Is cursive handwriting making a comeback? | Hacker News Reader

Is cursive handwriting making a comeback?

washingtonpost.com

20 pointssamclemens46 comments

Who would even think to ask this? It feels like a submarine... and there it is: it's an ad for Handwriting Without Tears, Inc.

(http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html for submarine articles, for those not already familiar with the concept.)

I hope not. Even if it does stimulate motor skills or learning or whatever, I'm sure there are plenty of other skills that do this, and are actually useful at the same time.

This exactly. Print is everywhere, and so long as folks can write print on paper and get ideas across, that is all that is needed. Motor skills can be learned by arts and crafts and cooking and other such things, which have the added benefit of teaching new skills, overlaps with needed skills (art and music both can incorporate some math, for example) and new forms of enjoyment or stress relief.

Cursive with a ballpoint pen feels really different from cursive with a fountain pen. If these schools want to talk about cursive as a form of artistry or individuality, they should get the kids using fountain pens.

You might be interested in this article: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpo...

HN discussion: How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10141874

Edit: formatting

basically true, I didn't really understand my own handwriting and how to write until I switched pens

In Germany they used to use fountain pens in school almost exclusively.

(Not sure if that's still the case. It was up to ten years ago, definitely.)

In Hungary in the 80s, in the first two years we had to use fountain pens as well. Dodgy ones, didn't like it, but now I have my decent collection and I love them.

People still learn cursive writing in .hu, it is much faster writing in that style.

These days ball point pen have become thin enough that cursive writing is not bad or ugly. But children and teachers should be taught not to use a thick ball point pen.

It's not about line width, it's about the amount of pressure one uses to write, and the angle at which they hold the pen.

I write in cursive, and I like it, but I don't think it's important enough to teach in school. There are modern skills we should add to the curriculum; removing non-essential subjects is the only way to make room for new ones.

For what it's worth, the amount of time spent teaching standard cursive is pretty small for kids with decent motor control. If they present it then move on (don't require things be written this way) then I think it can stay in.

Though I suppose it is not essential.

Exactly. Kids spend less time being taught cursive than they do attending music class in primary school. Far less. It's a pretty useful skill so I think it's certainly worthy of that basic investment.

> pretty useful skill

Why is it a pretty useful skill?

Good. Music is far more useful. You can use music skills to play music, which people like to listen to.

I'm not swayed by the arguments. I think legible print handwriting and computer typing is what should be taught.

However, this article is all i've read about the issue so what do I know about it?

My daughter is about to enter school, and i'll let the school system decide whether or not to require her to learn cursive and focus on have her learn more important (in my opinion) things like philosophy, math, computer skills, creative writing, and science.

The most legible handwriting I've ever seen has always been from engineers or mill-wrights, who had to learn and practice a great deal of the block lettering used in mechanical drawing and blueprints.

Most of what little handwriting skill I have left has obvious traits from the mechanical drawing class I took in junior high school. And in comparison to my peers, I'd say my handwriting is pretty darned good. I mostly can't even write cursive letter forms anymore, let alone use cursive for writing.

I learned block writing in drafting class. In high school. Sadly, with CAD, drafting is a skill that's out of date and with it goes block writing.

Comic book letterers perhaps also count?

Based on what I see in my kids elementary school: nope. On the bright side, thanks to smart phones and the relative crappyness of speech recognition, they are excellent typists.

Thanks to smart phones, they are actually pretty terrible typists.

Is cursive an American thing? Wikipedia says I learned 'casual cursive'. I join some letters.

I can't really name anyone that writes in full cursive.

Definitely not. It is a pain in the ass to write discrete characters with a quill or a fountain pen, so it's more of a change over time than geography.

In fact, I find it more interesting to consider when printing (non-joined letters) became acceptable for an educated person. I'd put money it is directly related to ball point pens and pencils.

I expect drafting plays a role; "Engineer handwriting" often actually is "writing in drafting letters," sometimes in a SmallCaps style for lowercase.

