Does it trouble any of you that cursive handwriting, as we have known it, will soon be a thing of the past? And are you aware that many, many people under the age of about 25 CAN NOT even read something written in cursive? I have written a journal for the past 30 years or so, and I always thought that in the future people might enjoy reading parts of it, but now, I am starting to believe that within as little as 50 years, my writing will look like "Greek" to most people. Any thoughts?

I remember a couple years ago reading about Suetterlin and how it's virtually unreadable to modern Germans when it was used for decades before.

My solution? Put a "Rosetta stone" at the end of your journal, with print letters corresponding to cursive letters

Seriously though, I don't think its that bad. There might be less people who value good handwriting, but there are still some, and more than you might think! Just as you often hear people bemoaning "Kids these days" while at the same time there is a group of young adults coming of age now that really want to change the world for the better. I think it's sort of a "back in my day" mentality. Yeah, things have changed, but they aren't as bad as they appear. The bad parts just always get more attention than the good.

A very intelligent 17 year old I know can't read his mom's perfectly formed Palmer cursive. He and his classmates write in a print script when they are forced to write by hand for some reason. So it may be that cursive is already a thing of the past. So good health and long life to everyone here at FPN!

Doug

Just to serve as a counter-point...

I'm 19 years old. I only started using fountain pens about a year ago when I graduated from High School and received one as a graduation gift from a good friend (it was my Waterman Phileas in case you where curious)

I've always used a Ziller-esque cursive. I've made a few modifications, simply because I like them better. Namely I don't have that large ascender on my "p," but everything else is pure Ziller. Maybe a little squished from the speed I write at, but if I really want, I can have a near-perfect cursive. No one I know has any problem reading my notes, and I frequently lend them out to people when studying for exams. I usually end up getting complemented on my handwriting. And I attend a very large, public university.

That isn't to say everyone writes with good penmanship, but a lot of that is simply the speed with which they take notes. I don't see cursive becoming an extinct form of writing anytime soon.

Cheers.

I agree with Doug.

When I went to school in the 1990s, not too long ago, I learnt cursive handwriting. But I begin to think that cursive is already a thing of the past. When I see the handwriting of kids these days, what cursive they USE is hopelessly...screwed up! It's a bloody mess. And more and more of them seem to be using block-letters. To me, cursive is the only way to write.

To add a little more...I'm 21. My handwriting has always been cursive. It was what I was taught at school, and very glad I was, 'cause it looks cool. I have met people, my age and lower, who don't and can't read or write cursive...which is what makes me believe that it's already a dead style of writing.

And that makes me feel really, really, really old...

I'm starting to think that my 11 year old grandson can't read my cursive. It seems to perplex him. He's coming to visit next week and I'm going to ask him how his teacher writes at school. I'm curious as to how things are done.

Here's an idea. Maybe we should write messages - riddles - questions - whatever - to the young people in our lives in our best cursive. If they can read it back to us, they get some kind of reward. I know. It's blatant bribery , but it might keep cursive alive a little longer.
Judybug

We can post samples here if you like. This might be fun...

All three of my kids write in cursive. They are taught cursive script as early as the end of first grade in our system. My kids will be going into 7th, 5th and 3rd grade next year. I keep hearing about this electronic age thingy, but my kids still have a lot of handwritten assignments to do.

FWIW,

Kevin

I was taught cursive in the third grade and I always hated it for some reason. I've always had trouble reading it too...my mom's is pretty easy for me to read, usually, but some of her girlfriends when they send letters and cards and such, I have to ask every so often what they're trying to say! Needless to say my mother can read their cursive perfectly.

I personally write in a bastardised cursive/print scrawl.

I'm 29 btw.

But does cursive writing degenerate world wide? I'd guess you can write complex charakters in chinese or japanese faster by hand than type them on a keyboard, so maybe a small enclave of cursive will survive

Anyway, maybe hand writing will evolve. As Kakaze pointed out, nearly no one can read Suetterlin anymore, though there are still people alive who learned it in school. (Btw, I taught myself Suetterlin and it wrecked my cursive permanently) But hand writing did not die, it just became a little sloppier because people didn't have enough time anymore for a cursive that turns into a frantic mess of jags if you don't write carefully.
So maybe when handheld devices become more common and most keyboards are replaced with touch screens and PDA pens, hand writing will adapt to that.

