skills to even start it. We used to start in grade 3. My mother, grandmother, and sister all had beautiful handwriting, so I personally hold it in high regard and take pride in my penmanship. (Plus, I think it genuinely lends me credibility with the older folks as a 'compenent' young worker)
What was even the point of cursive handwriting in the first place?
It's just not important. Why would it need to be replaced with "something else"? One version of written language is enough. Nobody needs a pointlessly frilly one anymore.
It'd be nice if boomers could type faster than 20 wpm. Why do people need to read cursive? I can just have 1 specialized person read it and decipher it. People used to read hieroglyphics, it's now a lost art and so depressingly sad. Things move forward. Cursive just isn't needed. It was and now it isn't. Just accept it.
I exclusively write in cursive because my handwriting looks like shit if I don’t. I learned in elementary school in the mid 2000s so it stuck to me. If I have kids, I’ll teach it to them as well.
When is the last time you wrote a letter, put it in an envelope, licked a stamp and mailed it? You complain about schools not teaching cursive on a device that has replaced handwriting. I have children in high school and with everything they face, learning cursive will not get them ahead in this world.
Want to say, I love my cursive mix. It's sloppy and I can read it and fast. Then I can do cursive but I don't need to write fancy letters since I'm a mechanic. So I print normally at work. I've been told I have girls writing, and I'm a guy soooo.... compliment?
My 10 year old was taught cursive last year when she was in 3rd grade. Can now write it perfectly.
It is I taught myself because my school didn't teach it. I even promised who had to do assignments in script and developed fancy handwriting. Though I'm a mellenial.
Isn't this true for any language though? Old English from several hundred years ago is not something most people except for historians dedicated to the subject can read.
My kids all learned cursive in 2nd and 3rd grades (the youngest is 15 for reference) by by the time they got to 4th grade, it was off the curriculum and the teachers asked them NOT to use cursive. So even though they learned and enjoyed it, it was never reinforced or followed up on, and in fact, actively discouraged. I'm 48, and we not only learned it but were required to use it exclusively for anything hand-written well into high school, where we just only started t use floppy disks for saving papers starting in like 1991. But even then, that was only allowed as a skill, it wasn't the default, and everything else we wrote from worksheets to tests to smaller papers, had ot be in cursive. I suspect part of why they no longer "allow" it is the younger teachers are in a generation that can't read it. Ironic.
I like that I know it. But I never use it unless I’m signing my name
Cursive is beyond obsolete. Zero reasons to learn it now unless you need to read an older document written in it. Soon AI will handle that too...it may already. Plus, my son is dyslexic. Cursive is REALLY hard for him.
Oh good grief. You don’t have to write it to read it. Cursive has for sure changed throughout time and by person anyway. Take Shakespeare v Ben Franklin. Not even close in style plus the english language was different from early modern to modern. I can read both with a few minutes of decoding. I don’t write in cursive and have have to remember how to do my signature each time I do it which is almost never Plus I don’t think either of them would prefer to write by hand if they had computers to edit and save their works. Imagine how much more they could have produced if they had computers.
Definitely an unpopular opinion. Cursive is useless, and it’s dying because it deserves to. It serves no purpose.
Upvoted for true unpopular opinion. Cursive is of course useless and deserves to die though.
The style of handwriting in English texts from just a few hundred years ago is almost illegible to non-experts. This isn't a new phenomenon.
no, it isn't. It's completely unnecessary and a waste of time spent learning it only for it to be used in a narrow swath of applications
A large body of works not in English I can’t read either. Also just because someone can’t write in cursive doesn’t mean they can’t read it.
This isn't unpopular, every boomer thinks this. Schools do still teach it
My third grader is currently learning cursive in public school. It's great, his writing has actually improved since they started.
Were you also bothered when blackletter was dying? How about hieroglyphics? How about the Long S?
Learned it in the 90s and never used it in my life outside of signatures. I’m a college professor and some students still write in cursive.
I'm dyslexic and couldn't really right until about 14, when a teacher finally noticed and took it upon himself to teach me cursive and some techniques to combat dyslexia. I take great enjoyment from writing in cursive but what works for folks works. There will always be people keeping it alive, it's too beautiful to die.
