In cursive, it's forward movement constantly

July 3, 2023 9:36 PM

Ontario teachers could be the ones doing the learning as cursive makes mandatory return to curriculum (CBC article, July 1 2023)

"Last week, Ontario announced that cursive, which became an optional part of the province's curriculum in 2006, would once again be compulsory."

Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths: Teaching cursive handwriting doesn’t have nearly the value we think it does (Nautilus article, 2016)

posted by readinghippo (144 comments total)

abelist and reacitonary bullshit
posted by PinkMoose at 9:40 PM on July 3, 2023 [42 favorites]

The weird thing is, there’s not even some powerful force out there that I can think would be manipulating this behind the scenes. Who exactly benefits from cursive?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:46 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

its connected to an idea that we are missing something by not returning to the old ways, symbolic of the trend of home schooling and the like.
posted by PinkMoose at 9:56 PM on July 3, 2023 [21 favorites]

Maybe it's just how my particular (neurodivergent) brain works, but I can't imagine not being able to write in cursive. It's a crucial part of my thinking process. I also diagram on paper (and iPad). Printing has its place, but it's just too slow for my hand to keep up with my brain.

Typing on a computer is fine but it just feels different, and I use it for different purposes (editing rather than generating).
posted by cnidaria at 10:03 PM on July 3, 2023 [28 favorites]

Who exactly benefits from cursive?
The kids in private school who have more of a leg up on the poors because they did better things with their time than learn cursive
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:04 PM on July 3, 2023 [14 favorites]

"Do you know cursive? A lot of business is done in cursive." - Stan Smith, American Dad
posted by Servo5678 at 10:05 PM on July 3, 2023

(Upon reading the second link, I'm probably doing a "mixed" style rather than strict cursive. I don't recall ever being reprimanded for this in school, but I'm sure schools differ. Writing stuff by hand is rad, being weirdly rigid about exactly how that looks is not.)
posted by cnidaria at 10:07 PM on July 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

My seven year old can write (terrible) cursive because he's a Montessori kid and they get to pick what they learn. He thought it looked rad so he learned it and now he can write it, barely legibly. I'll tell you one thing, olds love it. Nobody over about 35 can resist a little boy's gnarly cursive. It is incredibly cute, especially because he's so proud of it. Nothing like an obsolete skill learned by a child under no duress whatsoever to warm the cockles of your heart.

Honestly, guy's time would probably have been better spent improving his printing, which looks like it was written by a t-rex's tiny little arms. But that's not how we do things in Montessori school, so cursive it is. He had to sign something the other day and he wrote just his first name in the loopiest, slowest cursive you can imagine.

If you happen to know a child who actually wants to write cursive I totally recommend facilitating that! It's adorable.
posted by potrzebie at 10:16 PM on July 3, 2023 [30 favorites]

As the (excellent) second linked article points out, learning a form of handwriting (rather than relying on typing) is beneficial for multiple purposes, including linking your brain to the words in a tactile fashion, giving you the ability to leave notes without relying on technology, and because we haven't yet invented a way to type graffiti.

Mandating teaching children specifically cursive (rather than printing aka manuscript) only makes sense if you are smart enough to know that the amount of cursive children are taught in school is highly correlated with the amount of power cis-het white men have in society, and dumb enough to not understand the difference between correlation and causation.
posted by Superilla at 10:32 PM on July 3, 2023 [10 favorites]

Isn't cursive a faster way to notate thoughts onto a page opposed to hybrid/stylized printing?
posted by Keith Talent at 10:41 PM on July 3, 2023 [12 favorites]

I've always found that cursive is easier than printing because I'm fairly double jointed, and the "apply pressure/no pressure" back and forth that you need to print just doesn't work with my hand configuration. My printing is awful! but my cursive is stylish, and I'm a good painter, I have a career that makes use of my drawing skills. Would I have been able to use my odd hands as well if I only was taught printing? hard to say. I certainly wouldn't call it useless though.
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 10:59 PM on July 3, 2023 [4 favorites]

As a left-handed writer and person with a learning disability I personally feel that mandatory cursive in public schools is ableist as fuck and I absolutely hate it
posted by Doleful Creature at 11:06 PM on July 3, 2023 [31 favorites]

What a great use of tax money. Smh. Seconding everyone calling this out as ableist.
posted by rabia.elizabeth at 11:29 PM on July 3, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'd guess this is another bad outcome of the people who trade rancid Facebook memes about kids using litterboxes showing an interest in school administration.
posted by zymil at 11:43 PM on July 3, 2023 [6 favorites]

I once had a student write their exam in perfect copperplate. It was incongruous to see something so beautiful created under stress.

If we're going to teach cursive (and we shouldn't) we should be teaching students styles sufficiently advanced as to let them casually drop documents that look like 18th century treatises.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 11:48 PM on July 3, 2023 [11 favorites]

I like cursive.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 12:00 AM on July 4, 2023 [11 favorites]

I can barely read cursive. I don’t know if I remember how to write it. My manuscript writing isn’t great but my cursive is horrible. Even when I was in elementary school I had awful cursive unless I wrote with sign-painting slowness, and regardless of speed it always looked, and probably still would look, like a child learned it this week.

