Writing in Cursive, Not Taught in Many Public Schools?

[Matthew Lee 1959]

Illinois required cursive a few years ago over the objection of the governor.  I saw a study that learning to play a musical instrument engages so many muscles and parts of the brain that it actually helps people with overall mental sharpness.  I think I have also seen similar studies dealing with cursive handwriting.  It is really sad that my daughter who is a junior in college cannot read my handwriting.  Not because it's unreadable, but because she never learned to be fluent in cursive.

 

We aren't even talking about shorthand, and for the record, I never learned it either.

[TSherbs]

On 3/2/2021 at 1:05 PM, Manuel F said:

I just found out that cursive writing is not taught in the public schools in my state of Pennsylvania, and many other states in the USA. I was shocked, I still am. How can this be?....

 

It can't be true, and it is not. Perhaps you mean that Pennsylvania state board of Education no longer includes cursive instruction as a required standard. 

 

But it cannot be true that there are no districts, no schools, no teachers in Pennsylvania leading this instruction. My wife is an elementary school teacher, and she teaches cursive even though she is not required to do so. She teaches second grade. Other teachers do the same. 

 

I teach high school. A few of my students write in cursive. Most don't. All of them can read it, except for when it is particularly loopy with filigree. And I find that hard to read, too.

 

For some people, formal cursive sucks and is much slower than printing or writing in some ugly hybrid of semi-connected writing.

 

And I know of no studies that link cursive writing (as opposed to printing) to any improved cognition or thinking. A lot of people claim this, but without attribution to any study actually published. If that exists, I would love to read it (I have looked and looked, to no avail. I teach writing.) It seems to be turning out that writing in cursive has no cognitive advantage.

[Manuel F]

39 minutes ago, TSherbs said:

 

It can't be true, and it is not. Perhaps you mean that Pennsylvania state board of Education no longer includes cursive instruction as a required standard. 

 

But it cannot be true that there are no districts, no schools, no teachers in Pennsylvania leading this instruction. My wife is an elementary school teacher, and she teaches cursive even though she is not required to do so. She teaches second grade. Other teachers do the same. 

 

I teach high school. A few of my students write in cursive. Most don't. All of them can read it, except for when it is particularly loopy with filigree. And I find that hard to read, too.

 

For some people, formal cursive sucks and is much slower than printing or writing in some ugly hybrid of semi-connected writing.

 

And I know of no studies that link cursive writing (as opposed to printing) to any improved cognition or thinking. A lot of people claim this, but without attribution to any study actually published. If that exists, I would love to read it (I have looked and looked, to no avail. I teach writing.) It seems to be turning out that writing in cursive has no cognitive advantage.

 

[BaronWulfraed]

5 hours ago, Matthew Lee 1959 said:

We aren't even talking about shorthand, and for the record, I never learned it either.

 

Heh... I used to be able to do Gregg shorthand at 100wpm (high school senior year -- 1976), but my typing transcription rate was only around 25-30wpm.

Even with that, my class notes -- when I took any -- were of the dropped letter style.

evn w tht, m cls nts -- whn I tk ny -- wr of th drpd ltr styl.

[txomsy]

8 hours ago, TSherbs said:

And I know of no studies that link cursive writing (as opposed to printing) to any improved cognition or thinking. A lot of people claim this, but without attribution to any study actually published. If that exists, I would love to read it (I have looked and looked, to no avail. I teach writing.) It seems to be turning out that writing in cursive has no cognitive advantage.

 

Just made a quick check on PubMed:

 

Handwriting: 3,963 results

 

Cursive writing: 127 results (of which the first is titled "Teaching of cursive writing in the first year of primary school: Effect on reading and writing skills")

 

Haven't read any, so probably some will be for and some against. Don't know.

 

When looking for references one should keep in mind terminology too: what one calls "cursive handwriting" others call differently, hence the difference in results above. As far as I know there is not a strict world-wide nomenclature for writing, so finding everything published may be daunting.

 

Script: 9,685 results

 

Of which at least the first articles treat script writing but many rely on other meanings of the word. Words used may matter.

 

Italic writing: 13 results (among them "Influence of increased letter spacing and font type on the reading ability of dyslexic children", though most are spurious hits)

 

And there may be many more articles published not covered in PubMed which, after all, is mainly concerned with Medicine (although in a very, very, very broad sense).

 

The bibliography of these articles should lead to other related ones. E.g. from the one above on cursive I found "Handwriting or Typewriting? The Influence of Pen- or Keyboard-Based Writing Training on Reading and Writing Performance in Preschool Children" which finds advantages in handwriting over typing on action-perception coupling.

 

Still, there are publications. One just has to know how to look for them.