The newer generation in most of the cases (1986-1992) doesn't know how to handle a pen correctly, let alone write words legibly and in a correct English. I always used fountain pens and will continue to do so whatever the technology was, is or will be. I can read cursive and italic very easily same comment for cursive gothic and italic gothic characters, that is not the case of everybody born in my generation (1977-1985). I am the one and only to use a fp at work because I can't stand bics or roller balls. A good penmanship is a sign of someone educated, accomplished and really professional as well. A good penmanship is also the ability to write with your non dominant hand.

It's worse than that, the vast majority of my students cannot PRINT legibly, let alone interact with cursive.

Just a note: My grandson (13yrs) wanted a new Mac notebook. My son and daughter-in-law (he's a doctor, she's a school psychologist) told my grandson he had to start doing all of his school work in cursive. Now he hadn't been taught cursive in school so him mom had to show him how. He had to do it for the last two months of school before he could get his computer. He has to still use it to use his computer. It's a wonder what incentives will do to a kid. I've got his younger brother (8yrs) interested in FP's.
PMS

I believe that handwriting will always evolve over time to meet the needs of a number of people. Here are some examples of how that has happened, perhaps "fossils" if you would of a 400 hundred year span (1600-1940s):

I remember distinctly in school learning to write in cursive script. And then in later years, the "restriction" on how letters are formed was cast off. You were allowed to write as you please, as long as it was legible.

When you look at the writing from the days of old, there is so much ornamentation to the lettering. I think it's because they had so much time on their hands! It's interesting to see how lettering became more streamlined as the years went on. My niece is 7 years old and she has learned just regular printing so far. It'll be interesting if she's taught cursive.

The good thing about the Internet is that there's tons of information available, enough that I don't think we need to tack on a translation legend on our writings and back page of journals.

Thanks for your exmples. The very last one was almost the way I was taught back in the late 1940's. C. S.

When I was in school, this was what I learnt:



Victorian Modern Cursive Script. It's alright, I guess, but I hate the way the lowercase bs looked. And the zs. Couldn't stand them. And to this day, I don't write them like that. I think it looks horrible. I don't write the ps or the vs like it's done there, either.

Also when I was in school, you weren't allowed to write with a pen. From prep until year three, you could *NOT* use a pen. You had to use a pencil. Don't ask me why, I don't know. But we were never allowed to write with pens. In my *ENTIRE CLASS*, I was the sole exception. My eyesight (or lack of, as the case may be), meant that I could use a pen to write with (easier to see stuff, I suppose).

And I'm sure you can guess what kind of pen I used I started with Sheaffer school FPs. In year 4, we were officially given our "pen licenses". They were little laminated cards with our names and year-levels and photos and something like:

"James Smith is now permitted to use a pen to complete his work".

Weird little things they make you do in school...

Handwriting evolves. It always does. Frankly, I'm more concerned about the atrocious spelling, punctuation, grammar and usage with which I'm confronted whenever my niece emails me. No pretty font can cover over that mess.

Here in Grenada, paper records are still the norm, and while my sample is anything but broad, every clerk I deal with has impeccably legible cursive handwriting. Would you give up hot running water, properly maintained roads and 21st century medical imaging (for one example) for better penmanship in your country?

Apologies for the false dilemma I present, but "these kids these days" arguments always bug me. It was old when Homer did it. Yet the world is still muddling along, arguably better off than we were 2900 or so years ago.

It doesn't trouble me so much since I have also kept a journal for more than 20 years,
and I can say that even I have trouble in reading parts of it due to my weird cursive, let alone others... :-)

My journals, notes, and papers can be difficult to decode myself. As for others, I will leave a "rosetta stone," should they care to discover the contents thereof. This is a brilliant idea.

I've often wondered how historians are able to piece together old manuscripts, which must be tedious work given not only the changes in writing but also usage of words and languages. Incredible work. Who knows what mysteries lie out there in the paper-sphere?