I always had a hard time with it. Even the most beautiful cursive writing looks to me like someone sneezed on the page and wants me to predict the future in it. There are lines that aren’t part of the letters, that make them look like other letters. A cursive r will always, always look like an n to me, even though I know what an n looks like. A cursive s is a sick joke. That’s the bottom half of a b. Z? That’s an n wearing a y costume.
And the capital letters mostly look like manuscript caps that just farted and want very much for you to think it was someone else.

I say this as someone who can’t do either of these two things well, even though I actually understand the second one, I just can’t do it:
Cursive writing is the French pronunciation of typography.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 12:10 AM on July 4, 2023 [16 favorites]

I can speak cursive.
posted by john at 12:13 AM on July 4, 2023 [15 favorites]

still vividly remember, it's not that I refused to learn cursive or complete any cursive assignments as a kid but when cursive wasn't mandated I preferred to print, and some teacher got butthurt about it & said to me "Someday you're going to want a different way to write and you won't know how"

I was like eight years old & even then it set off my bullshit detector so hard, like lady I got a way to write, how many of those do I need? Jesus P. Christ

(joke's on her, I eventually got really good at cursive and she'll never know)
posted by taquito sunrise at 1:16 AM on July 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Here in the UK, kids and schools are assessed on cursive so it gets a massive amount of attention in school. A vast amount of time and resources are spent getting kids to learn it. In my son's school, you're only allowed to write in pencil until your cursive is good enough: then you get a "pen licence" and are allowed the great privilege of writing in ink.

I guess it has some benefit, but I'm not sure it's worth the opportunity cost of all the effort spent on it. I barely to never use it in real life.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:23 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I can speak cursive.

𝒴𝑒𝒶𝒽 𝒷𝓊𝓉 𝒸𝒶𝓃 𝓎𝑜𝓊 𝓉𝓎𝓅𝑒 𝒾𝓃 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝓈𝒾𝓋𝑒?
posted by loquacious at 1:37 AM on July 4, 2023 [16 favorites]

While the public school gave up cursive in favor of typing, my kids learned both in parochial school. In high school, they were sought out to read cursive documents for the other kids. My oldest also got into calligraphy, which had the short term result of her being able to forge notes from her mother, and the long term result is that she is asked to address wedding invitations.
posted by Miss Cellania at 2:13 AM on July 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

I learned cursive in a one-room country school, The White Star school, in rural Wisconsin.

I credit my incredible success in life to it. However, today, I only can write cursive while speaking French in Russian.
posted by lometogo at 2:59 AM on July 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think it can be a good thing to teach cursive. It gives kids an extra option for writing (and works better for some kids, like me, than printing does), a lot of kids actually think it's cool and want to learn it, and it does give more people the ability to access older historical and personal documents.

What I don't think is a good idea is spending massive amounts of time on it, or making it a significant part of your grades (if at all), or enforcing the use of cursive after learning it. Cursive is cool, let it be a fun cool thing you get to experience a bit outside of the strictly utilitarian stuff, and if you don't like it you don't need to keep using it. Teachers should pair it with some calligraphy and graphic design stuff while they're at it; I've met a lot of kids who really love the idea of playing around with letter shapes and personalizing their style. For some kids it seems like it gives them a bit more sense of ownership and control over their learning.
posted by trig at 3:16 AM on July 4, 2023 [32 favorites]

We shouldn't be teaching how to do arithmetic, their are calculators for that now. Why spend time learning the old way? We shouldn't be teaching kids how to cook, there's DoorDash for that, let the kids who want to cook do the cooking, no need to learn how to do it yourself. Seems there are a lot of people here with deep seated handwriting issues, I suggest therapy.
posted by zengargoyle at 3:29 AM on July 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

Seems there are a lot of people here with deep seated handwriting issues, I suggest therapy.

What a bizarre and uncharitable take against other members of this site. I smell a plant by Big Cursive.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:45 AM on July 4, 2023 [36 favorites]

As for me, I was mocked and punished by teachers because I was terrible at cursive, and my handwriting is a thrashed mishmash of unreadability as a result of that particular classroom trauma. I think trig's solution is fine, but this whole initiative smacks of dogwhistling to that particular "proper binmen" mentality.
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 3:49 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Without wishing to derail the discussion, since when did Ontario start using the term “cursive”? When I was at school in Ontario a long time ago, it was referred to as “writing” (as opposed to printing) but never as “cursive”. “Cursive” was a word that was used in American children’s books.

Or were my schools just weird?
posted by sueinnyc at 3:53 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Mister Moofoo, when I was a kid, I didn't like cursive, though I was able to learn it. When I got into calligraphy, I found out why. The cursive which is usually taught is a hideous style that obscures the letter forms. A capital L is a simple thing of two lines at right angles, What's the point of adding loops?

Cursive can be made less awful (to my eye, not as an experience for people who are bad at it) by realizing there's a letter form adding structure as you write it, but it's still not good.

