reading cursive

[KateGladstone]

A poll on reading cursive (including a question or two on whether cursive will continue) ...

[WendyNC]

I recall only too well being unable to read cursive writing and the frustration I experienced that, having cracked the reading code, I was still excluded from learning the content of a good bit of the writing in the world in which I lived. For me, learning to write it was the gateway to learning to read it.

 

 

[Clydesdave]

Cursive handwriting will probably not die out, at least not for some time. There are a huge number of people that write with cursive and there will always be reason to write notes. That alone will prolong the agony. It will dwindle to such a small number, however, that it will seem dead, just before the resurgence. The resurgence will ocurr because the general population will become so willing to accept less and less (intellegence expressed as learned) for average, that we will collapse under the weight of our ignorant. (Not ignorance mind you; "Ignorant".) Once that collapse is recognized, it will be thought that teaching cursive communication, is the first step of learning, to sneak in on the masses. It will be so difficult get the average person to learn anything like mathematics, history or english, they will start out by teaching the alphabet, and it will be cursive. (Computers will be thought of as the norm, and they will take care of the printing.) It will be penning a printing style that will die first.

 

No, I'm not kidding.

 

 

[The Grim Sheaffer]

I believe that you are not cutting broad enough with this survey. You should be asking " Will handwriting and pens survive the digital age " The kids of the future wont even be taught to write - just typing lessons.

 

What will happen to all of us that have over invested in Fountain Pens - Then we change to mobile keyboards.

 

and the fountain pen market collapses ..........

[KateGladstone]

I believe that you are not cutting broad enough with this survey. You should be asking " Will handwriting and pens survive the digital age " The kids of the future wont even be taught to write - just typing lessons.

 

What will happen to all of us that have over invested in Fountain Pens - Then we change to mobile keyboards.

 

and the fountain pen market collapses ..........

 

 

Well, Grim, why don't you start the survey that you suggest?

Edited March 28, 2009 by KateGladstone

[jimk]

It would be great fun to have some kind of gallery of examples of "cursive" handwriting from different times and places. Folks could try to decode the various examples.

 

A liitle googling surfaced this:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Early-Americ...y/dp/080630846X

 

which looks wonderful.

[KateGladstone]

It would be great fun to have some kind of gallery of examples of "cursive" handwriting from different times and places. Folks could try to decode the various examples.

 

A liitle googling surfaced this:

 

http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Early-Americ...y/dp/080630846X

 

which looks wonderful.

 

I'd love to see such a gallery! Pal[a]eography sites -- Google both spellings to find them -- often include this kind of material: try the free on-line "Palaeography Game" which the UK National Archives provides at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/palaeography/game

[Sonnet]

I voted "other-- please explain" because we're talking about skills that were learned between the ages of 5 to 8 (or maybe even 7). My recollection of those days is a bit hazy because:

1. I was a kid (see the age range)

2. I didn't start keeping a journal until I was nearly 10.

 

So like learning how to read, I *know* I learned how to write at some point (in my school, we learned cursive writing in the latter half of second grade, so I would have been about 7), but darned if I could tell you, "okay, this is when I didn't know how to write at all, and THIS is when I learned how to read printed lettering, and then cursive lettering, and then learned how to write all of it." Sorry but my brain doesn't work like that.

 

An aside: By fourth grade, all classroom writing and homework had to be in cursive. Although maybe that was just a teacher-specific rule. Hmm. If I ever run into Miss Wood again, I'll ask her.

[Paddler]

I learned to read cursive by learning how to write it.

 

The differences between printed letters and cursive letters are no big deal. You tell someone, "this is a printed G and this is a cursive G. " Is this a strain on the brain? I don't think so. People decide this is going to be difficult. Then they try to learn it and they try too hard. Your brain will do the translation for you if you just back off and let it do its work.

 

I find different styles of cursive difficult to read sometimes. When that happens, I sit and study the text for a while. If I am willing to apply myself for a half-hour or so, I can read it. This takes an attention span that is longer than that of the average hamster. If you haven't got that, then you're stuck.