44

I've been swamped at work, so I'm a bit behind on the threads, but I wanted to weigh in on this one.

My kids, 12 and 16, are not being taught cursive in school. (We're in a district about 10 miles East of Seattle.)

I asked a teacher about it a few years ago and she said it's just not taught in the school district any longer. They are more focused on things which improve the WASL scores, which are directly tied to funding for the district.

Hi,

I'm new to this board. I'm a 32 year old engineer that learned "loopy" script in elementary school. By high school, I cast that "loopy" script away, because, A) it didn't look too elegant, and it was way too slow. After that, block letters have been the norm for me. And over that time, my writing has devolved, getting sloppier and sloppier, to the point that sometimes I can't read my own handwriting when I go over it at a later time and date. My one experience with cursive handwriting was in high school, when my amazing German teacher taught us "Fraktur" script as he called it. it was a script that my father learned in pre-war Germany. unfortunately, we only used this for limited writing assignments in class.

So here I am, at 32 years old. I just purchased the "Write Now" penmanship book by Getty and Dubay and a few Pilot Varsity disposables. Hopefully I stick with it. hopefully I learn cursive and tame my handwriting. Once that's accomplished, it'll be worth it to purchase a good fountain pen.

Thats what happened in the UK school system - we lived to regret it
Our children are now ranking as some of the most illiterate in the educated world. There was a news item just last week about industries despair at the lack of basic requirements from graduates such as legible handwriting and basic grammar skills.

My writing is fairly neat and readable but lacks elegance and style. I would love to write in a good traditional cursive script, especially on special occasions.
Does anyone know where I can get those handwriting books where you copy printed passages, to improve your skills. Either that or a website which allows you to download sheets to practice on?
Thanks
Tawanda

Don't wait to buy a better pen. The Varsitys write quite nicely, but it's more fun with something a little nicer. Consider a Lamy Safary with a F or EF nib, a Pilot 78G with M nib or a Pelikano with F nib. I'm sure others can recommend more inexpensive but fairly nice pens.

My daughter (age 12) writes her weekly essays in longhand, in pencil. Her handwriting is fine, loopy, girlish script; clearly more legible than mine was at her age.

She doesn't like fountain pens, thinks they're old fashioned. That's OK, it means I can use the Safari I bought her.

I just located this thread and wanted to give a slightly different slant. As a former teacher (quit 8 years ago), cursive is still taught in my area in third grade. By the time students reach 5th grade (what I taught) their penmanship is frequently illegible in cursive. Teachers are being told yearly this has been added to your curriculum, and that has bee added to your curriculum, and no, there isn't anything you can stop teaching. More and more is added and no more time is given in which to teach it. The poor 3rd grade teachers are teaching cursive in a this is how you do it lesson, and quickly go on to the next subject in order to cram everything in. No child Left Behind is leaving students overwhelmed and teachers exasperated.

When my students turned in work that I couldn't read, they had to redo it. I gave a weekly refresher on how to write in cursive, but it seemed to be a loosing battle.

Thanks for letting me weigh in. I'll get off my soapbox now.

Edited for Caps and punctuation.

Most people's handwriting will go to hell in the future. However, I'm fairly certain that the ones who care will continue to provide good examples for good students to follow.

As a teacher of 15-17 year old students (in a literature/grammar class), roughly 150 students per year, I would say that the "vast majority" comment is a vast overstatement. In my experience (which seems broad to me, but limited to my rural Southern geography), at least, most students have legible handwriting. Some of it is cursive, some of it is print, but in an average year (let's say this past school year) there are only three students who have bad handwriting, and only one of those is so poor that he ever had to re-write anything. Now, only a dozen or so have "nice" handwriting, but I don't care how prettily the letters are formed; I care how well the words are put together. If the writing is good the handwriting only has to be good enough. Handwriting is like language, art, technology, etc. and it evolves and adapts to the needs and desires of the people using it. If enough people value attractive penmanship it will generally improve. I just doubt that most people (outside of forums like this) care how nice the words look. As someone else pointed out, we are having issues with students entering the workforce unable to form a coherent sentence. Making jibberish ornate doesn't change the fact that it is jibberish. I want to eliminate the jibberish to start with.

