Is Cursive Writing No Longer Essential in Indiana Schools?

[GeorginaS]

While my penmanship with both printing and cursive writing has always wildly sucked, and frequently I can't even read what I've written down, I've been a bit perplexed by people saying that they've learned how to write (cursive) at one point in their lives and have now forgotten. Really? It's so ingrained in my mind, it's akin to walking; I just can't imagine forgetting how to do it.

About it disappearing, does it matter? I think it should be taught, if for no other reason, so that people can continue to read it. There's so much history that's pen on paper that I think it's a valuable skill, still. In another fifty or so years, maybe not required to widespread. I think there's value in that.

And I think there's value in knowing how to produce written communication without the aid of computer-type-thing. I'm thinking of deserted on islands and needing to write a message in the sand sort of situations. I don't think that it needs be cursive writing, but some method of getting a message set down all on one's own I think is a valuable skill.

 

[Drakkith]

Writing will never go away in my opinion. Print on paper is nearly identical to how it is on a computer or newspaper or book. So I don't think we have to worry about that. And I don't see any reason why we should keep Cursive around. What realistic scenarios are you going to be in that require you to read cursive? If you are in a job or position where you need to look at letters or documents that have cursive, then you will probably learn it for that position/job, just like people do for different languages. And learning to read cursive is much much easier than learning another language. There are only about 52 different characters to learn and they are put together identically to non cursive.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I'm sure there was the same rucus when cuneiform was replaced, and the switch from hieroglyphs most certainly must have caused an uproar. It's obsolete, time to let go. If you want fancy stuff, learn caligraphy.

The problem with this view is that cursive isn't supposed to be a fancy way of writing. It's supposed to be easier than printing, the connecting of the letters, and their change from characters that need so many separate strokes when printed, to shapes that are described in a continuous motion, being a faster, more natural hand motion. In other words, cursive, itself, was a surrender to speed and sloppiness in the beginning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive

People's inability to get the hang of it must be stemming from some erroneous notion on the part of todays teachers that it's a "fancy" way of writing, hence gratuitous trouble for appearances sake.

So, this whole thing bothers me because it suggests that teachers don't know what they're teaching or why they're teaching it. Formal typing lessons will be the next to go, by this logic, because figuring out your own hunt-and-peck system is easier in the short term. The trouble of learning the faster formal method will be seen as unnecessarily burdensome.

 

[Evo]

The problem with this view is that cursive isn't supposed to be a fancy way of writing. It's supposed to be easier than printing, the connecting of the letters, and their change from characters that need so many separate strokes when printed, to shapes that are described in a continuous motion, being a faster, more natural hand motion. In other words, cursive, itself, was a surrender to speed and sloppiness in the beginning.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive

People's inability to get the hang of it must be stemming from some erroneous notion on the part of todays teachers that it's a "fancy" way of writing, hence gratuitous trouble for appearances sake.

So, this whole thing bothers me because it suggests that teachers don't know what they're teaching or why they're teaching it. Formal typing lessons will be the next to go, by this logic, because figuring out your own hunt-and-peck system is easier in the short term. The trouble of learning the faster formal method will be seen as unnecessarily burdensome.

The wiki example shows how wiki can get it wrong thanks to someone uploading examples without knowing the subject, they don't even show an example of standard cursive. The subject title is cursive, the example is D'Nealian. All I remember is all of the ridiculous frills, curliques, peaks, and unnecessary flourishes. If it had just been a way to write quickly and easily, that would have been great, instead it was a nightmare of trying to match unnecessary flourishes. I can't tell you how many hours my teacher would make me re-do my small cursive r.

The wiki example you show is not real cursive, it's is called D'Nealian, a combination of cursive and block print, look at the wiki r http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cursive.svg and compare it to standard cursive http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/cursive/cursive-r.pdf

The wiki example is a modernized version of cursive called D'Nealian, I'm not familiar with it, it wasn't introduced until 1978. This is cursive lower case

http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/cursive/cursive-a-z.pdf

upper case
http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/cursive/cursive-az-capital.pdf

This is D'Nealian http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian

 

[BobG]

The beauty of cursive writing is that you only had to follow the standard style (which was the Palmer method when I was in grade school) until you were out of elementary school.

After that, you were free to customize your handwriting style as you saw fit, as long as it was still readable. My dad preferred sharp angles in his letters, while my mom preferred lots of rounded letters.

