Cursive...slip Slidin' Away

[pajaro]

It is one thing to say language usage changes over time, and that is true. I am less comfortable with the proposition that seems to be everywhere today that anything goes with respect to grammar and punctuation. Are there to be rules or not? Are the rules I learned to be adhered to, or are we to let it all hang out?

[maus930]

I can't think of any valid justification for dumping grammar and punctuation rules

[rwilsonedn]

I can't think of any valid justification for dumping grammar and punctuation rules

 

I suppose we could argue that originally the rules were intended to improve clarity--to make the meaning of a string of words unambiguous and easy to extract. (Later it appears that some rules became arbitrary distinctions used to market grammar and style books, but that is another discussion.) Anyhow, if what I'm trying to say is extremely simple, like a meme, a phrase, or a simple declarative sentence, then punctuation, style, and even most of grammar aren't really necessary for clarity.

We have always offered poets a pass when it comes to rules, on the grounds that they are deploying sound, cadence, and image in the service of a medium in which literal clarity is not the highest goal. Maybe we need to do the same with some of these new forms of writing.

The question becomes whether I can write clearly and unambiguously, and maybe even with a pleasing style, when I need to. And I suspect many of the people who take extreme shortcuts when they are texting or using social media can be quite good writers by traditional standards, when they so choose. I've usually been embarrassingly wrong when I've offered a low estimate of young people.

ron

[Cryptos]

It is one thing to say language usage changes over time, and that is true. I am less comfortable with the proposition that seems to be everywhere today that anything goes with respect to grammar and punctuation. Are there to be rules or not? Are the rules I learned to be adhered to, or are we to let it all hang out?

 

Yes and no. I fully expect that in 100 years (maybe less, just guessing) the language will be not only quite different to what we use today, but it also will have some different rules concerning punctuation and grammar.

 

Nothing is static in this world.

 

Edit to add: I believe languages are plastic, and that English is one that exhibits this characteristic to a far greater degree than most others. I can see us moving toward a universal language, but I don't think it will resemble English all that much.

[pajaro]

Some countries defend their language mightily, especially against the infiltration of foreign words. We do live in a period of apparent rapid rate of change. Iconoclasm seems to proliferate. I think a lot of it is born of laziness.

 

Grammar and punctuation are a framework. On it vocabulary is added to and morphed.

[TroutWhisperer]

Writing a birthday card to my niece last week, I was halfway through when I remembered she can't read cursive. My sister will have to translate that part, but I printed the rest.

 

So, the teaching issues aside, inability to read and write cursive complicates communication to a degree.

[Cryptos]

Grammar and punctuation are a framework. On it vocabulary is added to and morphed.

 

Really? Language mostly comes first, in spoken form. Then it gets written down. Then people make rules for writing. A bit simplified perhaps.

 

When the language changes sufficiently from today new rules will be born, old rules may be discarded. There is no inherent good or bad in this. Whether it is a product of laziness, or that laziness is symptom of a needed change is tricky to see.

 

It's hard to accept change, I guess.

[praxim]

I wrote a few months ago that I usually used semi-joined printing and that my writing was otherwise quite terrible. While writing some thoughts the other night I realised I was slippng in to cursive, like some restoring memory. I persisted. It is starting to work better. I never had a problem with it apart from my own legibility.

[Bookman]

Anyone here ever watch "Who Do You Think You Are?" I've caught enough of enough episodes to know that most records of the kind people read to research their family history are handwritten in cursive. Virtually all vital statistics—records of births, deaths, marriages and divorces, etc. in ledger books—going back hundreds of years might as well be in cuneiform to someone who can't read cursive. Very likely the writing on the backs of your old family photos—at least through the first half of the 20th century—identify the people in the photos with cursive handwriting. Letters from one ancestor to another that might come down to you after a relative dies would almost certainly have been written in cursive. Imagine being able to read letters between your great-grandparents and great-great grandparents and further back, maybe letters during wartime, maybe written from the battlefield. Or imagine not being able to read them—or the Declaration of Independence or Lincoln's working draft of his Gettysburg Address and other speeches or Dr. King's original Letter from Birmingham Jail or Ilsa Lund's jilting one-page letter to Rick Blaine in "Casablanca" or perhaps even the skywritten "Surrender Dorothy" in "The Wizard of Oz"—because you can't read cursive.

[AndyYNWA]

I find it strange that many people can't read cursive. Of course there are some types of cursive that are quite hard to read, but if you spend some time on it you usually get through.