Don't get me wrong. I like nice handwriting, but I suspect that most other teachers are like me and let that be one of the last things they worry about. In the greater scheme of things I have more important things to teach first, and handwriting only if there is time (and a student inclination). Now, if I find someone with nice handwriting I make it a point to encourage it. If I find someone who has decent handwriting and is generally detail-oriented I try to encourage him/her to write well, but some of them...whew...that's just not even on my radar. They all need different things, and that is rarely one of them.

But is it not depressing that our needs and desires no longer include beauty and style? The same sadly goes for so much of our modern environment. They won't even let me use a Mac at the office. Sigh.

The desire for beauty and style are personal affections, which you are welcome to pursue in your own personal time. The mandate of the state education is to turn out citizens with a rudimentary understanding of their governmental system and the skills required to compete in the international labour pool.

There are lots of things which can enrich your life, but are not necessary to meet the wickets set up by states to ensure minimum skills are being taught. Everyone admits that as a human, physical activity is healthy. It is not however the educational systems job to mandate that through PE classes. That decision is better handled personally and the educational time and money spent elsewhere. Similarly, many people enjoy music but it isn't part of the mandate to turn out music lovers. Those resources are better spent on core subjects. Handwriting beyond basic letterforms is the same way. While it may be beautiful and some might still see it as a sign of good breeding, it is barely necessary today and will be even less so by the time today's students are in the workplace.

If your country has a representative system of some sort, then you can of course petition for the return of penmanship (or gym, art, music, woodshop...) but today's school schedules are already overburdened with requirements and subject areas. So, you either need to cut some things currently being taught or hire more teachers, extend the school hours and raise taxes to fund the addition of a new topic. I think that will be the real downfall of penmanship. People like it, but not enough to pay for it out of their pockets. I also don't think educators will agree to drop another subject to add penmanship.

Just another data point...

I'm 25 and while I can read even moderately neat cursive, I write cursive with great difficulty. 99% of the time, I just print because it is easier. I have a slight motor problem, and never learned several cursive letters -- I was a smart kid, and could simply avoid them by use of varied vocabulary, so no one noticed until I was in junior high school. Cursive was taught for about a year spanning the second half of second and the first half of third grade, after which its use at school was forbidden in most classes because it was deemed that print was naturally more legible.

As an adult, I have reliably legible, but not beautiful handwriting in both print and cursive. My cursive is marked by many halts, and not-infrequent substitutions of print letters or approximations where I cannot form the needed cursive letter. I now teach an extracurricular at the same elementary school I went to, and only about 1/3 of my teenage students have remotely legible handwriting in print, let alone cursive.

My mom has the most unnaturally perfect Palmer Penmanship anyone has ever seen. She's a second grade teacher, usually the only one to get her students through the entire cursive alphabet in second grade. They are using Zaner-Bloser (not certain I've spelled that right), and I am not sure how much she likes it.

--HedgeMage

Cursive is the way to go for me. When have lined paper, I use cursive. If I don't or am in a rush, I print. I still remember in grade five (or was it 4) when my teacher forced everyone to had write in cursive. She wouldn't accept anything that wasn't in cursive. Today, my cursive writing has evolved into squished and slanty type. I some times even have problems reading it myself . My spelling is a whole other problem (Bless the creator of spell check!).

I'm seventeen.

Okay, so my cursive is pretty awful. But it's legible, for the most part, and I can read it just fine. (All cursive, that is). I only use print because in the Maryland school system (during the late '90s and into the 2000s), we were taught cursive in the third grade (1999, I think) and then nothing happened with it--we did (and still do) lots of handwritten assignments, but most everyone prints because we were never encouraged to use cursive. I used it preferentially into middle school, but eventually dropped it for print. Now I'm trying to rehabilitate it from years of atrophy and.... I haven't made much progress yet...

My dad, who isn't even German, can read the old German characters - I have no hope, though I imagine that with some time and a rosetta stone, I'd eventually figure it out!

