If you do a lot of writing by hand, cursive is a lifesaver.
Nope.
Legibility > speed.
Only if you suck at cursive. Depending on how much effort I put in, both my cursive and print writing can look nice, but writing cursive causes mess stress over time. If I’m just jotting a quick note it doesn’t matter and both look like ass, but if I’m taking notes for lecture or in a D&D campaign or something like that, where I’m writing a bunch over an hour or more, I see a huge drop off in quality after a bit of time when writing print.
My mother sucks at cursive then. I have to constantly call her when I do her shopping. If it was for personal notes, it wouldn’t matter, but if you’re communicating with other people, it’s terrible.
Some people just have terrible hand writing, cursive or not
Yeah, but I don’t know anyone whose cursive is more legible than their printing.
Sure, but cursive is still faster. So legible cursive is a good compromise.
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It’s selfishness. Your mother wants to save herself time by writing the quick way, and doesn’t care if it costs you more time.
Only if you suck at cursive.
I do, because despite all the work I put into it the letters all blur together. I forget a hump or two whem writing something like communication in cursive, and no amount of practice made a difference.
I can generally read poorly written cursive more easily than well done cusrive because I recognize which letters tend to be skewed. My father in laws lwriting was easier for me to read as his arthritis got worse!
But printed letters are always easier to read, which is why nobody uses cursive fonts when they type something up.
Meh, my handwriting sucks either way…
Mine is that of a child. It’s embarrassing.
I can read my own cursive just fine, and it’s way easier to write than printing each letter individually.
Once you’re good at it you can have both…
Nah, even my wife’s well written cursive is hard for me to read because similar letters like n, m, u, and r tend to blemd together for me.
Hell, I find all cursive fonts difficult to read and those are extremely consistent.
No matter how you slice and dice it cursive is harder to read than print.
Not necessarily, unless you just never learned it.
Well if you’ve never learned it then you won’t be able to read it at all.
There is nothing controversial here. It’s harder to read than print. Which is exactly why you don’t see cursive fonts.
I didn’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under, but you’re wrong.
Oh wow. You got me champ. You found a font in the world.
Now tell me this. When was the last time you saw someone use cursive fonts? Read any papers lately with cursive font? Any articles using the font? Anything at all?
Nope. Didn’t think so.
I learned cursive and school and it’s still harder to read than print. Is it impossible? No. But it’s definitely not the same as reading print. It doesn’t take a genius to understand this.
Maybe in some cases, I remember struggling in school to write fast enough to finish exams in time and also keep it readable.
I know this a quality vs quantity issue. Yet there are doctors who write scribbles and considered a real writing style. Lookup Gregg shorthand
I think the part of the intention there is obscuring what they’re writing to some degree.
It’s the only thing that keeps my chronic tendinitis from making me unable to write altogether
I switched schools for high school after being in a British private school since the first grade. I was shocked at seeing anyone write in block print for the first time. Up until then I genuinely thought that cursive was the only way to hand-write and that block was reserved for little kids just learning to write.
EDIT: That school even had a calligraphy class that taught us how to write with a fountain pen. I have no idea what world they were preparing us for.
I learned cursive in Canada after living in the UK for a while. When I went back to the UK and went to Sheffield everyone was like, “he knows how to do the joint up writing!” I can’t remember the exact year but we were going to start preparing for our GCSEs. Then I left again and went back to Canada.
I am American but I spent my childhood in the Caribbean. My mom wanted to make sure I had a good education so she enrolled me in a private school started and run by a posh British couple to educate the children of the expats stationed there back when agricultural exports were big business (1950’s??). I think they taught us they way they were taught as children in their preppy schools at the turn of the century.
what do you think about learning cursive and how people don’t use it anymore?
I still love it, I also taught myself calligraphy and bust out a fountain pen when someone asks me to sign a birthday or farewell card :)
Honestly, I don’t think about it much since to me writing cursive is “just how it is”, but I do wonder why they stopped teaching it. It is so much faster for note-taking.
In my high-school’s defense, they did teach us touch typing, which has come in far more handy than cursive.
People got more polite. They wanted their reading to be more legible to others, even if it took a little bit longer.
I’m appalled by the absolute state of these comments. I expected more from what felt like largely a leftist space. more than yearning for ignorance. there’s no space where knowledge is sacred anymore I guess.
good capitalist boy. bark. sit. work your ass off. never learn anything that doesn’t give you immediate practical results, you understand? you’re only to learn things that produce and/or consume. you’re not to enjoy knowledge for the sake of it or anything that might spark creativity. we have AI for creative endeavors. you do the work. don’t wonder. don’t be curious. don’t even think about thinking. does it make money? does it spend money? no? then stop and get fucking back to work.
