Cursive Writing

[xi_o_teaz]

I want to seriously slap the bitch that invented this horribly inefficient method of communicating. You sacrifice a small gain in speed for the writer only to have the reader wonder WTF language it's in. I see about 9 different consonants and 3 different vowels, is this in Hawaiian or something

Comments

[unknownbinaries]

LOL.

Somewhere along the line I smushed the two methods together, wherever efficiency merits one over the other. I got in trouble for it in grade school, but it made my notes in college pretty readable, if tiny. (Inexplicable tendency to write smaller and more cramped-together, the more 'into' writing down whatever it is I get. My mom says I write in hummingbird.)

Also, my signature looks more like the trails left in an atom smasher than anything like a language.

[xi_o_teaz]

LOL

I was a straight A student up until high school (as hard as that is ;-), but I always got poor marks for Handwriting. Before I had even gotten to middle school, I basically had permission from all of my teachers to write normally (I forgot the term for non-cursive). Sure, there's a little drag between the letters sometimes, but they are still infinitely more legible.

I just have problems with things like the fact m's, n's, r's look so similar. Is that an "ol" or a "d"? A's and s's look almost identical, etc. ad nauseum.

BTW, my data entry job is converting my boss' cursive city names to text. Other than trying to decipher these, I'm rather enjoying this work. Thank the gods for Google Maps: "Did you mean ________?"

Why yes, I suppose I did. Thanks again, Google.

[primaldog]

Haha. I never had a problem with it though. I write in cursive more often than I write in print or anything else. I have to actually condition myself to print my words when I write them by hand, when I need to. I much prefer cursive, though. I've also never had a problem with reading it either, but maybe that's because I've written in it for so long.

[kaidevis]

If people actually learned penmanship, it wouldn't be an issue. Ever seen the handwriting of our grandparents' generation? And at that point it was already starting to slip. Nowadays most people barely manage legible printing; they have none of the control required for legible cursive. Which is sad, because one of the reasons cursive hung on for so long beyond the death of the quill pen is that, when your penmanship is well-honed, it's not just "a small gain in speed" -- it's a massive gain in speed.

Of course, all that said, I almost never write in cursive myself. I appreciate fine penmanship even if my own cursive is a little ratty.

[xi_o_teaz]

Ever seen the handwriting of our grandparents' generation?

As it happens, this rant came from my doing the temp-job at data entry. The cursive I was ranting about was from my boss, who is in his 60's. But I know what you're getting at ;-)