I'm 33. I was taught cursive in school (with fountain pens, no less!). One thing that had never made sense to me was some little orthodoxies they had about how to shape letters - those only started making sense a few years ago when I discovered vintage flex FPs. The interesting thing is that, as far as I know, the teachers ALSO didn't know why things were supposed to be done that way. Happily, I can manage a somewhat reasonable "flex" handwriting, though it looks very unpracticed, due to my not being all that used to applying pressure.

I also have a completely different (upright) style of semi-cursive that I've "invented" myself, which works better when taking notes in positions which are not very comfortable for writing.

My aunt used to use stenographic notation, which she knew, as her personal cryptography, as nobody else around her knew how to use it any more... I sometimes use English printed using Hebrew characters (using slightly modified Yiddish conventions) as my crypto-script: while it's not very secret, none of my colleagues can read it.

I remember a literature professor in college who, on a hand written assignment, requested that I come to see her during her office hours. I thought that I was going to be reprimanded for using my adapted spencerian handwriting(a mess in my opinion, but I am a perfectionist). When I arrived in her office, she had my essay on her desk. She asked if she could use it as an example of how the english language should be written for a class that she taught to middle school children in a local library. I answered yes, but was curious as to why the children were not taught this in schools. She responded that the local schools had to drop penmanship as a focus because many of the children coming from the elementary schools were barely literate.

This disturbed me greatly and made me feel that many teachers in, at least my part of, this country have simply given up. It also proved to me that this new system of teach for the test, get standardized scores up for funding, no child left behind strategy doesn't work. It tends to punish schools without the resources to fix problems, leaving them unable to address their existing problems and entirely helpless when new ones arise, like illiterate children.

Sorry for the ranting bit at the end, but it really bothers me.

My history teacher forces me to write in manuscript, which slows me down a bunch. I asked her once why, and she said it was because she couldn't read cursive. In all of my other classes my writing is smooth as butter due to the nature of cursive.

Writing in a beatyfull handwriting that is readable to one's peers is a very rewarding experience. Having been fortunate enought to be tought early in life how to write in a cursive hand gave me the opertunity to enjoy writing in a way that I do not see to often these days. The ever changing technologies change the way we communicate and it is certainly different. Here I would like to draw a comparison to a group of HipHop artist that in the 80's used nothing but electronic machines to create music. Often because it so EASY and FAST to come out with a product. Now in their 40's these guys have learned how to play organic instruments and collaborated with some old Jazz players to make organic music with just a dash of HipHop. They have come full circle.
So, it impostant for "US" to who know how to be there to teach whent the next generation comes around to embrace thier roots. The time will come. Most eduction systems once educated. Now they program.



..................Stani

With all respect to Chemyst, but it IS part of an educational system's mandate to produce well-rounded individuals. At least it should be--that's the Greek ideal from which most of Western culture bases itself. To argue that education is merely to produce workers promotes, in my mind, a depressingly mechanistic view of a human's place in society. Are you an individual or merely a completely interchangeable cog in a vast soulless machine? Are you a participant in your culture or merely a passive recipient? If the latter, who gets to produce the culture you recieve? Who gets to judge it as worth promoting? (This question plagues me every time there's a particularly awful movie--did you know they're doing a live action Smurfs movie?!)

I'm continually disheartened how the music/arts/penmanship/liberal arts are increasingly under assault and up for budget whacks in America (where I live). Not only do these subjects increase a person's depth of experience, they're vital to critical thinking and an exploration of individual values. (Some studies even show that studying music increases a child's ability for abstract spacial perception!)

Anyway, I wouldn't worry about obsolescent penmanship. Anyone with a bit of training in paleography can read texts written in the last 1500 years--Luxeuil, Beneventan, Merovingian, etc, are a little challenging, but once your eye is used to the letterforms, they read just fine.

My larger concern is that not only are we not teaching *readable* (let's put aside the notion of 'pretty' for the moment here) handwriting in schools, we're not even teaching them the basic skills that Chemyst would approve. I teach a college skills course and out of my 15 students, 11 of them can't do *fractions*. One student can't even do long division. And they have high school diplomas!

HK