Is handwriting — cursive — going the way of the do-do and elocution lessons? Maybe so.
The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.
To be honest, it’s hard to get too worked up about it. I have never used cursive writing on a regular basis, except in my signature (and, as a result, can still do flawless textbook cursive if I need to). With keyboarding taking up more of our written output, especially outside of school, it just doesn’t seem nearly as important.
That said, clarity of whatever form of writing is used is important — keyboards are not and never will be everywhere. Just as it’s important to be able to do math without a calculator in hand, it’s important to be able to write clearly by hand, too. But is cursive essential for that? I suspect not.
Interestingly enough, I was just talking with one of Katherine’s friends the other day, a grade or so higher than her. The friend was very proud that she was learning to write in cursive. She may be among the last generation that does so.
Amusing.
I lost my ability to write cursive after spending years having to write things in a stylized Architectural “font” for work (and having lost that after being on a computer. ;P ). So this is one of those moments where I am going to be happy that cursive is on its way out.
Good riddance to cursive. Not everyone’s fine motor coordination develops at the same rate. Kids who can write cursive receive all kinds of approval and positive strokes. Kids who can’t… the content of their writing is totally unimportant because they didn’t get the shape of the damn letters right.
Then, in junior high, papers must be typed. And once out in “the world” (as if school is not part of the world) it is “Please print or type”.
Handwriting, which is not synonymous to “cursive”, is made into a joke. I know many adults who joke about how bad their handwriting is. Perhaps they can’t remember to when they were children and it was either laugh or cry. (not that I’m bitter)
Katherine got a postcard from the grandparents yesterday. She declared to Margie that she wanted to learn to read cursive, and figured out most of the postcard from that.
I find cursive writing tends to be far less legible anyway. My dad’s chicken-scratch all-caps writing may be the ugliest handwriting I’ve ever seen, but it’s also the most readable, while my grandmother’s lovely cursive script is nearly impossible to make sense of.
I think prescriptions would be safer if doctors used print for their scripts. I know I’ve had a few prescriptions where what the doctor wrote down could have been any of 3 medications, and incorrect medications due to that aren’t as uncommon as one would hope for.
Don’t think that’s as much a cursive-vs-printing thing as a “scribble down quickly long complex terms and highly repetitive abbreviations” thing.
Need to do what our HMO does — Rxs get keyed in at the computer there in the exam room. Then, at least, they’re legible.
As a handwriting instruction/remediation specialist, I’d like to point out the following:
/1/ The law doesn’t require cursive for signatures, and never has required it. Anyone telling you otherwise has misrepresented the law of the land.
/2/ Research shows that the fastest and clearest handwriters avoid cursive. They join only some letters, not all — making the easiest joins and skipping the rest — and use print-like rather than cursive shapes for those letters which differ notably between printing and cursive.
Kate Gladstone
founder and CEO, Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works
director, the World Handwriting Contest
http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Interesting. Thanks.