 

[Matthew Lee 1959]

12 hours ago, BaronWulfraed said:

 

Heh... I used to be able to do Gregg shorthand at 100wpm (high school senior year -- 1976), but my typing transcription rate was only around 25-30wpm.

Even with that, my class notes -- when I took any -- were of the dropped letter style.

evn w tht, m cls nts -- whn I tk ny -- wr of th drpd ltr styl.

My mom made a career of being a secretary.  She told me that her shorthand teacher would start talking as soon as she walked through the door and everybody had better be writing down everything said.  I don't know what her transcription speed was, but I do know she averaged 80-100wpm typing.  When she started using computer keyboards, she would have to pause every so often to let the computer could catch up.  One night in high school I was typing a paper and it was taking forever, she got tired of hearing it while she was trying to sleep, so she got up, sent me to bed and a paper I had been struggling with for at least three hours, she knocked out in about twenty minutes, and that was while trying to read my writing, and correcting my grammar.

 

My note taking was whatever I could get down on paper.  There was no real rhyme or reason and barely legible.

[essayfaire]

On 3/3/2021 at 10:31 PM, inkstainedruth said:

Didn't you ever read the old Calvin and Hobbes cartoon about how artists were crazy?   Or as my mother said, "This is why Calvin is the way he is -- his father messes with his head...."  [A friend of my mother's didn't like the strip and used to complain about it just being "one more anthropomorphic animal" -- not realizing for the longest time that Hobbes is a TOY tiger....]

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

But a real philosopher!  I never realized how much my children were influenced by Calvin and Hobbes until I heard them quoting old strips ten years later.

[Pointyscratchy]

Dylan Thomas rhymed about the p51? I know I read that wrong but it got me imagining.The reference I expect was to the dying of the light and us FP people raging against it.He was probably a biro man anyway poets are very unpoetical ie fag in gob rain Mac etc.

 

The essence of the handwriting argument is that it is very human.It's what humans do.When we see stick men on a cave wall it moves us for the same reason.

We can write.

We can use tools.

We can think into the future and remember the past.

We can talk.

We can draw.

 

Perhaps some other things too like programme a computer, but when you get to the more complex things like the phone or computer then these are mankind's achievements and not really human in the same way.Billions of man hours have gone into the iPhone, not to mention someone had to develop plastic and metal and lots of other things too.No one man could ever have done that.Not even an Einstein.So I would argue that to a degree we are just adjuncts to machines that hundreds of collective minds have devised.This idea is depressing, so I believe handwriting still has it's place, if you believe that human beings still have a place.

 

 

[ParramattaPaul]

35 minutes ago, Pointyscratchy said:

I would argue that to a degree we are just adjuncts to machines that hundreds of collective minds have devised. This idea is depressing, so I believe handwriting still has it's place, if you believe that human beings still have a place.

I would offer that it is the machines that are adjunctive since everyone of them, even the wheel, was invented to serve humankind, to make life easier, and to reduce work in some way.  That there are millions of people in today's world (not to mention millinnia of our ancestors) who exist (existed) quite  happily without iPhones, computers, jet aircraft, motorcars, and even steam powered trains seemingly supports my hypothesis.

[txomsy]

Problem is, at some point we stopped making machines to serve mankind, but to increase profits and eliminate labor (from some point of view, humans). We now look to machines to produce "art", talk to us, understand us, design, build... Paul Valéry put it better:

 

Tout homme tend à devenir machine. Habitude, méthode, maîtrise, en fin cela veut dire machine...

 

En verité c'est la machine qui tend à devenir animal...

 

Paul Valéry. Cahiers. La Pléïade, 885, 139

 

This is clearly illustrated by the printing press. Original types were designed to imitate handwriting. With time, we changed from imitating handwriting, accepting variety in scripts, styles, penmanship and characteristics, to imitate machined types (nowadays electronic), seek uniformity, and are losing the ability to read and appreciate the variety that is intrinsic to Life.

 

So, while humans become unable to read old text and machines offer each day a wider choice of scripts/types, who's becoming what? I am tired of the increasingly large amounts of people who claim one should aim to reproduce exactly a reference handwriting style (Spencer's Spencerian, Arrighi's Italic..., Copperplate, down to the ductus, X-height, inclination, spacing, etc..) with uniformity and sticking perfectly to the "ideal" model.

 

Personally, I think it is great time to get back to practice, developing our own styles of handwriting and not worry if they do not look exactly as the model as long as they look "correct", "nice" and readable (for a subjective, animal, organic definition) instead of copy machines.

