Learning to write

[anghara]

I tripped over an article recently where a school in Indiana became the latest edcuational instution to abandon the teaching of "cursive", electing to concentrate instead on the students' proficiency on a computer keyboard

Comments

[seawasp]

Well, I guess I'm not human. They forced me to learn cursive, and what I learned was that it was the only subject I nearly failed, and there was a reason they call it "CURSE-ive". I never did learn to write it well enough that anyone could READ it without effort. And that included me.

Now I can type new fiction at 1200 words per hour, and just type words in general at 60+wpm when I get going. I do not, however, write by hand except when I must; it's painful, and painfully slow, and I consider the use of non-printing writing to be a complete archaism. Cursive is almost ALWAYS harder to read. It does look prettier than most people's printing, but that's about its only virtue, and I will shed no tears for it when it's gone.

[anghara]

I can type fast, too. That isn't the point. I don't write fiction out in longhand before I type it, but I know writers who do, and who claim that they THINK differently - more slowly, more discerningly - when they are writing out the words by hand, and the kind of prose that comes out is very different to the stuff they could produce if they just typed it in.

Yes, it's harder to read. Well, waaah. When I say "cursive" I literally mean "handwriting", and not "elegant copperplate". I don't expect anybody in this day and age to cultivate THAT kind of handwriting. I have enormous difficulty reading my own mother's handwriting, sometimes, especially when she's scribbled something down in a hurry. But that isn't the POINT. The point is that we all know how to write, and would be able to function in a computerless society without keyboards if all we had was pencil and paper. What will the Keyboard Kids do when they don't have a keyboard in front of them?

Not TEACHING writing... is still beyond my understanding.

[seawasp]

Well, if *I* had to write longhand again, I would stop writing. It's far too painful now that I know the RIGHT way to write, which involves a keyboard. I stopped writing longhand when I got a typewriter, an old cast-iron bugger that literally cut through the paper with its O's and P's and so on.

Insofar as what the Keyboard Kids will do -- they're still teaching PRINTING, which is generally vastly more legible than cursive, and not really that much slower for the kinds of things you're likely to need to write when there isn't a keyboard (grocery list, quick note of a number or something). The Keyboard Kids will, in general, NEVER be without a keyboard, anyway. Hell, *I* am two generations back from the current group and *I* am hardly ever without a keyboard.

Wondering what I'd use in a computerless society is like wondering what I'd use in a society without electricity. If it gets to that point, I'm probably dead already.

[mmy_me]

I find it oddly comforting that our country school term reports include a section on handwriting, and the kids practice it every day. both girls have massively improved their writing since we moved out here, their hand is definitely more legible than mine some days.
However, YoungerM is now practicing touch typing on her own, as she was very interested to hear me that my fingers can keep up with my brain when I'm typing but not when I'm writing longhand.
I'm with you on the letters, though. there's something very personal and intimate about a hand-written letter. It's a keepsake, unlike an email.

[barbarienne]

My fingers can keep up whether I write by hand or by keyboard. I do both regularly, so I expect it's simply practice keeping my neural pathways ready. But more of my writing is on keyboards, and I think my facility for writing extended digressions without losing track of the main sentence is better on keys than with a pen.

(That's why I prefer a pen for composing fiction, perhaps--one should avoid a lot of digressions in most fiction.)

Nonetheless, I confess I don't write in real cursive. I never liked it, and didn't see the use of it when one had straightforward, more-legible, print handwriting available. In the era of the ballpoint, print was as easy as script; and with the advent of the razor-point (huzzah, the late 70s), print was definitely better than script, which required one to sometimes push the wrong direction on those fragile nibs, inexorably reducing them to broken fuzzy bunches of nylon fiber

[barbarienne]

Oh, also, recognizing the handwriting. It's like recognizing someone's face. My sister's bubbly handwriting. A friend's handwriting that is Catholic School Standard. Another friend's elegant, spidery script with exuberant ascenders and descenders and use of a European-style numeral 1 that always looks like a 7 to me. My best friend's writing, all short, separate strokes that look as if she chopped them into the page with a knife.

Even my father's letters, always typed, never handwritten--but typed on an electric typewriter, not printed from a computer. Every typewriter has subtle quirks, and Dad's was no different--I could tell when he got a new one one year while I was at college.

On the internet, you need to look at headers. In handwriting, the writing itself reminds you constantly who is speaking. I see their face and hear their voice in a way that is dimmer when reading a blog or an email.

[heleninwales]

How many of today's grandparents communicate via computer?

More than you would think, actually. Many of them taught by me. :)

With families scattered all over the globe, grandparents use email, Skype, Facebook etc to keep in touch.

With regard to cursive, I don't feel very strongly either way. I have two forms: messy scrawl that I can barely read a day or so later and my Neat Writing. It's as though they come from different parts of the brain. Though I mostly type story first drafts, if something isn't flowing, I often find that going back to fountain pen on paper will unstick it.

However, my husband (now 60) has never written in what you would call a proper cursive style, yet he hand writes quite a lot of student reports, feedback sheets etc.

[joycemocha]

There are kids who can't read cursive. Period.

Some parents want them to do that, but won't teach it. Others rejoice.

Others cultivate a lovely Italic hand. One reason cursive stopped being taught was that US teachers were over-the-top strict about it at one point, to the degree that left-handed kids were forced to change to right-handed writing. Plus kids with reading challenges or handwriting challenges end up not improving no matter how hard you ding them on cursive. Or they view cursive as a form of art and draw their words rather than write them...and have no idea of what the words they wrote mean.

I tend toward the teaching of an Italic cursive, myself. Classic cursive handwriting never came to me, much to the despair of my teacher mother, whose own copperplate handwriting could have served as a teaching template for it. I didn't achieve readability until I learned the Italic cursive variant in high school. The arthritis that now impairs my fingers was already rearing its ugly head then. Italic's easier on them.

[dr_pretentious]

I have a tutoring student now who can't read cursive, and his inability to read my very print-y italic longhand has moved me to vow I'll teach my own kids cursive. They don't have to be great at it, they don't have to stick with it, but they must get far enough with writing it to have a durable skill at reading it.

I wonder whether the disappearance of this early fine motor training from our schools will be reflected in less capable surgeons when this generation's doctors are done training. Somebody ought to do a study.

[joycemocha]

Handwriting is not the only form of early fine motor training nor is it particularly the most crucial. Most of the non-cursive-reading students I've encountered have had learning disabilities and I doubt they could have read it easily (if at all) even in the era where cursive training was ubiquitous.

I think the study's been done and the verdict is that there's not a correlation. I seem to recall allusions to it.

[joycemocha]

Also, for many students with autism (as an example), while they can write beautiful cursive, it's very slow and difficult. Reason why is that they view cursive as artwork, not communication, and they're drawing their cursive, not writing.

(the argument of disappearance of fine motor training was also around when ball points appeared vis a vis fountain pens. I also have a student who can't read very well but has a very lovely cursive hand. Rife with misspellings, but it's a lovely cursive lacking meaning)