School as we know it was designed to produce workers, and cursive was a part of that. They taught us cursive because they thought we would need it for work.
cursive != calligraphy
And here i was thinking it was a way to write quickly and neatly
I was born in the 90s and we didnt have computers in school for us to use til I was around 12 or 13? And that was dedicated computer science class, and I went to a school known for math and science.
You needed to write your notes. By thr time I hit 14/15 we had to type our assignments but we were still using notebooks in class.
It was only by the time I hit college that people were using laptops in class.
So up until then, most people were still writing. I still write letters to people I care about - my girlfriend, friends who live far away, etc.
Also consider the vast amount of studies that show that handwriting helps people memorize or learn at a far higher rate than typing does.
Funny enough my younger brother is a good amount younger than me. He grew up with typing, his school gave him a Chromebook to start, laptops in every class, etc. It’s just a difference in what you were taught and why, based on when you grew up. I don’t think anyone expected us to go from n64 to ps4 in less than 20 years. The boom of technology has killed handwriting. But considering that for the longest time tech didn’t advance at the rate that it has been doing since like 2008 or so, it makes sense that people were taught to write. Writing has been around for thousands of years. It’s probably still a skill you want to be able to do, and do legibly
I write by hand so rarely that I just use sans serif.
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If it’s for class notes, then the extra time helps me memorize it better.
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If it’s for someone else, then it will be actually legible.
Cursive users tend to overestimate how legible their handwriting is to others.
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sounds american. in normal countries it’s a way to learn several things, including how to write and read a form of writing, improving fine motor skills, and hopefully being able to write quickly. just because you or anyone else hated it and didn’t bother to get better at it doesn’t mean it was for no reason.
even if so, this has no bearing on my comment which was about people’s complaints about learning things that are not practical. there are people who complain that they had to learn 8 (maybe 9 if they’re old enough) planets in order. oh the horror of knowing which of any two planets is further! multiplication table, probably the single most helpful part of math that helps with quick calculations without assistance? oh no! what about capitals? I can’t put capitals in my excel sheet and earn a bonus!
then people will complain having got to where we are. this is why. because apparently learning anything that you can’t implement in everyday life is a burden.
The problem with memorizing 50 capitals (or anything else useless) is opportunity cost. They could be learning useful things instead.
I think we agree that learning things just for capitalism is bad, but possibly disagree about whether schools are currently doing that by teaching cursive. Anecdotally, I was told that I would need it for work.
what’s useful knowledge to specifically replace 50 capitals?
none of these are specifics, they’re topics. but I didn’t ask for that anyway. i said what’s supposed to specifically replace the 50 capitals. none of these qualify. also “I wish this was taught” isn’t really an argument for something else not to be taught. why not replace something else? what is going to determine the cut?
most of this list is about how things should be taught, by the way. I agree that learning problem solving skills, curiosity and thirst for knowledge and know-how to obtain knowledge is better than learning facts. this doesn’t explain the disdain for basic knowledge about your country, the solar system or the fucking multiplication table.
Any information that’s useful whatsoever? Maybe I’m not understanding your question.
I’d love it if everyone could label a supply and demand diagram, and that’s about as hard as memorizing 50 capitals.
what I’m asking is how you determine what’s useful and what isn’t. unsurprisingly seems to come back to getting a good capitalist boy again.
I think capitalism persists because most people can’t label a supply and demand diagram.
Or maybe cursive just sucks and needs to go away, while all the rest of us choose to value knowledge by learning things that are worth learning.
no it doesn’t and you sound like you’re just annoyed by having to learn it when you didn’t want to. this is the kind of thinking that put comic sans on everything from restaurant menus to legal documents.
Cursive is so bad I would choose Comic Sans over cursive any day. 🤣
well at least you confirmed my point
That’s what art class is for, which includes calligraphy.
There’s a wide gap between only learning practical money producing skills… And trying to include cursive in a list of life/mind expanding knowledge.
It’s just pointless and dumb. It might be faster to write, than normal letting, but for anyone other than yourself, it takes longer to read, as no one actually follows any of the standards. They make up their own shortcuts and it becomes a squiggly mess.