If you want children to learn (hopefully) to make something beautiful, italic writing (clearer than italic fonts) is much better.

I can see spending a little time on teaching children to read cursive, but it's ridiculous to spend time on learning to write it.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 3:57 AM on July 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

As someone with absolutely horrible fine motor skills who received no OT or support during childhood, even my print writing is awful and illegible to most people, including sometimes me. My cursive is entirely illegible to other people and mostly illegible to me. Switching to mostly remote work has meant that all my notetaking happens electronically, which means I no longer burn time trying to decipher and write up my own handwriting, and it's great.

School in my day was definitely partly about punishing kids for not being good at mandatory things they'd never be good at (see also PE, where any of my teachers could have noticed that I'm hypermobile with poor body literacy and mind-muscle connection, but instead chose to write me off as lazy), and I'd kind of hoped we were moving beyond that education model as a society, but apparently not.
posted by terretu at 4:00 AM on July 4, 2023 [14 favorites]

Do they mean a specific uniform style across the province, or just that students are expected to learn print and joined-up handwriting?

Because I agree that we ought to be teaching students to write by hand even though typing is fairly ubiquitous, and I'm open to the argument that we should teach them a style that makes it easy to write quickly, I'm not at all persuaded by the French/German approach that there is only one acceptable style of handwriting which all students must use.
posted by plonkee at 4:01 AM on July 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

I think this is a silly thing for the government to force on teachers and a typical deflection away from the real issues that the Ford government's cuts to education have created.

With that said, as someone with awful handwriting but who loves notebooks and good pens and so on, I really wish I hadn't given up on learning to print or write cursive well when I was young.
posted by synecdoche at 4:02 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Upon reading the second link, I'm probably doing a "mixed" style rather than strict cursive.

This is me. As an old, I was, of course, drilled in cursive. I don’t recall ever being reprimanded by any teacher for not writing in cursive anywhere outside the cursive lessons, though. When I look back, I think what I really got from learning cursive was an eye for how letters/letterforms interact and flow as a unit. You know...typography. And, thus, a graphic artist was born. I was never in love with the field, but I looooove working with type.

Even today, I am very critical of “handwriting” fonts and will spend an inordinate amount of time massaging things until it flows juuuust right. One of my favorite treats is getting various pieces of junk mail wherein a handwriting font has been used to infer that a real humanoid has hand scribbled special info onto the pre-printed flyer. Those fonts are getting better and better. Serious props to the typographers! I’d love to talk to them.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:11 AM on July 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

synecdoche, I don't know whether it would be worth it for you, but you might be able to improve your handwriting.

I believe one of the most evil things school teaches (somehow) is that if you can't learn a thing in school, you can't learn it at all.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:12 AM on July 4, 2023 [11 favorites]

As a sixth grade English teacher, I did review cursive because they learned it through third grade and then stopped being required to use it. I figured it wouldn’t hurt because no one had taught them to write in legible print either. What I learned is that it was deeper than that. Many of my students used uncomfortable and inefficient pen and pencil grip methods for print and cursive and used so many nonstandard letter forms that made their handwriting illegible. They had bought into the comouter evangelism that it wasn’t ever going to be important to know how to communicate by hand, too. But they couldn’t touch type either.

As someone who loves writing in all its forms*, I wish we taught our children to write efficiently and clearly in some standardized way so they could communicate with a large range of other people in a variety of situations.

*I write in my journal in cursive with a fountain pen, write Christmas cards in an italic print or one of the other calligraphic hands I taught myself, and write my novels on a computer keyboard because I’m a fast typist. What? It’s all writing.
posted by Peach at 4:22 AM on July 4, 2023 [26 favorites]

Obviously evidence is needed, but from my experience teaching math, I can see where teaching two (or more, but at least two) different options for hand writing would potentially be quite helpful if done well - i.e., as options, not in the rigid way that also unfortunately is all too common in math education. If done well, I would expect that learning multiple ways to hand write would give students options to use whichever form works better for them, which could better accommodate students with different needs. I would also expect that learning more than one way to shape letters would help students become better readers in the long run, in the same way that learning multiple algorithms for basic arithmetic operations helps students understand and reason about what addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are/are doing, and prepares them for the different ways one has to think about early math when making transitions to algebra and then later to calculus.

Like learning multiple languages from birth, I would expect the learning curve to look like some initial “delays” were the short-term result, which educators and parents would need to be aware of in order to not put negative pressure on students during the learning process. And like early math education, of course if done in a rigid manner without focusing on the larger goal and broader understanding or giving students options for developing the skills in ways that work for them as individuals, then you’re just doing poor teaching, which isn’t the fault of the content or skills themselves. I can just as easily imagine that if cursive were the initial standard way of hand writing we were all taught, and print was the secondary method, that this Metafilter thread would go exactly the same just with cursive and print in reversed roles, for example.
posted by eviemath at 4:26 AM on July 4, 2023 [17 favorites]

synecdoche, I don't know whether it would be worth it for you, but you might be able to improve your handwriting. I believe one of the most evil things school teaches (somehow) is that if you can't learn a thing in school, you can't learn it at all.

