When Did You Stop (And/or Start) Cursively Writing?

[djmaher]

I don't know for sure, but maybe part of the point of writing in cursive is to "compel" us to contemplate a bit and slow down a little. Even with all of the advances with pens and ink and paper, all of it has its roots with the ancients. Not glamorous or fancy, but, I think, deeply personal sometimes.

 

Maybe sometimes using a fountain pen isn't the most practical way to record things, and in that case, there's no question that we are all(mostly) spoiled for choice. Sure, there is an element of utility in writing as we do, but, the element of Romance we have for words and art and how we still put them to paper is still strong with many of us, grasshopper....

 

Sometimes, life forces us to go fast. Maybe it wouldn't kill us to go slow(er) sometimes, if we have a choice and if it is practical. I think, somehow, it would be a great topic, if it's not been proposed before, of why we all started using fountain pens in the first place, and maybe why we continue to use them.

 

Especially when we live in a day and age where we can choose anything the create our own personal art. (if it's already been done, please send me the link)

Edited October 25, 2018 by djmaher

[BaronWulfraed]

I don't find cursive a "slow down" -- Not compared to block printing. Calligraphy, OTOH, is slow (and something I never did long enough to master any hand -- I can fake a blackletter hand, but find blackletter undesirable for things that need to be read).

[wrighar]

We were taught joined up writing and made to use it from primary school.

 

I write everything like that without even thinking 40 yrs later.

[wrkerr]

Attached.

[inkstainedruth]

I learnt cursive in the context of my French classes (extracurricular). Cursive's wasn't a requirement at school and this is as it should be. I do not intend to offend anyone's sensibilities but cursive writing's beside the point. Good handwriting is just legible handwriting with correct spelling. Nothing more, nothing less. It was fun to practice it and it did change how I shape some letters, but I never adopted it. It's highly impractical. "Printing" is much faster to put on a page. So much so that my Parker IM's feeder has sometimes trouble to keep up with my writing speed, especially on sleek paper. Sometimes a person's hand has to keep up with their thinking, you see. When cursive is written fast you need a small army of PhD holders in graphology to decipher what the text might purport to convey. My views on cursive were later corroborated by how most people actually do those exquisite cursive, but highly legible, calligraphic texts: one letter at a time.

 

I think you're mistaking "regular" handwriting for formal "calligraphy" hands. You *should* be comparing printing to something like Palmer or another "business" hand.

My cursive is way faster than printing, and unless I'm really tired, at least as legible; but then, I remember taking notes in the last class before my General Philosphy final in college -- after pulling 2 all-nighters in a row: the first page was okay, but the second was just chicken scratchings.... And that WAS printed...

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[ardene]

 

I think you're mistaking "regular" handwriting for formal "calligraphy" hands. You *should* be comparing printing to something like Palmer or another "business" hand.

My cursive is way faster than printing, and unless I'm really tired, at least as legible; but then, I remember taking notes in the last class before my General Philosphy final in college -- after pulling 2 all-nighters in a row: the first page was okay, but the second was just chicken scratchings.... And that WAS printed...

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

 

 

The paper is A5.

 

Concerning the second part, I can write more upright but it's almost midnight here.. I really don't like cursive. I often can't read my own cursive. I really find it very difficult to mark student scripts written in cursive. There are no clear geometrical clues for my mind to get a grasp on and recognise a word. Thankfully at least half the stuff is typed these days. Interestingly, I usually read Spencerian without excessive flourishes fine. The business hands I encounter online, not so much...

 

Bear also in mind that I write in two alphabets, Greek and Latin. Cursive Greek I was never taught, but I tried a bit and it really is a mess. I could try and post some images -of strictly non-cursive and non-calligraphic- of my Greek writing sometime.

 

The titles in black ink are slowly written personal-style "calligraphy" (i.e. I'm not reproducing some standard letter forms, like italic, foundational and the like, although it's an italic script) written with a broad nib. I have no problem with slow. I like slow. The thing is I like slow when I'm holding this pen, and I like fast when I'm holding that pen, and generally I like to write according to mood and impulse. Believe it or not, my slower regular style has even been praised both for its looks and because some fellow students who didn't show up in classes wanted my notes and it xeroxed very clearly...