This take is honestly bewildering to me. What do you mean “for no reason”? You learn it to write quickly and legibly. What other option is there? Writing in block letters like a kindergartener?? inb4 “bUt eVeRyThInG iS dIgItAl nOw”. I’m a programmer, about as digital as you can get, and even I whip out the pen and paper for mindmapping and notetaking.
I work in construction. To communicate on site we need to do a lot of quick ugly drawings and writing notes on site in places way too dirty to use a computer. We do it by hand, and of course we write in cursive. I am also extremely bewildered by this post and it comments.
I was told I needed it to communicate and get a job. None of those were true. And I hated the process of learning it.
To be fair, no one can see the future, so there was no way that my teachers could know.
Sometimes life is just shit.
I’m also a programmer, almost all of my note taking is now digital. I have a small scratchpad when thinking things out tactilely, but that needs to be legible to only me for all of an hour, and often is just a few unconnected words
Older Millennial here.
I had to learn cursive, memorize the times table, and know the capital of every god damn state. I had to remember the order of planets. I had to memorize polygon names up to 20 and roman numeral math.
There’s so many things I learned that I don’t use on a day to day. Things I can pull out of my brain but if you made me apply it, I’ll struggle for a bit, and scribble the answer on a piece of paper.
The one time the skills came in handy was when I was crushing a escape room.
I mean, broadly speaking there’s no utility to knowing the planets or their order. There’s no reason to know all the organs in the human body or the capital cities of all the states or the names of a hundred different dinosaurs or the events surrounding WW2.
But some of this stuff is just… fun to know. It gives you a knowledge base that lets you have an intelligent conversation with your peers and answers some broad existential questions about the world around you. And some of it is so foundational to your understanding of reality that - if you leave the teaching to the wrong people - you get some very ugly knock-on effects.
The guy who doesn’t know what roman numerals are is much easier to sucker into a Facebook conspiracy theory when he starts seeing them show up in a conversation between Sovereign Citizens. Knowing times-tables is helpful for that base-line mental math that keeps you from getting scammed by a shady contractor or embarrassed when you try and calculate a tip at a restaurant. Knowing your planets at least blunts some of the absurd “Iranian Drone Mothership Harasses Innocent East Coast Dipshits” headlines CNN has been spewing.
And ffs, people still write things down. Cursive is a faster way to write than print. The whole reason people keep coming back to eInk and other free-hand computer tools stems from the fact that a pen remains mightier than a keyboard in a host of cases.
These are all still important educational touchstones, even if you’re not going back to them every minute of every day.
But some of this stuff is just… fun to know.
except for the part were you go to computer science and are forced to study literature that is gonna be worth 1/3 of your final grade
Maybe you don’t enjoy the process of learning or they’re taught poorly, but it is fun later when you recognize all the references to that literature.
God forbid you learn basic skills and knowledge
Why does every bit of knowledge have to be monetized?
Aren’t you ever curious about things and want to learn them?
Imagine being an adult now and not being able to do basic math. Wouldn’t that be embarrassing?
Memorizing multiplication tables seems weird to me to be on that list. I might not use it every single day, but it comes up often enough that I can’t understand how someone could consider it not a useful thing to know.
There has always been extraneous data in the education system. Holdover from the early years that spawned all the currently studied philosophers maybe. Back then all anyone really needed was the four Rs of reading, ritin, and rithmatick.
I’m a millennial. I was also taught cursive for absolutely no reason.
First of all, why? It’s supposed to be easier/quicker to write things down using cursive but honestly, I can’t understand people’s chicken scratch cursive anyways, so it’s basically meaningless. You might as well give someone a list of scribbles and just have them call you later for what it should say.
That’s basically it. Signatures, sure, maybe, but bluntly, who gives a damn?
Fuck cursive.
Just practice drawing this single letter while I get over my wine hangover for the next 40 minutes. Heaven forbid someone gets bored and acts out.
I can barely read my own cursive if I try to write fast
training fine motor skills at a young age is worth nothing… gotcha :D
There are better ways to accomplish that
might be true… but you don’t learn writing cursive with those ;)
And? Playing games has been a far better use of my time than learning cursive.
Times I’ve written in cursive: nil.
Games I’ve played: more than nil.
I find it quicker to write in a mix of cursive and regular if taking notes
It’s way neater in cursive
Also peoples handwriting skills have absolutely tanked since typing and computers became widespread
If you were writing constantly you generally had decent hand writing. Growing up, when I was really young, like 3 to 6, we were also graded on the legibility when learning to write
You and I have had very different experiences.