I'm aware that it's possible to learn things outside of school. I'm learning things all the time. But finding time to sit and practice handwriting every day just isn't something I've ever been able to successfully prioritize.
posted by synecdoche at 4:27 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

eviemath, you sound like an excellent teacher.

This might be too bitter, but my experience at school was more like being axposed to things, but without actual teaching on how to get better at them, and this was a relatively good school.

I don't know how much is that they really didn't try, and how much was that I was unreceptive.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:32 AM on July 4, 2023

I can just as easily imagine that if cursive were the initial standard way of hand writing we were all taught, and print was the secondary method, that this Metafilter thread would go exactly the same just with cursive and print in reversed roles, for example.

Ditto eviemath.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:50 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Bouncing back in to say that (a) the research indicates cursive is actually slower to produce than print, so speed is no justification (b) many kids have dysgraphia and will never learn to write legibly (c) being able to type or write legibly is often seen as a feminine skill and therefore disdained by male kids (don't ask me why) (d) teaching handwriting of any sort isn't hard, just takes a few minutes a day for a while, which inevitably forces something else out of the curriculum because we expect too much from our schools (e) the research indicates that writing things out by hand tends to reinforce learning subsantially, but it shouldn't be required because it disadvantages people with cannot write easily by hand, so people get even angrier at handwriting (f) if you really don't want people to cheat, handwriting works just great as an alternative to computer use, but always at the cost of something else (g) handwriting deteriorates if not practiced, so lots of people who say proudly that they learned cursive in school cannot write legibly today.

Most people can teach themselves to handwrite very easily, though, and all it takes is a small amount time they would otherwise spend doing something else equally important :)
posted by Peach at 4:58 AM on July 4, 2023 [13 favorites]

It's interesting: since the ascent of computers my handwriting (which was never great) has declined, the physical act of writing has gotten more fatiguing, and it's gotten harder for me to read handwriting. I cannot reliably read cursive anymore.

Sometimes I look at documents or letters from olden times (like mid 20th century even!) written in cursive and I can't make them out and I get this anxiety we will lose this piece of handwritten history. But I suppose there will remain specialists who can read it.
posted by latkes at 5:09 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Re: point (e) - it’s a bit more complicated than that, and we’d well-serve students (including students with learning differences) if we taught them intentional note-taking skills (including variations such as visual note-taking). Which gets at one of the other points made above, that approaching hand writing instruction from the perspective of typography - and extending it to include also helping students practice drawing quick icons and such, or thinking about visual display of information in general - would likely be helpful.
posted by eviemath at 5:11 AM on July 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

Most of the examples I've seen - especially in the CBC article - are italics, not cursive. So maybe they just mean “handwriting” instead of cursive?

I'm 54, and I can neither read (easily) nor write (at all) cursive. North American cursive is mutually unintelligible from many European cursives, so my parents' handwriting is unintelligible to me in a different way from American loopy scrawl. Handwriting was a huge source of public shaming for me in primary school. My letters got smaller and further from the line until my attention-span ran out mid-letter. Did I get identified as needing help with an obvious learning issue? No. Did I get yelled at for being messy and lazy? You bet I did: daily, even once getting paraded in front of the class for having the audacity to score 10/10 but not be able to write clearly.

I re-taught myself how to write in my mid-40s. I like how I write: a blend of half-remembered Getty-Dubay italics along with what stuck from school, and for some personal reason, the Architect-style capital N from my grandpa's 1930s technical drawings. I can read it, and it doesn't pain me to write it.

I hope you understand that what I'm saying with all sincerity is: fuck Stephen Lecce and his twisted outcomes.
posted by scruss at 5:13 AM on July 4, 2023 [16 favorites]

And yeah, building off your observation, latkes, I think a significant part of why I can still decipher a wide variety of scripts, mis-oriented text, etc. is that I spent enough time reading and practicing even more than two varieties of hand writing (writing print and American cursive and block print from drafting, reading a couple other different types of cursive that vary from the American cursive I was taught, as well as a variety of computer fonts). Probably some of that can be replaced with different enough fonts, but the actual writing out seems to have an important effect as well.
posted by eviemath at 5:17 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yes eviemath! I taught my students to memorize poems (yes, I was a private school teacher and could do weird stuff like that) partly by making little visual cues (icons, etc.) for each line on the page, and they were always astounded at how much easier it made things.

But they resisted. How they resisted. Kids so often believe they should be applying brute force to everything, and so do their parents. Selling them on more efficient and effective ways of learning is often an uphill climb.