I tended to lose a lot of the little extraneous loops on a lot of the capital letters, but adopted the bigger Spencerian loops my mom used on her B's, D's, R's, and P's. Yet, I also adapted my Dad's almost minimalist T's and F's, which looked almost more like 7's than T's or F's (with the horizontal line to differentiate between the T and the F). Later on, when I started drawing horizontal lines on my 7's, it occurred to me how similar my Dad's captial T's and F's were to 7's and I reverted back to the more standard T's and F's of the Palmer method, except I kind of lost the sharp corners on them. I also copied my dad's capital G's, which are a lot sharper on the bottom instead of rounded. Eventually, the rythym of writing cursive letters was more important than the flourishes or the non-flourishes (I always hated capital H's and K's because they just never quite fit in the rythym of my writing.)

 

[Evo]

The beauty of cursive writing is that you only had to follow the standard style (which was the Palmer method when I was in grade school) until you were out of elementary school.

After that, you were free to customize your handwriting style as you saw fit, as long as it was still readable. My dad preferred sharp angles in his letters, while my mom preferred lots of rounded letters.

I tended to lose a lot of the little extraneous loops on a lot of the capital letters, but adopted the bigger Spencerian loops my mom used on her B's, D's, R's, and P's. Yet, I also adapted my Dad's almost minimalist T's and F's, which looled almost more like 7's than T's or F's (with the horizontal line to differentiate between the T and the F). Later on, when I started drawing horizontal lines on my 7's, it occurred to me how similar my Dad's captial T's and F's were to 7's and I reverted back to the more standard T's and F's of the Palmer method, except I kind of lost the sharp corners on them. I also copied my dad's capital G's, which are a lot sharper on the bottom instead of rounded. Eventually, the rythym of writing cursive letters was more important than the flourishes or the non-flourishes (I always hated capital H's and K's because they just never quite fit in the rythym of my writing.)

Death to cursive!

I think most people ended up creating their own writing style. As long as it's legible, I'm ok with it.

 

[zoobyshoe]

The wiki example shows how wiki can get it wrong thanks to someone uploading examples without knowing the subject, they don't even show an example of standard cursive. The subject title is cursive, the example is D'Nealian.

There is no "standard" cursive. You might be thinking of The Palmer Method that BobG mentions, but that was not the "standard", merely the most popular during a given time frame. Before that the very fancy Spencerian method was, apparently, the most popular. At the present time, D'Nealian is, apparently, the most popular. They're all cursive.

I wasn't taught Palmer. I don't remember the name of our system but it was adopted by the School Sisters of Notre Dame after much deliberation on their part. We did not write the same way as the public school kids in our town. This was in the 1960's.

All I remember is all of the ridiculous frills, curliques, peaks, and unnecessary flourishes. If it had just been a way to write quickly and easily, that would have been great, instead it was a nightmare of trying to match unnecessary flourishes. I can't tell you how many hours my teacher would make me re-do my small cursive r.

You're not against cursive, you're against OCD penmanship. It does defeat the purpose if you push people beyond legibility into time consuming perfectionism.

But, you'd have had the same bad experience with block printing if there had been no cursive for the OCD teachers to focus on.

Because: there's no limit to how well a person can print. The standard level of rigor in block printing required from a drafting student back in the day, for example, was far in excess of what the average non-drafting student had to be able to produce:

Scroll down to fig. 22:
http://www.kellscraft.com/EssentialsofLettering/EssentialsofLetteringCh02.html
The lines, "The ability to letter well can be acquired only by persistent and careful practice..." and the rest in that figure were lettered by hand. (Lots of people used to be able to do this. It was a standard skill for draftsmen and graphic artists.)

Teachers lavish the discipline on cursive because they don't expect people will be doing much printing. Cursive gets the reputation of being harder. In the absence of cursive I'm sure we would have been drilling for more perfect printing.

I don't think, though, that better printing is going to result from dropping cursive at this point in time because the point is really to drop the associated penmanship. I think the ubiquitous keyboard will kill handwriting. When you can type faster with your two thumbs than you could ever write by hand, what's the point?

The wiki example you show is not real cursive, it's is called D'Nealian, a combination of cursive and block print, look at the wiki r

No, you misread that. It's not a combination. There is a D'Nealian cursive and a D'Nealian block printing. Two separate things.

 

[Studiot]

Why does everything have to have fancy titles these days?

My primary school maths exercise book had 'sums' on the front.

My English book had 'writing' - which we called 'loops and joins' and is now apparently called cursive.