Anyone who has written anything for me in cursive, I have had difficulty understanding, or could not decipher what was written.
My cursive skills never really matured, so maybe that’s the problem
Yeah but what life event causes some people to forever write in all capital letters?
Imagine not using the faster, cooler way of writing
Typing?
I don’t have to imagine.
Is it speaking into your phone? Thats what I see the youngins do
I don’t remember the last time I hat to write something on paper except for signatures
I don’t care if anyone learns cursive or not, but I have to say it’s a bit painful to watch people taking twice as long to laboriously print stuff out and TBH I’ve had just as much trouble deciphering some people’s printing as I have someone’s cursive.
Engineer here, that’s why we write everything in sans serif!
Imagine if a profession wrote critically important directions on which lives depend… in illegible chicken scratch. That would be crazy.
I had a coworker who wrote in printing that was so neat, at first glance it looked like it was typed. Apparently she was able to keep up a decent pace as well.
Kinda makes me wonder why he didn’t write that sign in cursive. Kind of a missed oppertunity to accually use it
But then no one would be able to tell what it says
fair, but it would look nice i guess
Then he would have created a reason to use it… Defeating his entire point.
I guess it’s a good thing he wrote it in print. Nobody would’ve been able to read it otherwise.
I have lovely cursive handwriting and I’m proud of it
My handwriting is anal sauce but at least at one point I wasn’t terrible at calligraphy. Those two things are not related skills at all.
I enjoy hand brushed lettering, but I’ve never done calligraphy. Seems to be quite different than just having nice legible handwriting, its a much more structural process, more like drafting than writing
Somewhere in that region, yes. I find it much more of a process of drawing than writing, each individual letter gets specific attention. Maybe if you’ve done it enough you start picking up speed and start thinking about whole words.
It’s beautiful when it’s well done. Almost some sort of graphic art.
I wrote almost exclusively in cursive and it looks just as bad as my non-curskve writing (REALLY bad). Cursive is just so much faster and smother. Don’t gotta lift the pen for each letter.
It took a while to relearn cursive as an adult but it def feels nice and flowy, and switching back to printing feels slower for sure
Plus it saves a lot of time when you’re writing things out by hand, like birthday card wishes, or a diary.
And it wastes a lot of time when the recipient can’t read a god damned thing written down.
That’s their problem at that point lol
As soon as my school said cursive was no longer mandatory, I immediately stopped using it. Garbage, pure garbage. I’ve had a job that involved coming into contact with a lot of papers where people are still choosing to write in cursive, and it is consistently the most unreadable spaghetti I have had the misfortune to look at.
By all means find ways to transcribe old works written in cursive - into print, but stop trying to revive this shitty writing style, it deserves to die.
It lent to faster writing at the time before texting was the thing. Writing out each letter without running into another takes more effort. But yeah, doctors using cursive for prescriptions is a garbage fire.
I know what cursive was for, I was there. Writing something hypothetically faster has no value when the thing written is too illegible to read, which cursive virtually always is. The fact that block writing probably is a little slower to write is exactly what makes it more consistently readable.
Ok calm down. I didn’t invent the thing. Just relaying what I know.
Gen x? No, millennials
were the last Gen to learn cursivelearned cursive tooGen Z here, learned cursive in elementary
Did you learn typing as a Gen Z person? I’m curious as my kids didnt and I taught them myself.
Like typing on a keyboard? Yes, but I had already known how to do so since as long as I can remember so it didn’t make a difference
I don’t think one has to be the last to learn a thing in order to be able to realize how pointless learning it was.
My writing is a combination of print and cursive. It’s nice. Readable and pretty.
My capitals are pretty much the same as printing, the rest is cursive.
My kid is learning it now (UK primary school). His writing is awful because he’s supposed to do it the way he’s taught instead of finding his own way to make it legible. He has a talent for drawing neat little cartoons, so he can clearly manage a pencil, but his writing is near unreadable.
That’s ridiculous. Those small children could be learning something useful like epistemology instead of wasting their time with selfish letters.
My daughter is currently learning it in Canada. And she likes it way more than non-cursive (I dont know how it’s called in english).
Depends on the country
The hell are you talking about? It’s the perfect secret code to keep anything hidden from younger generations. It’s like how manual transmission is the best car security system there is.
Hah! I treat that as a nice side-effect. The primary reason I use cursive in my daily notes (nothing that I’d need another person to be able to read) is convenience and speed.
I do have a decent-looking print handwriting and I use that if shit needs to be legible to anyone else.