(unfortunately for them my notes used to be -and still are- laconic so you need to read that thick brick of a book anyway to figure out what the meaning is).

 

Note: The italic nib script was written one letter at a time, some with multiple strokes, the R in "regular is three I believe. The s in "cursive" is two strokes. A regular s double curve and return to the top to finish the shape.

 

Note 2: I still need to lift the pen to write some particular letters or combinations of them in cursive, so why not print since it comes more naturally, is faster for me and I like it better?

Edited October 25, 2018 by ardene

[azbobcat]

Started in 3rd grade in 1953. Still going, though my hand is a bit shaky.

Well I know that feeling. With my Parkinson's I call always tell where I am in my drug cycle just by looking at my writing. It does not matter if I print or write in cursive if I am "off" you can't read either; when I'm "on" it is quite readable, though my cursive is and has always been far better than my printing. If I'm off and I *have* to write something, I have to SLOW way down and take care with each letter, though the tremor shows up. Agony.

 

Fountain Pens I have found make my writing "glide" along, as opposed to these CHEAP BIC-like ballpoints. Just bought a NEW Fountain Pen for the first time in 22 years -- A Conklin Duragraph with a MEDIUM nib and also bought a STUB 1.1 mm nib that I want to experiment with. The pen should be here sometime next week.

 

I have still been trying to wrap my brain around the fact that cursive is no longer taught in schools. Now that makes me feel very OLD!!!

[TaylorJ]

I had to learn it in...maybe second or third grade, for a year or two. I maintained it for that year, hated it, and swore I'd print forever once I was done with that grade. I would have liked it had I learned it by choice, not by requirement...Ah well. What's done is done.

 

I stopped writing in cursive then (age 9-10 or so) but re-learned, in a rough way, in my teens, when I began to really appreciate stationery. I think I realized that computers were taking over correspondence, and I'm enough of a rebel that I immediately wanted to help preserve handwritten letters and hand-writing in general.

 

I have a few familial pen-pals and we write back and forth for fun. I also journal in cursive off and on...sometimes in print, sometimes in cursive, it varies.

 

Lately, thought, my cursive has gotten really messy and I want to learn to do it properly, or re-learn in some more regimented way. I'm getting a copy of The Art of Cursive Penmanship this week, so maybe I'll find some help there.

 

-Taylor

[jmnav]

I really don't like cursive. I often can't read my own cursive. I really find it very difficult to mark student scripts written in cursive. There are no clear geometrical clues for my mind to get a grasp on and recognise a word.

That's curious. People usually don't read word by word but by mentally grouping them into semantic units (there are some "mind tricks" that "abuse" this so you end up reading things that are not written unless you are on guard). That is usually considered an advantage of cursive: we, not being machines, can't be expected to write letters with perfect spacing so connecting letters within a word makes easier to identify its internal grouping (printed letters should pay attention to spacing too and, in fact, they usually are not equally spaced so subjectively look like they are).

[ardene]

That's curious. People usually don't read word by word but by mentally grouping them into semantic units (there are some "mind tricks" that "abuse" this so you end up reading things that are not written unless you are on guard). That is usually considered an advantage of cursive: we, not being machines, can't be expected to write letters with perfect spacing so connecting letters within a word makes easier to identify its internal grouping (printed letters should pay attention to spacing too and, in fact, they usually are not equally spaced so subjectively look like they are).