One school I went to had special paper, bit like music paper, but with four unevenly spaced lines for teaching loops and joins.

 

[Evo]

You're right zooby.

It also appears Zaner-Bloser is just as (un)popular as D'Nealian.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/ZanerBloser-Announces-Top-16-prnews-159878856.html?x=0

According to this, the two both claim 40% of the handwriting book market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penmanship#Books_used_in_North_America

Zooby, if you went to a Catholic School you might have been taught Zaner-Bloser from what I read about Catholic schools back when you were in school. I was taught Cursize from Hell, which is the type in my link.

 

[Antiphon]

I can't wait until the kids no longer read cursive. Then I can tell them what I think the world's great political and historical documents contain.

Edit: let's get rid of the multiplication tables while we're at it. Don't we all use computers and calculators anyway? 2nd graders have so many more pressing things to learn.

 

[Jack21222]

I can't wait until the kids no longer read cursive. Then I can tell them what I think the world's great political and historical documents contain.

Edit: let's get rid of the multiplication tables while we're at it. Don't we all use computers and calculators anyway? 2nd graders have so many more pressing things to learn.

Are you seriously suggesting a 4th grader would be able to understand the constitution if only they were able to read it firsthand? I'VE never read the script version of the constitution. And then you're comparing multiplication, which everybody uses every day, with reading and writing cursive, which I haven't done in 10 years?

Was this supposed to be satire?

 

[Jimmy Snyder]

I can't wait until the kids no longer read cursive. Then I can tell them what I think the world's great political and historical documents contain.

Like the Magna Carta?

 

[zoobyshoe]

Zooby, if you went to a Catholic School you might have been taught Zaner-Bloser from what I read about Catholic schools back when you were in school. I was taught Cursize from Hell, which is the type in my link.

That Zaner-Bloser is also not what we were taught. The Capitol P and R are especially different from ours. All I remember is that they said they had spent considerable time deliberating over which system to teach and had chosen ours as "the best". They only mentioned that at all to quell our suspicions when it came out we weren't being taught the same cursive as our parents had learned, or as the kids who went to public school. If they told us the name of our system I don't remember it.

I haven't found anything online that completely matches our method.

Your cursive does look unnecessarily flourish-y compared to ours.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Are you seriously suggesting a 4th grader would be able to understand the constitution if only they were able to read it firsthand?

I think the point is that if someone can't read something and you can, you can tell them it says anything you want. The broader point being that the less you, yourself, can do, the more dependent you are on the good faith of "experts".

 

[Jack21222]

I think the point is that if someone can't read something and you can, you can tell them it says anything you want. The broader point being that the less you, yourself, can do, the more dependent you are on the good faith of "experts".

Alright, are YOU suggesting that if cursive writing isn't taught in 3rd grade, then nobody will learn it? Or do you feel Antiphon was suggesting that?

Why not make that a high school elective? Or a topic in English 101 in college? Or just something people self-study if they're interested in it?

Honestly, I've never read the original constitution, or any other original historical document. I've only read "experts" who copy it down in book or electronic form. I fail to see how knowing cursive would have changed that.

 

[Antiphon]

Zooby has my point. And yes, very few adults will learn it. It's just not a good idea to lower basic literacy standards.

The components of literacy include
-spelling
-comprehension
-vocabulary
-reading/writing

The argument is "who uses it anymore? It's deprecated anyway so let's toss it."

Why doesn't the same logic apply to vocabulary? How many words are not in common use? Can't we afford to skip those too?

 

[Jack21222]

Why doesn't the same logic apply to vocabulary? How many words are not in common use? Can't we afford to skip those too?

YES we can afford to skip those, and we DO. Rare vocabulary words ARE NOT TAUGHT in primary nor secondary school. The only "esoteric vocabulary" instruction you'll find is people studying for the SAT. In college, you might find some people studying vocabulary words for the GRE.

Rarely-used words are simply not taught in school, nor should they be. It's nice to see you agree.

 

[Antiphon]

The ideas not mine; I got it from George Orwell.

 

[Integral]

I keep wondering if typing will soon be obsolete due to voice recognition software.

I too have virtually lost my cursive skills - or any writing skills beyond the chicken scratching that only I can read. On the up side, if someone ever steals my notes it will do them no good.

I certainly have not lost MY cursive skills. Ok, the fact that no one, including me, has ever been able to read my cursive , makes it hard to gauge.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Alright, are YOU suggesting that if cursive writing isn't taught in 3rd grade, then nobody will learn it? Or do you feel Antiphon was suggesting that?