[parenthetical: How come I'm an expert proofreader and inevitably make errors that LEAP out at me only after the edit window closes? Yes, that's a rhetoricalalalal question.]
posted by Peach at 5:20 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

How we teach basic skills is super important, of course. Although things are changing, there are unfortunately still many teachers who will hear “The Ontario Human Rights Commission and so many others have called for us to really be informed by what works, and what clearly works is the return to phonics, the use of cursive writing, the embrace of digital literacy and critical thinking skills," and interpret that as needing to drill and shame students (exactly the ‘teaching’ methods that made things worse for students with learning differences in the past), instead of taking the more holistic approach described by the other professor quoted in the CBC article of understanding why they are teaching kids cursive as well as print, and supporting kids in getting to the end goal by whichever route works best for them (and on a schedule that is feasible for each child).
posted by eviemath at 5:30 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

When I was in grade 3 (ontario, 1978 or so?) I entered a 3/4 split and the older kids already had started cursive in their prior year and the teacher seemed to think we'd "catch up". I am a lefty, my printing was terrible (I was the last kid to graduate from "fat pencil fat ruled lines" to "thin pencil thin ruled lines" in grade 2) and the catching up never happened as far as cursive went. Being told that the capital I was best looped backwards, and the structures of capital F and T and Q, still bring me minor anxiety at times.

And yet: I use cursive all the time now (and fountain pens but that's a different thread; but if you are a lefty in particular I encourage you to try them). written info goes into my brain (as notes or whatever) far more readily than typed. sadly I only acknowledged this fact in the last 5 years but I am far more successful with my info management with a stack of photocopy paper and a couple of fountain pens than I ever was with microsoft onenote and all my annotation "tricks".

This thread makes many great points that of course those toxic shitheads Ford and Lecce will never ever heed:
- claiming the computer is the best modality and not teaching proper touch typing is flawed strategy
- learning cursive in order to read cursive when encountered in the wild is useful but this is not the same as ENFORCING cursive with all the misery that can bring
- the strongest need overall is almost certainly teaching how to receive information and take notes, by whatever means. I referenced "point form" notes to a 20something the other day and she said "oh, like dots in powerpoint?"
posted by hearthpig at 5:33 AM on July 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

I can barely read cursive. I don’t know if I remember how to write it.

I can confirm hearthpig’s tale. When I was a student in Ontario, they taught us cursive in third grade (at about age eight, for those in other school systems). I say “us” but I was leapfrogged from second to fourth grade, and we were expected to write in cursive, so I had to teach myself (while being bullied for being the youngest and smallest in the class).

A year later they let us go back to whatever we saw fit and to this day I print at speed. My cursive has thus always looked exactly as lovely as something self-taught by a child for a year or so under numerous types of stress. Save for my signature, I have not used it in many decades.

A few years ago, it occurred to me that while I could still read it, I hadn’t tried to write it since forever. Could I still do so?

I got out a pen and paper and wrote out, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” And to my shock, it looked exactly like it did when I was nine years old. I am not sure exactly what I expected, but it was not that.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:38 AM on July 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

Who exactly benefits from cursive?

Big Ink
posted by chavenet at 5:40 AM on July 4, 2023 [15 favorites]

I always find North American cursive to be extremely old fashioned and stuffy. In the UK, I was taught “joined up writing” which is far closer to print, less prescriptive and allows individual styles to shine through.

Assuming Canadian style is just like US style, here’s a comparison of US cursive versus UK cursive.
posted by rh at 5:51 AM on July 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

I am 50 - was born in Ontario, went to kindergarden and early grade school in the Ontario Catholic system.

Being left-handed was always an issue - first the nuns smacked me for writing with my left-hand. Next, once I had finally mastered printing, it was on to cursive - and ink - which smears when you are left-handed. I rebelled, and never did fully master writing in cursive. (I can read it just fine)

So ... in the age of smartphones and keyboards (be they physical or digital) we are going to teach this because? Why?

What business in today's society is conducted in cursive?

What a waste of time and resources.
posted by rozcakj at 5:54 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

i think it obvious people should learn to write by hand, something that continues to be desirable even on digital devices. i do believe that writing by hand engages the mind more intimately with the word, although why this is i’m not sure. but cursive? fuck off! do you make them use a quill? or even a fountain pen? ballpoint was born for block printing which i always found faster than cursive and much much more legible even to myself. this is a pointless exercise in politics by dying generations, and i hate that everything continues to suck.
posted by dis_integration at 5:57 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

𝔎𝔦𝔡𝔰 𝔱𝔬𝔡𝔞𝔶 𝔞𝔯𝔢𝔫'𝔱 𝔟𝔢𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔱𝔞𝔲𝔤𝔥𝔱 𝔥𝔬𝔴 𝔱𝔬 𝔴𝔯𝔦𝔱𝔢 𝔭𝔯𝔬𝔭𝔢𝔯𝔩𝔶. 𝔚𝔥𝔞𝔱𝔢𝔳𝔢𝔯 𝔥𝔞𝔭𝔭𝔢𝔫𝔢𝔡 𝔱𝔬 𝔢𝔡𝔲𝔠𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫?
posted by Faint of Butt at 5:59 AM on July 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

Also not really understanding the reactionary dislike of this. If it’s ablelist to teach cursive, isn’t it also ablelist to teach printing?

And I’m a left-hander that went to elementary school in the mid-80s! It sucked! No one ever taught me how to hold a pen or pencil properly which follows me around to this day. I remember one teacher who made me use a right-handed version of their pencil nub things and didn’t understand why I complained. Another teacher who basically thought I was stupid or willful for not being able to cut with right-handed scissors. And don’t even get me started on the lack of left -hand desks.