 

Even my 7 years old daughter can read cursive. She has never been taught how to write cursive nor how to read it, but she still get through a text written in cursive quite easily (of course she needs help from time to time, but usually no big problem for her).

 

Another thing I came to think about the other day, when this thread started, was that my grandmother, 89 years old, almost always write in print. I have only seen her write in cursive a few times. However, my grandfather almost always writes in cursive (he doesn't write much anymore, his eyesight has gotten quite poor).

[estie1948]

Cursive writing is flowing writing, not disconnected, but designating writing in which the strokes of the letters are joined in each word. There are many different styles of cursive writing, but all styles of cursive writing share similarities. If someone knows cursive writing, then that person can read cursive writing given it is in that person's language or a language that person understands. What some of us have been grousing and complaining about is that cursive writing is not being taught many places anymore. All manner of reasons have been put forward as to why it appears to us to be a good thing for cursive to be taught. It would appear to me that the many voices put forward on behalf of cursive writing are not totally convincing. That saddens me more than just a little to think a writing instrument (the fountain pen) that so many, if not all, here celebrate was the designed instrument of cursive writing (in my opinion) and a majority of members don't see cursive as important. Granted: that is how I perceive the situation and the situation is open to other interpretations which might be more accurate than mine.

 

Be that as it may, let us agree that, however much it may be marvelous for written communication, print and many forms of calligraphy are not forms of cursive writing. I spend part of most years living in an old warehouse in a defunct warehouse district in a certain city. Looking through any window in my building, and there are plenty, I can see examples of both print and (would you believe it) a type of calligraphy spray painted on the walls of adjacent buildings. What is there is not cursive. It may be better than cursive in your opinion, but it is not cursive. It has noting to do with what is said on the buildings, for cursive writing could have been used in every instance without changing the meanings in the slightest. It is not that cursive is good and print or some other form of writing is bad. It has nothing at all to do with anything so banal as that. Let us just agree that the forms of writing are different.

 

What we -- Rather let me say, what I believed this thread was about was the importance of cursive writing. Communicating over a telephone, a short wave radio, a cb radio, or a computer are not written communication. Therefore, they seem to me to be outside this thread. That is not to say that they are unimportant. In the end, they may well prove to be far more important. However, for the confines of this topic "should cursive writing be allowed to slip slide away?", they are all outside.

 

Some posters have decided to confuse cursive and non-cursive handwriting with some connection to grammar and vocabulary. Grammar and vocabulary - thunderation! In order to communicate, one must have both a shared vocabulary and grammar - even though a great many do not realize such a need - and these have nothing at all to do with how one shapes ones letters! In English in America, we have our choice of grammars. We have traditional grammar which we old geezers were taught and, from about the mid-1960's, there is transformational grammar as developed by an English professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who just happened to be Polish. But none of this has anything to do with whether teaching cursive writing is a good thing or a waste of time.

 

Many have made use of the Benjamin Disraeli quote in 1867 when he stated that change is inevitable, even constant. Those of us not so ready to greet change are more likely to quote Richard Hooper in 1554 who noted that change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better. When it comes to cursive writing and it's not being taught many of us would agree with Henry Lyte in the early 1800's who only saw "change and decay all around me." Whether one sees change today as decay or as something to be welcomed with open arms; all will in their own time fight and lose against change.

 

Should cursive writing, that curvy form of connected writing be allowed to fade away as no longer worthy of a student's time? I say no.

 

-David (Estie)

[ksm]

most records of the kind people read to research their family history are handwritten in cursive.

 

In Germany those records were written in Kurrentschrift, does it mean we should insist on teaching that script too?

 

(Kurrentschrift is much harder to read than typical cursive).

 

 

I am less comfortable with the proposition that seems to be everywhere today that anything goes with respect to grammar and punctuation. Are there to be rules or not? Are the rules I learned to be adhered to, or are we to let it all hang out?

Language is not a static structure. Prior to proliferation of reading and writing skills, and later the ability to record and transmit spoken word, languages changed much more rapidly; but even now languages evolve. I don't know the formal process for English, if it even exists; but in my native Polish there is a body called Polish Language Council that can declare some rules obsolete or create new rules (i.e. administratively change very common error into allowed form).

[Cryptos]

Some posters have decided to confuse cursive and non-cursive handwriting with some connection to grammar and vocabulary. Grammar and vocabulary - thunderation! In order to communicate, one must have both a shared vocabulary and grammar - even though a great many do not realize such a need - and these have nothing at all to do with how one shapes ones letters! In English in America, we have our choice of grammars. We have traditional grammar which we old geezers were taught and, from about the mid-1960's, there is transformational grammar as developed by an English professor from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who just happened to be Polish. But none of this has anything to do with whether teaching cursive writing is a good thing or a waste of time.

