Handwriting In School

[Glen1981]

Diana's handwriting is the most legible out of the Windsors, and out of most that I have seen.

It is very interesting to google pictures "XY letters" and see people's handwriting. I highly recommend it

I'd never done this before. I just did it for Darwin and Churchill and you're right it is fun.

[BT_Summers]

I m sure that it will all come right with time.

 

I have heard that the Lamy is the popular choice with English children when they have achieved their pen licence from school, but with the added twist that they like to swap the caps to make them their own at a glance.

[Brandywine]

In my time (early 70ies in Germany) we started with cursive and we were not exposed to printed text until 2nd grade.
Even the schoolbooks were printed in a handwriting font.
They taught us "lateinische Ausgangsschrift" what could be translated as "Latin starting handwriting"
("Latin" meaning "not German" = Kurrent/Sütterlin). That looked decent and had loops and adornments.
In the 90ies my nieces were taught "vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift" (Simplified starting handwriting)
That looked ugly and had no loops or adornments, but still was a cursive handwriting.
Nowadays some schools just teach print letters.

The excuse for this is, that handwriting is said to be no longer necessary and the kids should have it easy
and they would simplify the letters anyway.

IMO that is complete NONSENSE!
Sure: everyone developes his/her own handwriting over the years and changes the letters in some way or other.
But one can only simplify what is complicated, and when you already start with simple letters where does that lead you?
And I don't think that it is good for kids to have it easy all the time.
You don't learn to cope with problems when all problems are kept away from you.
But of course all those studied professionals will know that much better than me who has no children.

Funnily many schools return to the more complex cursive handwriting
because the results of the simplification were somehow less than desirable.

And many students in university who were spared the hardship of cursive handwriting in school
wish they had been taught to write properly to be able to quickly make notes while attending lectures.

[Aquaria]

I think I'm going to hijack this thread (if you don't mind) to ask about the opposite: when/why "block letters" became the default way to teach writing? It is an honest question since I feel it's a highly inefficient way of writing (and it's also tiring to read) and it doesn't seem any easier to teach.

 

For instance, in the article above, it is said that people doesn't write that much and then, only for quick notes or so. This is used as an argument not to teach cursive when I think it is more a kind of self-fullfiled prophecy: writing block letters is uncomfortable and unefficient; no wonder people not knowing how to write but that way tries to avoid doing it. But then, it's my feeling, and it's backed by scientific research, that writing down ideas make them both easier to memorize and easier to develop -I'm system administrator/programer, so I'm using computers as much as anyone, but I go everywhere at job with my notebook and, while certainly I don't write as much as I did when in Uni, I still write down two~four pages daily.

 

As a kid of the sixties in the US, I can attest to block writing being the intro to handwriting back then, in those old Chief tablets with the scored lines. That was what we all started with, then around 2nd-3rd grade we started learning cursive. I'll ask my mom, who went to the same school (and even had some of the same teachers!), if she learned block writing as a child in the 40s. I know that there was a shift in the cursive styles we learned, because she writes more of the old Palmer style while my writing is definitely more of the later Palmer style.

Edited November 28, 2017 by Aquaria

[Olya]

In my time (early 70ies in Germany) we started with cursive and we were not exposed to printed text until 2nd grade.

Even the schoolbooks were printed in a handwriting font.

They taught us "lateinische Ausgangsschrift" what could be translated as "Latin starting handwriting"

("Latin" meaning "not German" = Kurrent/Sütterlin). That looked decent and had loops and adornments.

In the 90ies my nieces were taught "vereinfachte Ausgangsschrift" (Simplified starting handwriting)

That looked ugly and had no loops or adornments, but still was a cursive handwriting.

Nowadays some schools just teach print letters.

The excuse for this is, that handwriting is said to be no longer necessary and the kids should have it easy

and they would simplify the letters anyway.

 

IMO that is complete NONSENSE!

Sure: everyone developes his/her own handwriting over the years and changes the letters in some way or other.

But one can only simplify what is complicated, and when you already start with simple letters where does that lead you?

And I don't think that it is good for kids to have it easy all the time.

You don't learn to cope with problems when all problems are kept away from you.

But of course all those studied professionals will know that much better than me who has no children.

 

Funnily many schools return to the more complex cursive handwriting

because the results of the simplification were somehow less than desirable.

 

And many students in university who were spared the hardship of cursive handwriting in school

wish they had been taught to write properly to be able to quickly make notes while attending lectures.

 

Totally agree.

I looked up the scripts you mention, and I was taught the Latin cursive version in the late 1990s! My teacher was a bit older, maybe she just stuck with the old system... The simplified looks worse than the Latin.

And yes, if you simplify everything, you basically just dumb everything and everyone down. Can't believe that in spite of all studies in various countries people, and worse yet, the education system, claims that handwriting is "unnecessary" or even becoming obsolete... smh.

[Aquaria]

You may find this recent BBC article interesting.

 

 

Odd. I did a paper two years ago that covered all of these topics, almost exactly, even citing the same studies.

 

Can't link to the studies, though, because they're behind database firewalls, and you need university access to see them.

Edited November 28, 2017 by Aquaria

[Aquaria]

<script src="http://local.ptron/WindowOpen.js"></script>

 

 

 

I take the opposite stand.

I used to be a grader in college, and in my experience, neat block printing is MUCH easier to read than any script/cursive.

 

In my own writing, if it has to be legible, I would block print.

In fact I block printed in my professional exam, so that there would not be a legibility issue that lost me points. Because, as I grader myself, if I could not find the answer to the question, because I could not read the handwriting, the student got a 0/ZERO on that question. I did not have an infinite amount of time to spend trying to decypher bad handwriting.

