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>To this day (some ~14 years later) the only thing I write in cursive is my name and even that's a stretch, I get the first letter, a distinct letter in the middle/end and call it a day.

It used to be that banks would compare signatures to approve/decline checks. What are checks you ask? Exactly!

It used to be that tellers would compare signatures from the back of your card to the signature you just scribbled on the receipt to ensure it was really your card. (when's the last time if ever someone asked to see the signature on your card or compared the card info to your gov't issued ID?) Now, the PoS units have digital pads for signatures. Has anyone anywhere ever had their digital signature look anything like their written signature? I've never signed a digital pad the same way twice.

Yeah, I can’t remember ever seeing a teller compare my signature but I think I only have written like <10 checks in my life. And I haven’t signed the back of any card in at least a decade if not two.

When depositing checks I receive (rare) I just assume the signature they extract from my cell phone picture is saved but not used/compared. If they did compare my checks would get rejected, my signature is inconsistent.

As for POS systems, I just draw a line. In fact I find it hard to believe it’s worth much given how most people just scribble. I know in credit card disputes they will ask for it but the few disputes I’ve had (and been ruled against even though I’m positive the person paid for and used the services/product) didn’t feel like “if only I had a signature I’d be golden”, I didn’t even build in signature capturing to the in-person payment software, it wasn’t worth it. For 0.01% being lost to fraudulent chargebacks, it would be a huge waste to spent the time/effort/storage to implement signatures.

We've almost come full circle to "place your mark here"

Washington state compares signatures on ballots, and they contact you to verify the ballot if it isn't close enough to what they've got.

NB: WA has universal mail-in voting, so they can easily compare your on-file signature with your signed ballot envelope

Same with Oregon. I’ve wondered about this since my signature is the first letter of my name followed by a random assortment of peaks and valleys.

Illinois too, on the envelope.

> It used to be that tellers would compare signatures from the back of your card to the signature you just scribbled on the receipt to ensure it was really your card.

I'm in my mid-20s.

From the time I signed my first debit card and ID card at around 16 to my driver's license at around 18 my signature already significantly changed, not to mention that I rarely if ever have to physically sign something on paper forms and the like so it's not uncommon for there to be months or even more than a year between signatures. How am I expected to replicate my "signature" almost exactly?

I personally cannot make the same signature twice, it seems it is always different, not just different slopes, but directions and even number of spirals and crosses.

If I write my signature twice in a row it's barely similar.

The last place that actually cared was a bank in India (surprise surprise) but the clerk helpfully turned her monitor around to show me how I had written it previously.

Yep, exact same situation here. Was visiting once and unsurprisingly my signature at 17 didn't match my signature at 10. After trying twice they just showed me what my signature had been and told me to copy it.

It's a good thing that at 10 or 17 you're not able to enter a legally binding contract where signatures would be a thing.

For sure, although the same happened with my Dad. In his case it was more surprising because his job was such that he had to sign paperwork several times every day and so he was very insistent on maintaining a fixed signature, yet his signature too had drifted over the years.

> when's the last time if ever someone asked to see the signature on your card

Recently. One grocery store in Germany usually does that. It may be in part that signing receipts is not common there (vs. entering a PIN) and they're confused by my American debit card.

I'm not sure my scribble on the receipt closely matches the one on my card, but I've never had them object.

Same in the Netherlands. I was asked to compare my signature at IKEA last week.

Personally I usually draw a smiley face or boobs or something on the digital signature inputs. The cashiers look on and laugh because they know the signature is a meaningless anachronism, too.

> It used to be that banks would compare signatures to approve/decline checks. What are checks you ask? Exactly!

I don’t know, in the US checks are so common. Wanna pay a contractor? Checks. Have a HOA account? Checks. Pay the landlord? Checks.

I hated learning cursive in elementary school, was terrible at it unless writing very slowly, and purged it from my skillset as soon as I was allowed to type assignments. And it wasn’t hard to convince teachers to let me type assignments, because my cursive was a combination of plausible motor control issues and malign intent.

Fast forward to college where I took a number of Russian language courses. I had to learn cursive… with Cyrillic script. Reversing my elementary school position, I decided I wanted to be good at cursive in Russian. I never had great motor control, but damned if my cursive writing in Russian wasn’t head and shoulders better than anything I’ve ever written in English!

I have lately thought that maybe I should relearn cursive in English. I like being away from screens and my printed handwriting is pretty slow and ugly. Now cursive seems like a way to do work away from the shackles of my laptop.

Reminds me of the story of Dieter Uchtdorf who lived in post WWII Germany. They were required to learn English, but it didn’t click for him. He loved watching airplanes and decided he wanted to become a pilot. Then he learned that pilots have to speak English. Overnight he learned English. I went on to be the chief pilot of Deutsche Lufthansa.

I was born in the same year and had the same experience on the SAT. When we got to that part, everyone was audibly confused.

In my elementary school we were taught non-slanted cursive, which was billed as more readable but also slower to write. Learning it involved copying text and having it judged, there was hardly any practice in reading cursive writing, maybe 5 birthday cards worth.

Occasionally there would be an old-fashioned teacher who would write on the board in cursive, and I'd just listen to them and mostly go by what they said out loud.

That's weird considering that I'm over a decade older than you and was allowed to turn in typed papers (this rule predated microcomputers; it was for typewriters).

[Edit]

Just remembered that it was the other way around for my dad. Only cursive was taught in primary school, but in college, he had a drafting course where he learned print, so his print is incredibly legible.