 

I studied the German language for a year in college. Later, I purchased a few books that were printed in German Blackletter. It took me a couple of hours to become a dab hand at reading them. Nobody taught me how. I had no translation or comparison alphabets. I just sat down and put it in front of my eyes and learned it. I can read and write Tolkien's runic, too. I am an adult now; I am allowed to know these things.

 

People should not have to be taught everything. If they can't figure out what is written on a page, they don't need to know, especially when there are only 52 letters to learn. If they need to be taught anything, it is how to turn their imaginations and curiosity loose on a project like reading cursive. Relax. Have a homebrew. Read.

 

Paddler

 

[KateGladstone]

Paddler -- I, for one, hadn't decided as a child that "this is going to be difficult": I had read (print) since about age 3, and expected that reading another style would prove equally easy ... despite very rigorous cursive teaching since age 7 1/2, I couldn't reliably read cursive (not even the cursive workbooks I had to copy: they might as well have been Japanese -- or Elvish) until age 24. (Coincidentally or not, I found myself able to read cursive -- and to write it, if I so wished -- rather suddenly, about one month after I'd started teaching myself to write Italic. Literally -- one day I couldn't read things in cursive, and the next day I could).

 

For me, a large stumbling-block had come from believing my teachers when they said that no relationship at all existed between one set of symbols and the other, and that therefore pure brute reasonless memorization would inevitably prove both necessary and sufficient: easy enough to believe, when you look at a North American cursive "G" side-by-side withany other kind of "G", but not in fact true. If anyone had taken a few seconds to show me step-by-step how the cursive "G" HAPPENED -- the process by which it evolved (or, some would say, devolved?) step-by-step from the kind of "G" I already knew about -- I would have gotten it (and I would actually have learned something worth knowing about how our handwriting-style originated) far quicker than by just having to memorize the end-result of that process. But that doubtless reflects my own intellectual shortcomings: as I said, many of my teachers did not consider me quite worth educating ...

[johnboz]

I can distinctly remember being friends with a girl who was one year older than me. She was in 3rd grade and had learned cursive. I was in 2nd and hadn't learned cursive yet. She was writing cursive one day when we were playing, so I decided to imitate her by drawing spirals and loops on the paper. That's what I thought cursive was and had no idea how anyone could read it.

 

The next year, I learned to write in cursive. That is how I learned to read cursive.

[Titivillus]

I can't remember a time when I was not able to read cursive.

[Renzhe]

It will never die, as it is functional, and its relationship with print and italic letters is simple and easy to learn.

[KateGladstone]

It will never die, as it is functional, and its relationship with print and italic letters is simple and easy to learn.

 

Renzhe -- in your view, what makes cursive "functional"? Research shows that the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive -- they join some, not all, letters (making the easiest joins, skipping the rest) and tend to use print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive forms "disagree."

 

The relationship of cursive letters to other forms is "easy to learn" if competently presented, indeed -- but I would scarcely call that relationship "simple." (At least, I don't find particularly "simple" the relationship of typical North American cursive-model G/I/J/Q/S/T/Z/f/r/s/z to their printed or Italic counterparts -- the simplicity of any relationship between writing-styles must depend on the forms used in the styles, and North American cursive models notoriously have far more complex forms, particularly for the capitals, than most other models of cursive.)

[YNY]

Source for cursive and other styles.

 

The Karpeles Manuscript Library has many examples of handwritten documents.

Branches are located in: Buffalo, Newburgh, Charleston, Duluth, Tacoma, Santa Barbara, Jacksonville, Shreveport and Fort Wayne.

 

Please visit their website for additional information: Karpeles Manuscript Library

I hope this works since I have not posted a link before. If not please search for the museum website and visit it.

 

YNY

 

 

[jimk]

Looks like the Library of Congress has a nice collection on line:

 

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/browse/ListSom...rmat=Manuscript

[JFT]

Paddler -- I, for one, hadn't decided as a child that "this is going to be difficult": I had read (print) since about age 3, and expected that reading another style would prove equally easy ... despite very rigorous cursive teaching since age 7 1/2, I couldn't reliably read cursive (not even the cursive workbooks I had to copy: they might as well have been Japanese -- or Elvish) until age 24. (Coincidentally or not, I found myself able to read cursive -- and to write it, if I so wished -- rather suddenly, about one month after I'd started teaching myself to write Italic. Literally -- one day I couldn't read things in cursive, and the next day I could).