This was all “progressive”, by the way. I think they stopped forcing left-handlers to use their right hand in like 1970.
posted by rhymedirective at 6:08 AM on July 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

Oh - definately teach writing using print/block letters - I cannot even comprehend how people would learn anything without that basic skill.

But - communication between people rarely happens using paper as a medium. When "they" (teachers) were trying to encourage us to switch, they would always haul out that argument about how much faster cursive was to write. In my experience, it is still far slower than typing on a keyboard...

And as several examples of cursive fonts here in this thread prove, NO ONE WOULD SERIOUSLY USE CURSIVE IN A DIGITAL MEDIUM. Are we becoming less digital over time?

... Or... maybe they are just preparing us for the "collapse/crumble" when we are all living in a localized agrarian society, the next mandatory skill should be paper-making...
posted by rozcakj at 6:09 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Great. Now do FORTRAN.
posted by heatherlogan at 6:10 AM on July 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

What neither article mentions is that cursive is ideal for writing with a fountain pen, which was used (is the US) until the 1960s, when the ballpoint pen became popular. A fountain pen requires light and continuous pressure, which is ideal for cursive, and besides the nib tends to catch on the paper if you're writing disconnected letters. A ballpoint pen requires more pressure to write, and the continuous writing of cursive with a ballpoint can exhaust your hand muscles, so printing is easier. This is why kids naturally gravitate to printing with a ballpoint pen. They know it's ergonomically better because their body tells them so.

I found this AskMeFi question interesting. Although I can read cursive Hebrew, I was stymied by the cursive writing of the Yiddish in the ask's image. Turns out, in the Yiddish cursive here, ד looks like צ and פ looks like ש and ו and י are all loopy and joined up.

In modern Hebrew cursive, the harsh square letter forms of "printed" Hebrew are all rounded out to the fewest number of strokes and hard turns, and crucially, except for a very few ligatures, the letters are not joined up at all. It's sort of the best of both worlds, and is legible even with bad handwriting.
posted by jabah at 6:20 AM on July 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

→ a comparison of US cursive versus UK cursive.

I wouldn't recognize that first example as any kind of UK cursive that even my grandparents (born c.1910) would have written
posted by scruss at 6:28 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Also not really understanding the reactionary dislike of this. If it’s ablelist to teach cursive, isn’t it also ablelist to teach printing?

Speaking as someone with little to no fine dexterity, there are worlds of difference between the two. Printing is a lot of short straight lines and the occasional small curve. You can carefully write each letter and then stop, and when a letter goes wrong it is often easy to repair.

If I am writing something I need to be legible I use all capital block letters and it still goes all over the place. The fine dexterity just isn’t there.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:31 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Mod note: One comment removed, per the Content Policy on hateful speech
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 6:43 AM on July 4, 2023

"...as a kid but when cursive wasn't mandated I preferred to print, and some teacher got butthurt about it & said to me "Someday you're going to want a different way to write and you won't know how" I was like eight years old & even then it set off my bullshit detector so hard..."

Same. I was taught cursive, but I was horrible at it, so as soon as I was able, I switched to printing (which I could do faster than cursive anyway). The teacher called me out on that, and insisted that I write cursive. So, I went back to cursive, with predictably horrible results.

I knew my limits, but the teacher was the boss. You want my shitty cursive? Here ya go. It was another in a series of formative moments when you as a kid learn you can be smarter than the adult in the room. I knew my abilities, determined the best course of action, got overruled, and we both had to suffer for it.

Cursive taught me a lot.
posted by Capt. Renault at 6:44 AM on July 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

Big Ink

And the blotter paper industry.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 6:46 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

The provincial education minister is an anti-public education position in Ontario. He never attended it himself. They are starving public education while supporting private schools.

This kind of arbitrary requirement is great, as it intentionally only applies to public schools, wastes their time, and looks like they (the government) are doing something not blatantly negative with education. Meanwhile, they cut per student funding and teachers and add in more remote-learn requirements delivered through private companies.

Don't expect this to be based in any kind of educational merit. The current administration of Ontario is based on distracting the news cycle away from a large give away of public assets to private real estate developers right now.
posted by NotAYakk at 6:56 AM on July 4, 2023 [17 favorites]

→ "a comparison of US cursive versus UK cursive."

I wouldn't recognize that first example as any kind of UK cursive that even my grandparents (born c.1910) would have written

Scruss, perhaps they started teaching it later? My ex MIL (1950s) and many other British adults I know write that way. Younger people tend to use print. My ex writes entirely in block letters - he was taught joined up writing but actively refused to learn it and stuck to his block letters.
posted by Ms. Moonlight at 7:06 AM on July 4, 2023

My assumption is that cursive is like the ink-well holes in the desks when I was going to elementary in Ontario, in that it served a purpose earlier but was now vestigial. I was taught cursive and did use it for a few years, but the only pens I used were ball-point and I gave up cursive over time. I harbor dark suspicions of the way the Ford siblings were raised and it would not surprise me if it never occurred to the premier to question why cursive was being taught.
posted by mscibing at 7:20 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I appreciate the second fpp link’s focus on evidence-based practices, as opposed to received wisdom, cultural preferences, or the vagaries of our own personal experiences. As a brief summary, it sounds like there may be some benefit to learning more than one way to write by hand, and then being allowed to adapt to one’s own individual needs; that there are important cognitive development effects of learning to write by hand in some way or another, but that there is no particular evidence in favour of either print or cursive as being better or worse than the other; and that there especially is a lack of research on the needs of kids with learning differences.
posted by eviemath at 7:25 AM on July 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

it would not surprise me if it never occurred to the premier to question why cursive was being taught.