Why not make that a high school elective? Or a topic in English 101 in college? Or just something people self-study if they're interested in it?

If it's not required in school I doubt a very large percentage will volunteer to learn it, yes.

Honestly, I've never read the original constitution, or any other original historical document. I've only read "experts" who copy it down in book or electronic form. I fail to see how knowing cursive would have changed that.

He is not talking about the constitution. He pulled that example out of the air to represent any document in cursive that might be important to someone to read. In realistic terms this might be old family letters, for example. If no one reads cursive but specialists, you're going to have to pay to have them transcribed, and you're going to have to trust the person didn't do a sloppy job.

 

[Evo]

I don't find it impossible to read cursive without spending years perfecting it.

I can read middle english without having studied it, even though there is little to distiguish between s's and f's. Not to mention archaic uses of words.

 

[Proton Soup]

i would continue to teach cursive if only for the art. but maybe not the nazi cursive that evo learned. we could save the nazi stuff for grade 3 touch typing class.

 

[zoobyshoe]

I don't find it impossible to read cursive without spending years perfecting it.

You could learn it, yes, but don't under estimate how years of reading cursive puts you in a better position to read anyone's cursive, even when it's not so legible. Someone who teaches themselves to read cursive out of a book is going to find each new example a kind of baffling new code in and of itself. Something akin to learning a foreign language from a book and then being baffled by the way native speakers actually pronounce it.

 

[ideasrule]

I had to learn cursive in grade 4, but could never write faster in cursive than I could normally. After that, the only times I've needed the skill was when teachers wrote comments in either chicken scratch or cursive, or maybe a combination of the two, and I somehow couldn't ask them to explain. In other words, I never needed it. (Incidentally, reading the U.S. constitution is not one of the tasks I need cursive for. I can read the original documents just fine: http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads.html)

A typing class would have been much more helpful IMO. Until grade 9, my way of typing involved striking shift and the spacebar with 1 finger and the rest of the keys with another. That was obviously slow as hell. Measured on a utility/class basis, the grade 9 typing classes were the most helpful I've ever taken in any school.

 

[lisab]

Oh, it will be so cool if they stop teaching cursive! Then all us old folk can write to each other in a code no one else can read! Our own secret language !



Nevermind that we have nothing much to be secretive about that's completely irrelevant.

 

[Zantra]

I guess I'm in the minority, but I see this as a bad thing. I grew up learning cursive, and had to use it basically all the through school, and pretty much up until college, I had to use it. When I was in school the perception was always pretty much that non-cursive was the "lazy" way to write, and cursive was the elegant, fluid, educated way to write.

Does it actually help you write faster? probably not. But it is somewhat of an artform. I did practive, and to this day I have to write excruciately slow in order to make it come out not looking like chicken scratch. but It's something worth keeping. Some day some archeologist may scratch his head at our cursive and it will have become "heiroglyphs"

 

[BobG]

It's a lot eaiser to write cursive in the snow than it is to print in the snow.

 

[dlgoff]

It's a lot eaiser to write cursive in the snow than it is to print in the snow.

You dog you (respectfully speaking). I know exactly what you mean. Been there done that.

 

[Geezer]

Now my biggest problem is spelling since I heard things differently and phonics made no sense.

I was reading at age 3, and I still had significant trouble with phonics. What a complete waste of time.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Not just voice recognition software, but the ability to search for spoken words/word combination and to cross reference to other spoken word sequences, etc and do it as fast, or faster, than computers handle numbers/words now. In other words, the ability to create an organized database of spoken words so no "written" records have to be kept at all.

That would be an interesting development if technology made written language, itself, obsolete, seeing as how written language was the key to so much of our technological development.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE

 

[dlgoff]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hShY6xZWVGE

Love it. Go Scotty go.

 

[moa_osen]

I've had several professors who won't accept hand written papers unless they are in cursive without errors. Writing things without my computer helps me with better spelling in the long run and makes me a little more diligent; I tend to write in a really sloppy manner when I am on a computer and make really embarrassing grammatical mistakes. Penmanship is good in a classroom situation, and I prefer to do proofs by hand and not on a program-- and cursive makes it look so darn good.

 

[jtbell]

I can't see written word ever being completely replaced by spoken word. I MUCH prefer reading to listening, especially with large documents, and I know a lot of people who would agree.

Consider the hearing-impaired, for whom reading versus listening is not a matter of mere preference.