That is very interesting! A bit like learning Italic explained to your brain the logic of cursive?

 

For me, a large stumbling-block had come from believing my teachers when they said that no relationship at all existed between one set of symbols and the other, and that therefore pure brute reasonless memorization would inevitably prove both necessary and sufficient: easy enough to believe, when you look at a North American cursive "G" side-by-side withany other kind of "G", but not in fact true. If anyone had taken a few seconds to show me step-by-step how the cursive "G" HAPPENED -- the process by which it evolved (or, some would say, devolved?) step-by-step from the kind of "G" I already knew about -- I would have gotten it (and I would actually have learned something worth knowing about how our handwriting-style originated) far quicker than by just having to memorize the end-result of that process. But that doubtless reflects my own intellectual shortcomings: as I said, many of my teachers did not consider me quite worth educating ...

 

For my part I do recall learning cursive, I was in second grade (a longtime ago ). I had always been fascinated seeing my mother writing these strange loop. So as soon as I learned to read and write I wanted to next move on to these strange glyph. Learning to read cursive for me was actually done while learning to write it like others have mentioned. I didn't have any difficulties picking it up, writing and reading, but my hand was never deemed beautiful to my dismay. Still there were some letters that did not make sense to me like the "G" but also the "s", the "r" and a few others. Nothing to disrupt reading nor writing but it was nipping at me.

 

 

It will never die, as it is functional, and its relationship with print and italic letters is simple and easy to learn.

 

Renzhe -- in your view, what makes cursive "functional"? Research shows that the fastest and most legible handwriters avoid cursive -- they join some, not all, letters (making the easiest joins, skipping the rest) and tend to use print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive forms "disagree."

 

The relationship of cursive letters to other forms is "easy to learn" if competently presented, indeed -- but I would scarcely call that relationship "simple." (At least, I don't find particularly "simple" the relationship of typical North American cursive-model G/I/J/Q/S/T/Z/f/r/s/z to their printed or Italic counterparts -- the simplicity of any relationship between writing-styles must depend on the forms used in the styles, and North American cursive models notoriously have far more complex forms, particularly for the capitals, than most other models of cursive.)

 

Bear with me for a second

 

Last year I picked up a book to help improve my handwriting, Teach Yourself: better handwriting. That book was a revelation in many a ways. First it did improved my handwriting in a substantial way after a few weeks of doing exercises and of relearning to write. Second, up to that point I had always associated cursive with 100% connected letters, that book thought me otherwise. I am not qualified to say that the result is pure cursive but it is a pragmatic cursive which is mostly connected and quite pleasurable. Moreover I would think that it most probably faster than either printed script or 100% connected cursive.

 

But much more came with that book... The book doesn't give you ONE script, it provide you with one to retrain but then encourage you to personalize it once your hand is back under control. The first unexpected thing that this book did was "explain" some letters... See after learning a new hand one tends to write slowly and with time you pick up speed which leads to shortcuts. Naively just speeding up the fully formed "s" of this script I rediscovered the cursive "s" I had learned but which did not make sense when I was young. This actually happened with a few more letters. Now for the kicker, the basic script provided to retrain had quite a bit of an italic flavor...

 

Back to the original topic.

 

I am afraid to see cursive handwriting die. I see more and more people that write printed script everyday. Now I guess it will look biased (and it might be) but cheap ball pen are part of the problem... Writing cursive while putting a lot of pressure on a pen is more wearisome than writing script in my experience. Fountain pen but also rollerball are a much better tool to write cursive since they are low-pressure. I have heard/read many time that many European school forces the use of fountain pen instead of pencils like we are thought with in North America. I think this could also play a role.