It would not surprise me if it never occurred to the Ontario premier to question why anything is the way it is. Intellectual (or any sort of) curiosity is not a trait I associate with him.
posted by eviemath at 7:29 AM on July 4, 2023 [8 favorites]

Was taught "joined writing" only by a perverse school that insisted on giving kids only fountain pens and ink blotters from age 5 onwards. Incredibly messy, insane ink fights in school. Did not encounter ballpoint pens or non-joined writing until moving schools at age 10. Like learning to write all over again. Quite difficult, first year or two was slow and unintelligible. Today I write mainly simple block capitals, but for one of my jobs end up sometimes having to read hundreds or thousands of pages of messy, rapidly scrawled cursive notes. That is intolerable, and can result in absurd situations where you are simply unable to precisely determine the intent of the writer. Cursive is a terrible result of broken thinking that outputs something that overall delivers misery.
posted by meehawl at 7:33 AM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I have some modern, inexpensive fountain pens that I like. Contrary to a statement above, they do just fine when lifted off the paper and reapplied. They do strongly prefer downstrokes to upstrokes, because the downstrokes do a better job pulling the ink out of the nib. On the upstrokes, it's much more difficult to control the weight of the line. I have no idea if this is consistent with pre-1960s fountain pens or not.

In my own idiosyncratic mixture of cursive and printing (and I love the information that most children develop this spontaneously), I retain several of the serif-adjacent flourishes that are present in cursive and absent in elementary-school printing. This is partly a consequence of doing lots of math, where the difference between an "x" and a "×" must be maintained in rapidly-handwritten material, and serifs and loops help to distinguish between "i" versus "l" (that is, "ℓ") versus "1" versus stray pencil marks versus pieces of dust on the photocopier.

The argument that cursive is "faster" because the pen never leaves the paper is silly. It might make sense if you were going back to your inkwell after ever letter, like a medieval monk illuminating a manuscript, but with modern writing tools that is sort of like putting your car in park while you check for oncoming traffic at a yield sign.

The intellectual hurdle that drove me away from "proper" cursive is the word-length delay before making marks that can't be made without lifting the pen. To write "ȷumped" and then go all the way back to the beginning to add the tittle really cheeses me off. To write "tittle" and get to the end of the word with two-thirds of the letters incomplete seems like madness.

I did decide as an adult that my handwriting should include a two-story "a." But in math, it's always a one-story "a." Brains are weird.
posted by fantabulous timewaster at 7:42 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

For whatever it’s worth, it is a mistake to start from the position that the Ontario Ministry of Education under Doug Ford’s conservative government is making decisions about public education based on empirical evidence or good intentions.
posted by mhoye at 7:45 AM on July 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

As a left hander, I am confused about how cursive is worse than print? I still get a shit-ton of ink on my hand no matter what. Luckily I write alot less nowadays, but I do still prefer to take notes on paper. I remember so much better when I write something myself. I can forget a grocery list at home but will remember most everything if I wrote the list myself.

My writing is a mix of cursive and print. Essentially what is the most efficient way to get the letters out. I even use different shapes depending on how they fit in the word (for example, I may use a print and cursive s in the same word, depending on how it connects to the letter before). As a left-hander, and seeing so many other lefties with bad handwriting, I put alot of effort into my handwriting between 4-6 grades. I really like it now and feels very personal to me.

It also definitely helps that my writing wasnt terrible to begin with, thanks to my kindergarten teacher. She was right-handed, but had enough spacial awareness to be able to position my pen and paper at the proper angles for a lefty. I am one of the very few I know who can write without curling my hand around.

Z? That’s an n wearing a y costume.

This whole rant is amazing but also as a person with Z in their name I always loved the cursive version because I thought it was a ridiculously fancy/curly way to write a very sharp letter.
posted by LizBoBiz at 7:54 AM on July 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

I (ancient) was taught cursive. I think teaching it in schools now is a kinda dumb idea.

Isn't cursive a faster way to notate thoughts onto a page opposed to hybrid/stylized printing?

The only purpose of cursive is that it's faster for taking (longhand) dictation than printing is. Unfortunately, the trade-off is that printing is much more legible. I still often write in longhand, mostly printed words for names/nouns, and sometimes with some vague shorthandish cursive squiggles for connecting words.
posted by ovvl at 7:56 AM on July 4, 2023

Even putting aside the argument that teaching cursive is a good thing, the way it's being implemented is the problem (which, is to be expected with any education decision coming out of the Ford government). Teachers aren't being given the time to learn how to teach it, or even learn how to do it properly themselves. It was just dropped on them at the end of the school year as a total surprise and everybody has to be ready to start teaching it on September 1. There is no way this isn't going to be an utter disaster for everybody involved.