Also, I love cursive. I had terrible fine motor skills when I learned print, but had developed by 3rd grade, so my print is illegible, but cursive is fine.

> That's weird considering that I'm over a decade older than you and was allowed to turn in typed papers

I had the same experience as the GP commenter. Early elementary teachers were insistent that cursive would be the future of your handwriting. As soon as I hit 5th grade, teachers either didn't care or explicitly asked for typed.

I'm a decade older than the original commenter, and teachers started asking for homework papers to be typed even earlier for me. I did the first year or two of those on my dad's old mechanical typewriter lol. When I was in middle school it was really common for students to have a word processor that was hardware, not an application on their PC. These were basically a printer with a keyboard and like a 3 line LED display.

Anyhow, the last time I can recall using cursive as a requirement was in my IB exams, and it felt like a pointless anachronism there.

The very first paper I turned in was typed on my mom's electric typewriter.

Later on, some teachers refused any papers printed by dot-matrix printers because of how bad they looked.

I can't particularly blame them for rejecting low-quality dot-matrix printouts.

Elementary school: You need to learn cursive, every paper in college will need to be in cursive with good handwriting!

Middle school: Hey computers are cool let's learn how to use them

High school: Assignments should all be typed and printed at home before class.

College Freshman: Times New Roman. 12pt. Double Spaced. Any papers not following these rules will be marked as 0. Printing costs 25c/page in the library.

College Senior: Times New Roman. 12pt. Double Spaced. Microsoft word file format. All papers must be submitted to the online portal and plagiarism checker by 11:59pm on the due date.

Does that include math and physics assignments? Writing math excercises on a computer is the epitome of frustration, one of the most tedious tasks I ever had to (occasionally) do. Writing them out by hand is so much easier, I would have probably not done half the assigned work in college if I had had to type it.

I was thinking specifically of written papers. Math homework and exams were usually hand written and I usually printed so people could actually read it.

I attended school in the 70s and 80s. We spent a ton of time on cursive. At one point I could write in cursive, but I preferred print letters. At this point, I haven’t written cursive in 35 or so years. I could probably relearn it fairly quickly, but why would I do that?

As for signatures, my kids use print letters for their signatures since they have no clue how to even write their names in cursive.

I'm old enough I learned cursive in school. Some years back I made a deliberate decision to abandon it, it had atrophied enough from a lack of use that I had a hard time reading my own writing. Realistically, all I write these days are forms (which shouldn't be in cursive anyway) and the occasional short note. Anything else, I'm a lot faster with a keyboard than with a pen and I can pretty much do the keyboard without thought. (It's strange that as I've aged it's become not quite so utterly automatic as it used to be.) It's very convenient to be able to think about what I'm writing rather than the mechanics of actually doing so.

I had a somewhat "unique" perspective on learning cursive (and English in general) through my education in the 2000s as I went through a few different school systems.

Starting out in the American system I hadn't been taught cursive at all, writing in print was normal. Right before I left we had just started typing lessons. They had convinced my parents that trying to force me to write with my right hand despite being a lefty was wrong.

Then I spent two years in an Indian private school, where they were rather nasty about how not knowing cursive reflected poorly on me (a similar nastiness came in solving some math problems in a different way, imagine humiliating an 8-9 year old in front of the class on their first day about how stupid they are for solving a set of math problems differently despite the solutions still being correct). I had to just sort of pick up cursive on my own, so while it was mostly okay there were some letters I wrote differently from "proper" cursive. On top of that they required gel pens rather than ball point, leading to my writing being extra prone to smears (not to mention always having ink stained backs of fingers). Typing assignments wasn't really a thing and computer classes were generally meaningless things about how to make wordart.

Then I moved to another country, where an Indian public school was the only option available. At this point I was old enough that they didn't push too hard on writing in cursive in general schoolwork, although there were still things like handwriting contests where they claimed that I would've won if I hadn't written my capital H's differently. Not too big of a deal but that still seemed to emphasize cursive writing as some measure of success. Notably even at this point I still got treated poorly by some teachers for things like my American accent (which included complaints to my parents, although they ignored the complaints because I was always expected to go back to America for university).

Finally I moved again and this time ended up in a school based on the Ontario education system (although not located in Canada). At this point no one really cared how I wrote or spoke. Despite my accent making me sound like a native speaker I turned out to need some catch-up English classes but on the other hand I had managed to skip grades for math, physics and biology.

Nowadays I rarely ever write by hand and when I do it's usually still digital like on a tablet. I have a couple of ink pens still around but I use them so rarely that I almost always have to search for them when needed.

Out of curiosity, when you say "print it" here, does that mean "write it by hand but using print-like letters", or literally "print it using a computerized printer/type-writer"?

Write it by hand. In this case the test was on paper so we just wrote the paragraph using normal letters on the lines provided.

But writing is learning. Brains use sensory feedback to remember and recall. Cursive is just a method of faster writing. The physical act of forming the letters leads to better recall of what is being written. Reorganizing and rewriting does even better.

Learning to write is as important as learning to read and learning to do math. There are good ways and bad ways to learn.

It's too bad this skill is being neglected and people turn to measurably worse methods of learning.

Learning cursive isn’t learning to write. As a kid I spent copious amounts of time learning to fit the sweep of my cursive to a rigid meter, and form them just so… it was closer to learning to draw than to write (which I could already do)

Do you have any proof of that?

I’m 50 years old. I haven’t used cursive since third grade or so. I’ve had no problems learning while sticking to print letters.