 

Last I will say each and every of us who likes to write cursive can play a role in making sure it is kept alive. I have two sons, the eldest beeing close to 7 years old. They see me writing frequently and when I help the eldest do his homeworks I frequently either write (always cursive) or practice calligraphy while he is doing writing exercise. Guess what? He is fascinated by the look of cursive, he finds it beautiful and he yearns for learning it. By providing an example all of us can contribute. Long live cursive

 

P.S. English is not my main language so there you go if some sentence make less sense than I would have liked

Edited March 29, 2009 by JFT

[KateGladstone]

Re:

"That is very interesting! A bit like learning Italic explained to your brain the logic of cursive?"

 

I would definitely agree with that way of putting it -- and I wish I hadn't had to wait till age 24 in the middle of graduate school (when I happened to decide to learn Italic) to have that happen.

 

Re:

"Still there were some letters that did not make sense to me like the "G" but also the "s", the "r" and a few others. Nothing to disrupt reading nor writing but it was nipping at me."

 

I think it "nips at" enough kids that they decide, fairly early on, that they'll have nothing to do with such a system! (the way that other kids -- or some of the same ones -- decide not to care about spelling, when they run into such annoyingly unexplained weirdnesses as the letters "olo" spelling the sounds /er/ in the word "colonel.")

 

If the (apparent) nonsensicality of some cursive letters still "nips at you," I'll draw and scan my "evolutionary chart" for whatever cursive letters you ask me to "chart" in this way. (Actually, when it comes to the "s" and some other letters, it seems that re-learning to write by speeding up an Italic-based training-style has "explained" them to you in much the same way that learning Italic "explained" it to me ... )

 

By the way, I VERY highly endorse the book you mention: Rosemary Sassoon's TEACH YOURSELF BETTER HANDWRITING (co-authored, as I recall, with Gunnlaugur Briem). I agree with you in finding that it produces a far faster legible writing than "either printed script or 100% connected cursive" -- and I very much like its flexibility (giving you an Italic-based script for retraining, BUT then showing you ways to vary and personalize things). If I had a million dollars, with instructions to spend it all on handwriting improvement, some substantial fraction of that million might go towards loading a private plane with copies of that book and dropping them near randomly selected population centers ... though doubtlessly, you or anyone else here can think of better ways to get the message across ...

[Paddler]

Paddler -- I, for one, hadn't decided as a child that "this is going to be difficult": I had read (print) since about age 3, and expected that reading another style would prove equally easy ... despite very rigorous cursive teaching since age 7 1/2, I couldn't reliably read cursive (not even the cursive workbooks I had to copy: they might as well have been Japanese -- or Elvish) until age 24. (Coincidentally or not, I found myself able to read cursive -- and to write it, if I so wished -- rather suddenly, about one month after I'd started teaching myself to write Italic. Literally -- one day I couldn't read things in cursive, and the next day I could).

 

For me, a large stumbling-block had come from believing my teachers when they said that no relationship at all existed between one set of symbols and the other, and that therefore pure brute reasonless memorization would inevitably prove both necessary and sufficient: easy enough to believe, when you look at a North American cursive "G" side-by-side withany other kind of "G", but not in fact true. If anyone had taken a few seconds to show me step-by-step how the cursive "G" HAPPENED -- the process by which it evolved (or, some would say, devolved?) step-by-step from the kind of "G" I already knew about -- I would have gotten it (and I would actually have learned something worth knowing about how our handwriting-style originated) far quicker than by just having to memorize the end-result of that process. But that doubtless reflects my own intellectual shortcomings: as I said, many of my teachers did not consider me quite worth educating ...

 

Ah, the old "Teacher Problem". I know it well. I think society threw our intellects away when it sent us to these schools. They made us mule-haul some things through our left brains when our right brains would just let them pour in.

 

Sometimes you need a "bias" sound in order to learn something easily. It seems to be like the "bias frequency" in a tape recorder. I found that if I listened to a Bach fugue, Latin vocabulary would just pour through my eyes and into my memory.

 

How many thousands of years have we been teaching children? We don't know how to do it yet.

 

Paddler

 

[msacco]

I could never figure out how anyone could write italic faster than cursive. Kate, I 've seen you mention this before but I still don't believe it!

I can write italiic but not nearly as fast as I can write cursive. Would love to see a side by side comparison video. if you joining letter in a smooth flowing line, how can any type of printing be faster?

 

Mike S.