 

Actually, one only has to look at handwriting of old (even reference scripts) to see how over millenia scribes didn't care about "corrupting" their masters' reference as long as it still looked "good" or "nice" to them. And how it hasn't been a problem for reading (and even appreciating and imitating) them for as long... until now.

[BigBlot]

13 hours ago, Pointyscratchy said:

Dylan Thomas rhymed about the p51? I know I read that wrong but it got me imagining.The reference I expect was to the dying of the light and us FP people raging against it.He was probably a biro man anyway poets are very unpoetical ie fag in gob rain Mac etc.

 

The essence of the handwriting argument is that it is very human.It'st humans do.When we see stick men on a cave wall it moves us for the same reason.

We can write.

We can use tools.

We can think into the future and remember the past.

We can talk.

We can draw.

 

Perhaps some other things too like programme a computer, but when you get to the more complex things like the phone or computer then these are mankind's achievements and not really human in the same way.Billions of man hours have gone into the iPhone, not to mention someone had to develop plastic and metal and lots of other things too.No one man could ever have done that.Not even an Einstein.So I would argue that to a degree we are just adjuncts to machines that hundreds of collective minds have devised.This idea is depressing, so I believe handwriting still has it's place, if you believe that human beings still have a place.

 

 

It's merely that we all stand on the shoulders of those who've come before. If we are fortunate, one day someone will stand on our shoulders as well.

[BigBlot]

36 minutes ago, txomsy said:

Problem is, at some point we stopped making machines to serve mankind, but to increase profits and eliminate labor (from some point of view, humans). We now look to machines to produce "art", talk to us, understand us, design, build... Paul Valéry put it better:

 

Tout homme tend à devenir machine. Habitude, méthode, maîtrise, en fin cela veut dire machine...

 

En verité c'est la machine qui tend à devenir animal...

 

Paul Valéry. Cahiers. La Pléïade, 885, 139

 

This is clearly illustrated by the printing press. Original types were designed to imitate handwriting. With time, we changed from imitating handwriting, accepting variety in scripts, styles, penmanship and characteristics, to imitate machined types (nowadays electronic), seek uniformity, and are losing the ability to read and appreciate the variety that is intrinsic to Life.

 

So, while humans become unable to read old text and machines offer each day a wider choice of scripts/types, who's becoming what? I am tired of the increasingly large amounts of people who claim one should aim to reproduce exactly a reference handwriting style (Spencer's Spencerian, Arrighi's Italic..., Copperplate, down to the ductus, X-height, inclination, spacing, etc..) with uniformity and sticking perfectly to the "ideal" model.

 

Personally, I think it is great time to get back to practice, developing our own styles of handwriting and not worry if they do not look exactly as the model as long as they look "correct", "nice" and readable (for a subjective, animal, organic definition) instead of copy machines.

 

Actually, one only has to look at handwriting of old (even reference scripts) to see how over millenia scribes didn't care about "corrupting" their masters' reference as long as it still looked "good" or "nice" to them. And how it hasn't been a problem for reading (and even appreciating and imitating) them for as long... until now.

When I needed to find a period font, I looked for period gravestones. Monuments tend to endure, and gravestones are the most common monuments with writing. What we see is usually plain and utilitarian. Cursiva is a rather late development, the goal being speed.

 

Unfortunately, there was never an "own" style, or hand, or writing, unless someone happened to be important enough to be a trend setter. Legibility was also a goal, and uniformity was a good way to accomplish that. That uniformity showed up whenever a style became dominate because someone beside the person who wrote it would have to read it, maybe on  the other side of the continent, maybe decades later. I think it was maybe Johnathan Swift who suggested copybooks with lightly formed letters to be traced by students in order for them to learn to write their letters. In other words, to teach uniformity.

[Karmachanic]

2 hours ago, BigBlot said:

When I needed to find a period font

 

For clarity. A font is a subset of a typeface. For example, Helvetica is a typeface. Helvetica bold is a font.

 

As far as 'own style' I follow the advice of Sassoon & Briem in their book "Improve Your Hand-Writing" On the back cover one finds;  "This practical and informative book will help you to improve your handwriting and find a mature and individual style." I leave copperplate to others

 

P.S. In the above there is one typeface and three fonts. 😀

[txomsy]

That was my point. People would learn a hand, but when you see their written works you can see barely anyone followed the reference hand exactly, each one would have differences, variations, parts of the text that would be "better" written than others... Most would slip upwards or downwards on the line, etc... The reference was just so, a guide, not a law cast in stone. Which is how successive scripts developed.

 

I did not mean each developed a master hand used by following students. I meant each person developed their own variation, nobody -but professional teachers- cared about "teaching" or standardizing their hand, and nobody cared much about the hand of others as long as it was readable.