Well, cursive was always an approximation of hand-inked separate glyphs and then the printed glyphs. small caps predates lowercase.

In many parts of Europe cursive is the standard form of handwriting. Kids learn to write in cursive first and later they learn "print" letters. Books intended for children who are learning to read are printed in cursive too.

In 2014 I went back to school for a couple of years, and even though everyone had a smart phone and a laptop, at least half of the classes that I took, the professors forbid the use of electronics in class. I had no problem with this because I have been writing in cursive most of my life. But many of the students around me struggle to keep up printing their notes. I think cursive has a place, not just fine motor skill development in children, but also because there are times when you won't have technology. I know everyone writes differently, but I think there is no harm in teaching cursive. Only benefit.

So, maybe, but only because lawmakers won't let it disappear, all based on hazy justifications about brain development and fine motor skills and <insert modern justification for wanting to preserve an old tradition>.

The speed advantage of cursive is mostly wasted if you write by moving your fingers. You constantly have to lift your pen from the paper when you reach the end of your range of motion, so you might as well use a more legible style like italic. To get the most from cursive you need to write using your shoulder muscles, and AFAIK this is never taught in schools. I suspect most people never realize it's possible. I certainly didn't as a child, and therefore cursive seemed like a waste of time.

I hope it. It's an utterly complete waste of valuable education time. Teach them the meaning of money/personal finance, or how circuits/computers work instead.

One thing very few people consider about writing in cursive, is that it is much harder to do if you are left handed. As a left handed person this annoys me.

Ah, but you get your revenge when it's time to write in an RTL script.

Use boustrophedon for equality!

This is something I don't quite understand. I have a hypothesis (based on observational anecdata) that left handed people generally don't use a dynamic tripod pencil grip, often times there is a fair bit of flexion at the wrist which result in the palm going over the wet ink. Otherwise how are RTL scripts (like Arabic and Persian) not encountering similar issues on right handed people? In fact those scripts require joining, and their calligraphy can get incredibly floral.

If we're going to use precious classroom time to teach an extra writing system, it might as well be Teeline shorthand. Basic Teeline isn't much more difficult to learn than cursive, but it's drastically faster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teeline_Shorthand

Teaching handwriting to kids who haven't yet learned keyboarding (or any number of more useful skills) is pretty far up there on the list of the dumbest things ever.

Not at #1, or even especially close, but pretty far up there.

I don't know if the kind of dexterity needed to write can be learned as reliably at an older age. Its also a useful skill for operating in an child's environment you can write a story and draw an illustration for it when you use paper, that's much harder (and not as fun) for a six year old to do on a computer

Point being, they don't need it at all. They can always print.

Cursive writing is a perfectly fine hobby. But make no mistake, that's all it is. It will never again be important as a means of communication or creative expression. As such, it doesn't have a place in primary education where resources and classroom time are always limited.

If you can learn ophthalmic surgery or diamond setting as an adult, you can certainly learn cursive.

I hope so, I write in cursive, and I would like the next generation of my family to read my handwriting. I'm not even that old, and my peers sometimes have a hard time with my handwriting

I honestly don't get why most of my Millenial friends dropped cursive - it's easier to write with...

When I took the SAT they required you to copy a sentence in cursive on the scantron. I don't know cursive so I just scribbled on it. Didn't seem to hurt my grade.

I think that was the sentence where you promise not to cheat.

That is to catch people accused of hiring someone to impersonate them and take the test for them. Where that is suspected, they can make the real person copy the sentence out again in cursive for comparison, on the theory that it's much harder to accurately copy someone else's cursive than their printing.

I wrote an outline and some pseudo-code today (on paper), and I used cursive. However, my handwriting is terrible and has a half-life of 12 hours or so.

Writing in cursive is easier and takes less effort than writing block letters I dont get the antagonism towards cursive writing.

Another win for Betteridge. "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

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