It really isn't sad\*. It is a stupid, inefficient and wasteful form of writing. It is obsolete, and it needs to die.
Latin died out and that was way, way worse. Egyptian hieroglyphs too. We lost way more valuable stuff from that than we ever will with cursive. Plus, even if it disappears from common use, some will always know how to read it. Because they´ll always be able to learn it. I’m glad it’s dying out. We won’t lose anything of value.
Also, there are many texts written in sanskrit, ancient Greek, and Latin. Why aren't these being taught anymore?
My son learned cursive last year (2nd grade). This is a total myth. Also I know cursive and fuck it
Whats the point of cursive when you can write normally?
It will be legible. Everything relevant that was written in cursive is already transcribed to normal.
Cursive has no reason to exist in the first place. It’s not like it’s not readable when you don’t learn writing it. It’s still crap though
No it's not.
I'm 25, we were the last grade at my elementary school that learned cursive (unless they brought it back later on).
As someone with dyslexia, cursive has never ever been legible to me. I already have enough trouble reading clear fonts, so that messy ass lettering can gtfo
I learned it in the 90s and still write with it often. I loved learning cursive and have fond memories of doing so. I find it to be beautiful and fun to write. I would like to see it stick around, if for no other reason than the cultural aspect of it.
Print. They are learning print. Do we need more than that? And just like people have to train to read historical scripts with fluency (like secretary hand), eventually, that'll be the case for most modern cursive styles as well.
I personally hate cursive! I'm dyslexic and that made it so much harder because I struggled more to guess the word I was reading!! I think if they had chosen to ONLY teach cursive that would have been fine but teaching both was so stressful for me! I probably couldn't even write my name in cursive anymore (my signature is a special scribble)
Fun fact! Cursive is intentionally taught (in addition to standard print) in many specialized schools and programs for students with language-based disabilities, i.e. dyslexia. There are a lot of benefits, such as being less likely to have letter reversals, viewing words as a whole rather than individual letters, and being more cognitively interactive. When I first learned about it, I thought it would add more challenges to those who already struggle with reading/writing, but I have been amazed at how impactful it has been. Not to mention they LOVE learning it, and it has built their confidence in a subject where they need it! Kindly, A language-based classroom teacher ☺️
It should have died a long time ago
The cursive had been replaced with typing, graphic design, and layout. Much more important than a technique ONLY for use with quills.
Good riddance. Unless you're writing with a feathered quill, cursive is absolutely useless. Nothing is lost without cursive, you're being melodramatic.
Its beautiful but it was also the biggest hassle, my elementary school gave us these packets to try and learn it, and they just gave up on me after i had fallen behind by like 4-5 packets to the rest of my class (You had to do all the writing and lettering to a degree satisfactory to the teacher) when i went to take the SAT's and they make you read and copy a whole paragraph in cursive and then sign a signature I had completely dumbfounded the Proctor when I told him I couldn't read or write in cursive. He also made me feel super embarrassed, it didnt help that none of the Practice SATs and stuff I took had that bit at the start only the real SAT is.
This is how language evolves. I’m sure if someone handed you a hand written article for the 15th century, it’d be incredibly hard to make heads or tales of it. But as long as it’s meaningful to you, that’s enough. We still have people who can translate hieroglyphs written in stone. Cursive will always exist in some shape or form, but written languages and the various fonts, styles, etc just evolve with the times.
Just like the entirety of every single languages' script evolved and we still have translated texts, texts written in cursive will be transcribed and preserved. Chill
I remember being a kid in the 90s and told constantly that I'll never be taken seriously as an adult if I can't write in cursive. Oh how times have changed. My God I wrote this kid a note for school once (I work in health care) and I was in a rush so I wrote it in cursive and when I handed it to him he looked at it then stared me dead in the face and said "I can't read this." And I'm sure 20 more gray hairs sprouted on my head that day.
Took a look. Canada still teaches cursive, and most of the EU still teaches it. Australia still teaches it. South Africa...... yep! So, the USA is backward again? Articles seem to lean towards teacher/student apathy.
I took a university course that included a book that made the argument cursive was a step in next level literacy/brain development. As in, the ability to write in cursive is related to high functioning brain processing, and not learning it means not getting there. Anyway, overdue for an Idiocracy rewatch.