 

Continents? Think empires. Some merchants had to deal with writings from any countries, all over their world, each country often with their own national hand. It was readability that mattered, not sticking to a single style.

 

In Europe you'd have the English Roundhand, French commercial and formal styles, German gothic, about three or four Italian hands, Spanish bastardilla and redondilla, etc... not to mention Hebraic, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabian, and yet they all exchanged goods and notes. There were already too many wars for military supremacy to worry about unifying handwriting. Instead, "educated" people would learn their language, latin, greek and as many other languages as possible, and would know and learn about the different hands, as seen in the  writing textbooks of the time (copybooks often contained a fair number of hands).

 

[ParramattaPaul]

4 hours ago, Karmachanic said:

For clarity. A font is a subset of a typeface. For example, Helvetica is a typeface. Helvetica bold is a font.

If memory serves, it was you who chastised me a few years ago for using 'font' saying that I should have used 'script'.  Is 'script' the correct term?

[Karmachanic]

13 minutes ago, ParramattaPaul said:

If memory serves, it was you who chastised me a few years ago for using 'font' saying that I should have used 'script'.  Is 'script' the correct term?

 

 I have no memory of said exchange; besides which, "script" is not a term I use to describe either mechanical, or hand written text. So you'd have to come up with a link to get me to fess-up.

 

 

[Aminah]

Yes, I mailed my granddaughter a letter a couple of weeks ago.  Oh, I was so proud for yet another opportunity to practice my everyday penmanship not thinking.  Sure enough, the other day my daughter texts me that baby girl said, "I can not read curse."  She is a first grader in Japan.

 

Oy vey.  Not sure how I want to proceed.  I thought about keep writing to her in cursive but my daughter or SIL would have to read it to her so I guess I will simply typewrite to her.  I feel sad about that.

[Aminah]

On 3/5/2021 at 10:58 AM, Matthew Lee 1959 said:

My mom made a career of being a secretary.  She told me that her shorthand teacher would start talking as soon as she walked through the door and everybody had better be writing down everything said.  I don't know what her transcription speed was, but I do know she averaged 80-100wpm typing.  When she started using computer keyboards, she would have to pause every so often to let the computer could catch up.  One night in high school I was typing a paper and it was taking forever, she got tired of hearing it while she was trying to sleep, so she got up, sent me to bed and a paper I had been struggling with for at least three hours, she knocked out in about twenty minutes, and that was while trying to read my writing, and correcting my grammar.

 

My note taking was whatever I could get down on paper.  There was no real rhyme or reason and barely legible.

Hats off to Mamma.  This made me smile.  I suppose I did as she . . . made being a secretary (oh, yeah, they called it Administrative Assistant-rolling my eyes) as well.  I can relate to all that you wrote.

[txomsy]

12 hours ago, Lyric said:

Oy vey.  Not sure how I want to proceed.  I thought about keep writing to her in cursive but my daughter or SIL would have to read it to her so I guess I will simply typewrite to her.  I feel sad about that.

If you could:

 

Would you buy her books to learn/love reading? Or rather let her only use tablets to see YouTube videos? Learn to take notes or to just leave the cell phone mic open? Which would you think would be better for her future?

 

There you have it.

 

Mind you, I was an early technology adopter. But no matter how much I tried, I can always locate information faster in written text than on a YouTube video (though it is more comfortable). When I was a kid, my parents thought it might be a good idea to learn shorthand so I could take notes faster.

 

When she grows, and she goes to a meeting, she will surely record all of it (even if only for proof), but when she needs to refer to the meeting for anything what will be faster /more efficient for her, looking at the full video, reading a transcription or looking at some quick notes of the relevant points?

 

Ask yourself that and you'll get your answer. That her mom has to read them will impress on her the sense she needs to learn cursive. It will likely associate cursive with old ways, which may be good or not. Again, ask yourself what do you think will be better for her.

 

Me, I do not have a single answer.

[Pointyscratchy]

Good range of views.Regarding correct word usage I am always keen to learn.Font is a subset of typeface.

 

I misuse words all the time borrow instead of lend probably the one I get wrong most often but there are habitual others.

 

Are script and hand interchangeable- miniscule and lowercase?

 

The other thing  about words is that they change.The young say wicked or sick when they mean good.In the bible the word decimated- our teacher told us this had meant one in ten but now means nine in ten.

 

We also tend to use obtuse words less, like stammerers who avoid certain triggers, part of me thinks what a great excuse to use pummelgate- not much call for a word like that but in reality we'd all switch it for an easier word or phrase.For example I either say joined up writing or, cursive it means joined up writing.(logically shouldn't  it should have something to do with swearing).Melodic writing would be better.