 

I like cursive, I've always written in cursive because that is how I was dragged up. However, as far as I understand the literature on the subject there has been no clearly demonstrable and significant advantage to cursive over printing with regard to communication. Assuming that is true then the only response to the emphasised part above is to say that teaching cursive is neither a good thing nor a waste of time, and may well devolve to a mode of expression chosen purely on aesthetic values.

 

 

I also don't think that posters are confusing cursive and non-cursive with having a connection to grammar and vocabulary either. This is not a simple black or white environment. For example, and this is just a wild thought thing, if children grow up using only electronic means to communicate and perhaps mainly texting each other, it's not impossible that they will gradually lose many of the words in the current vocabulary. It could, by extension, be argued that being taught to write to a visual system (cursive, printing, whatever) facilitates thinking about not just the look of the words on the page but also what those words are and what they mean. Thus vocabulary is saved.

 

Of course that may be a somewhat contrived scenario. I put it here to suggest that divorcing writing from meaning is probably not a great idea.

[pajaro]

With schools teaching printing in lieu of cursive. some people will be unable to use cursive unless they teach themselves. They might actually teach themselves.

[Bookman]

 

In Germany those records were written in Kurrentschrift, does it mean we should insist on teaching that script too?

 

(Kurrentschrift is much harder to read than typical cursive).

 

 

 

I don't read German, and so I can't fully answer your question to my own satisfaction except indirectly. The vital statistics ledger books written in English and made as public records that I've seen with my own eyes have handwriting that could easily be read by anyone who reads English cursive regardless of the specific script in the book or in the reader's experience. For instance, if the reader has only been taught, has only used, and only read New American Cursive, I am absolutely certain he or she could read any Spencerian cursive in a public records ledger book. As far as I can tell, the relevant line of ignorance is at the ability to read English cursive at all. If a speaker of English cannot read English cursive, it's functionally a foreign language.

[Cryptos]

When everything has been transcribed and digitized, when the paper records have deteriorated beyond the skills of anyone to decipher, being able to read cursive will be redundant anyway. I suspect that this is inevitable.

[zwack]

Language is not a static structure. Prior to proliferation of reading and writing skills, and later the ability to record and transmit spoken word, languages changed much more rapidly; but even now languages evolve. I don't know the formal process for English, if it even exists;

Indeed many languages have these official bodies. English doesn't. The formal process for English is that the language changes and people complain about it.

 

As for the original topic, teaching cursive has benefits, even if they main one is only that it increases familiarity with cursive. However outside of a writing class the only time a chosen writing style should be criticised is when it is illegible. Then it is fair as I could scribble on a piece of paper and claim it was the right answer, but unless the teacher can actually read it then they are not going to know.

[AndyYNWA]

British English has the Oxford Dictionary that regulates the language. American English maybe hasn't a similar guideline.

Swedish is regulated by Svenska Akademien, the Swedish Academy, which constantly updates the language with new words and new grammar. They are fairly liberal to changes in the Swedish language.

[estie1948]

There was a stir about a language touted as an universal language back in 1958. There was a book (printed only in English for some reason) which explained the benefits of such a language and the value of such an undertaking. There was a rumor linking the project to the United Nations which prompted one of the many cries for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations. I'm sure there have been other such announcements of the upcoming universal language. Wasn't Greek once suppose to be the universal language? Maybe it was Latin that was the universal language. I suffered through Latin and had serious thoughts that I might wind up like the language: dead. I am too pessimistic to believe there will ever really be one universal language. However, if I am wrong and next month or next eon when they unveil the one universal language, won't people (some people) enjoy writing it in a flowing, curving, beautiful form? Will all those who wax poetic describing the pleasure they derive from writing in their daily journal with a favorite fountain pen and the current favorite ink - will all these people have gone extinct? Does the gene that allow for or even fosters the development of a universal language with its large vocabulary and grammarlessness - does that gene also destroy the desire in humankind to create a flowing, curving, beautiful form of this universal language?

 

I still feel that it is a sad fact that cursive writing is no longer a part of so many school systems. I am sad for the many who have posted here to say they were denied training in cursive penmanship. I don't mean to suggest that the entire process of learning cursive penmanship is wonderful, but I do feel certain that it is worth it at the end.

 

-David (Estie).

[maus930]

Electronic records can disappear in a microsecond -- the devices to read electronic records are obsoleted -- What do I do with my 5.25 floppy disks???

 

Written records have been found readable after hundreds of years