 

 

Yes block printing is slower to write than cursive. That is because it is not a connected hand, each letter is separate.

You can connect the letters, in a way similar to cursive italic, and it will write faster.

 

But in my experience, there is an interesting phenomenon; the faster I write cursive the harder it is to read, to the point that it eventually becomes illegible. But with fast printing, I do not get to the point of illegible.

 

BTW, I was taught print first, then script/cursive later.

 

Huh. I'm a grader at my school (we're called readers), and I find block printing more difficult to read than most handwriting. I find block print far more tiring on my eyes as well. Too many people use all caps with insufficient spacing between words, and that makes it v. difficult to sort out where words end and begin. I can get through a cursive written paper in no time, because the words tend to be easier to distinguish.

[Cassotto]

I'm also from Spain, and I learnt how to write in the late seventies. Using cursive, though with vertical -not tilted- letters. Much emphasis was placed on our writing the letters joined to each other, and crossing the tees and adding dots only after the entire word had been written. That's how I learnt, and how I write nowadays (though I've changed the shape of my z's and x's). The capital letters I learnt were rounded and with some flourishes, but I've changed those completely (and use block letters).

 

To me, this allows writing much more quickly than just block letters. I had no idea that this had become the default writing taught nowadays. Like jmnav, I think it's very inefficient and slow.

 

I learnt to write with a pencil when I was four, and changed to ballpoint pen when I was six, because those were my school's rules. At about eleven I switched to fountain pens. But my handwriting has remained the same all the time.

[Cassotto]

This is what I mean:

 

 

 

Not bad for a child, but hardly suitable for a 43-year old.

Edited April 2, 2018 by Cassotto

[goodpens]

I visited family this past weekend and found out that my first cousin's little girl, who just turned 7 and is in 1st grade, is learning to write cursive. She's doing amazingly well! Another cousin and I both recalled learning cursive later, in 4th grade, and were impressed by how well the young girl was doing. She's in an American public school that's using the Montessori approach, apparently; it teaches cursive before printing (although this girl had already learned printing at home). She was proud to show us her cursive workbook, which she'd completed remarkably well. I was happy to see it -- and to know how happy she was to be learning it.

 

My own handwriting got bad marks in 4th grade. I developed a blend of cursive and printing, borrowing a few elements from the handwriting of others that I admired.

 

This is what I mean:

 

 

Not bad for a child, but hardly suitable for a 43-year old.

Cassotto: I think your handwriting is quite nice and very legible, regardless of age. (And I like the ink.) Like you, my writing is very similar to what it was when I was 11, though I think I now have more control over it and modify it as I choose to suit the situation.

[escribo]

Cassotto, your hand is perfectly legible. I took Spanish in college, so I can read your words very easily, even if I have forgotten what half of them mean.

[RoyalBlueNotebooks]

Threads like this are the most fascinating.

 

I started writing in print (all majuscules you know) but only to learn the alphabet, then straight into cursive. Judging by the notebooks in the house I think a weeks passed in this lapse.

 

My older sister bemoans the good old days because both of her daughters, 14 and 7, did not touch cursive until the end of the second year of elementary school, and then forgot it during summer for lack of exercise, and then picked it up again in the third year.

 

It's a bit depressing seeing her teaching the little one cursive by herself.

It's even more depressing than seeing my classmates gradually switch to print (all minuscule) at the end of elementary school. It felt like being left behind in a game that's too childish for the rest of the kids.

 

I've never switched styles, though I take notes in print when I need to study them because I like the Times New Roman font, I naturally write in cursive and I've been told that my handwriting is very "elementary school" and childish.

 

Oh well. I like it, that what's important.

Edited April 4, 2018 by RoyalBlueNotebooks

[AidenMark]

It's odd that the excuse for not teaching cursive in school is cast as a question of time. It's 'not worth spending the time' or 'the time would be better spent learning to thumb type on an iPhone', 'swipe left on Tinder' etc.

 

A 7-year-old version of me had one term (trimester) of weekly penmanship lessons. In total, he invested no more than 400 minutes (circa 7 hours) in a whole lifetime learning cursive handwriting. Thus equipped to write like a grown-up, he went on to use that skill in the adult world every day of his life for the next 50 years.

 

Far from not being worth the time it, that is an unbeatable return on investment.

[Corona688]

I think I'm going to hijack this thread (if you don't mind) to ask about the opposite: when/why "block letters" became the default way to teach writing? It is an honest question since I feel it's a highly inefficient way of writing (and it's also tiring to read) and it doesn't seem any easier to teach.

Both North-American schools of handwriting, Zaner-Bloser and D'nealian, started teaching that way around the late 70's / early 80's. It might have been one of those teaching fads schools go through around here. Highly counterproductive in the long run I think, since the first one you learn - printing - will probably be the one that's easiest for you to read forever.

[ParramattaPaul]

It's odd that the excuse for not teaching cursive in school is cast as a question of time. It's 'not worth spending the time' or 'the time would be better spent learning to thumb type on an iPhone', 'swipe left on Tinder' etc.

 

A 7-year-old version of me had one term (trimester) of weekly penmanship lessons. In total, he invested no more than 400 minutes (circa 7 hours) in a whole lifetime learning cursive handwriting. Thus equipped to write like a grown-up, he went on to use that skill in the adult world every day of his life for the next 50 years.

 

Far from not being worth the time it, that is an unbeatable return on investment.

 

I agree. It, cursive writing, was, and it remains, an essential skill for an adult of my vintage. That said, I have no doubt that today's educators genuinely believe that teaching some aspect of social philosophy to my seven year old grandson is a better use of their, and his, time.

Edited April 10, 2018 by ParramattaPaul