 

You're right in all points apart from the advantages of cursive. I need to mark student papers as part of my job. We use quite a bit of technical vocabulary as well. My mind needs some starting point, which cursive simply does not offer. I need to be able to focus on the content rather than on spelling and stuff like that, without ignoring the spelling and the stuff like that, because otherwise the students would be waiting for a mark for months... The space between characters in printing (EDIT: in this case meaning typography) is called kerning. Also, letters can be partially or fully connected in italic script (the calligrapher's alphabet taught by Reynolds in the US) or in not-so-decorated Spencerian respectively without having to focus to decipher what something reads. But of course these scripts are written a letter at a time and the connection is largely the product of the doer's artistry. I apologise again if I offend people's sensibilities, but cursive takes me time to read, and besides, it does not necessarily lend itself to unambiguous deciphering in contexts where precise deciphering is a requirement.

Edited November 18, 2018 by ardene

[Corona688]

The knack for reading cursive is as easily lost as the knack for writing it. I don't think it's harder to read, just different. (I've seen some awful printing, at that.)

 

My generation gave up cursive almost the instant we were allowed to, as the brute pressure required for ballpoints lends itself better to printing than cursive.

[JakobS]

I learned and had to use cursive from 2nd to 6th grade, and then readily dropped it the moment it was no longer required for school work. I don't know if I can say I completely dropped it, as my writing is a mix of print and connected writing. But, at the same time, I doubt any of my connected writing meets the rigidity of any specific script. As I feel the point of everyday handwriting is to communicate information coherently, and legibly, as long as a person's handwriting allows for this, I have no qualms with whatever type they use, it's achieved it's purpose and is often beautiful in it's own fashion....

[senzen]

My mum recently dug out one of my primary school notebooks, so I can say I went from small and nervous cursive, to pretty but illegible cursive, to what I would now call legible but semi cursive, i.e. the letters are cursive but not necessarily linked, as I pay attention to making each letter understandable.

 

I'm just glad it doesn't hurt when I write, I used to have a death grip which eventually became painful, which fountains pens helped me solve.

[corgicoupe]

I don't remember, but like Pakman I began to print when taking drafting in engineering school in the late 1950s and have been using some form of printing ever since, except like InkStainedRuth, for my signature.

[a m a r g o]

 

Thank you Sanseri. This jogged my memory. We were taught first to print using cursive letter forms. Actual cursive once that was mastered.

Exactly my experience: In the first years of school we were taught each letter by itself, isolated, in cursive, and then practice joining the letters throughout the next school years. I stopped using cursive pretty early on, I believe it was thanks to mathematics, biology and physics, numbers and formulas just do not work with cursive (Well, they do sometimes, specially with letters from the greek alphabet representing certain constants).

 

Fountain pens were nowhere to be seen in my school years nor my aunts or uncles, it was only mandatory for the school years of my grandparents. I was nearly completely unexposed to fountain pens if it not were to my grandfather, which used them for every bit of writing, but I never used one until college, thanks to some rendering classes in which it was required...

 

Thats when I returned to cursive and all the wrist and arm pain from taking notes disappeared: An instrument made someone retook their childhood writing technique. It took a while to develop a style and clarity, but it was a time well spent.

 

I now struggle to write in print and many of my minuscule letters are cursive isolated letters...

Edited December 11, 2018 by coppilcus

[A Smug Dill]

Writing English in a cursive hand is not so much what I 'do', and so it's hard to say when I started 'cursively writing' or stopped it. It's just another capability or skill; I write in cursive when I want to (or have to), but it isn't either by conscious decision or by default how I write in English primarily. (I also trained sometimes intensively, over a course of ten years, in various martial arts. When did I stop practising eskrima? Over twenty years ago. When did I stop handling blunt or bladed weapons, in the way eskrimadors would, when an instance of close-range combat demands it? Never.)

 

I probably learnt how to write English in cursive late in primary school, about the same time I also learnt (as a separate pursuit) how to use a traditional calligraphy brush to write Chinese in kaishu. Fountain pens were never used in the course of my schooling, so there is certainly no logical association in my mind between them and any calligraphic hand, any more than I think a balisong is associated with or required for knife-fighting.

[Tom Kellie]

[Greenpenman111]

Started in 2002 still use it today.

[fpwriter]

Started learning cursive while in the pri primary (kindergarten) grades. Continue to write in it to this day.