As for the nobody needs cursive these days, I just had a work assignment that I submitted on Friday. I ended up having to refer to a letter written in 1885, which normally wouldn't have been too much of an issue, but it was a low-res emailed PDF of a scanned copy of the original (gone through who knows how many digital transformations). The handwriting was beautiful in that it was clear, and would have been very legible (even today), assuming the people doing the initial scanning hadn't done such a botched job. Even still, I ended up getting what I needed out of it. Now, I'm not saying I encounter scenarios like this all the time, because I don't, but being able to read and write cursive is still a useful skill.

As for me personally, writing is absolutely faster than printing. If I had to rely on printing for notetaking, I'd never be able to do my job. And no, a digital device isn't always possible to use.
posted by sardonyx at 7:58 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Can someone provide a link to educate me on why this is ableist? I did google it and didn't come up with anything. This thread is on the first page of hits.

My experience of cursive was that I sucked at it. My signature is first letter of first name, squiggles, first half of first letter of last name, squiggles. I can't actually write my name unless i stop to think about every single stroke of the pen and then do it ridiculously slowly like I'm drawing a picture. My printing is illegible, too, but I feel like it's less painstaking to produce illegible printing than to produce illegible cursive. That said, I have done some cursive as an adult when requested by and/or to impress my son (see below) and it actually didn't go as terribly as I remember it being in school.

My son learned to print and then switched schools in the middle of Junior Kindergarten and learned cursive. He can cursive and print at age 6 no problem. I thought OTs generally recommend learning cursive first.
posted by If only I had a penguin... at 8:02 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the real story here is that it's mandated. There's nothing wrong with teaching cursive; the problem is that there's a limited number of hours in the day and they're spending it teaching cursive instead of something useful. I'm sure you could get most of the same benefits-- perhaps more-- by teaching the kids how to solve a Rubik's Cube. There's no benefit to learning cursive that couldn't be demonstrated by having a student spend the same amount of time learning another manual skill. Hell, it would probably save lives. How many people have been killed by illegible cursive prescriptions? How many people have been killed by Rubik's Cubes?
posted by phooky at 8:17 AM on July 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

If we're talking about ableism, a diversity of people always requires a diversity of options. Everyone loves the thought that some accommodations help everyone. Yay, ramps! But there are always conflicting access needs. If there's no stairs, people with certain disabilities, like ankle problems and prosthetics, now get left out. So with print: some people with dyslexia and dysgraphia won't get cursive, and others really do need it.

I write in cursive. Fine, it's a hybrid. Without it, I couldn't have finished copying from the board in school in a reasonable time. So with taking notes. I'm still slow at it, but there is a difference between professors telling me to erase the board when I'm finished and taking my entire lunch break finishing up. True story.

It sucks that cursive is such a huge mental block for people. It seems really unlikely that every classmate who ever turned away my notes was disabled themselves. From the second linked article:

But cursive is not another language. If you need to learn to read it, that takes an hour at most.

But I've never seen anyone do that. Or even point it out in heated cursive debates. I realize my particular constellation of symptoms that make cursive better for me is an outlier, but so is every other disability, by definition.
posted by squelch at 8:37 AM on July 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

I went through five years of university life turning in papers done with a cursive Smith-Corona typewriter, a hand me down from my mother. No one ever said anything about it. My non-mechanical assisted handwriting is a pathetically illegible attempt at printing, degraded down from a less pathetically illegible kind of printing from five years of furious university note taking. I sadly dislike writing by hand in general. And I regret having to require people to try to read it. Including myself.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:43 AM on July 4, 2023

LizBoBiz She was right-handed, but had enough spacial awareness to be able to position my pen and paper at the proper angles for a lefty. I am one of the very few I know who can write without curling my hand around.

I'm left handed and I don't curl my hand round either. I'm not sure how that happened. I suspect tiny-me's non-confrontational bloody mindedness meant that once I devised a system of writing that worked for me the teachers just left me to it.

I write joined-up-writing (as we called it) the same way as a right hander would but numbers and block capital letters I do differently. For example, my A starts at the bottom right, goes up and left to the point, then down the left side (without taking my pen off the paper) and finishing with a right to left cross bar. My primary school friend (right handed) who I used to sit with thought it was odd but my teachers never remarked on it.

More on topic. I make still notes in cursive mostly, but sometimes with block capitals. I almost never print unless there is some stylistic reason to do so.
posted by antiwiggle at 8:50 AM on July 4, 2023

I've heard that hand above the line vs. hand below the line for left-handed people is genetic. Anybody know?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:57 AM on July 4, 2023

So much heat and noise, so little light.

"Cursive" handwriting is called that because, when cursive penmanship is executed with fluent command of technique, the pen literally runs across the page. Words appear on paper at the speed of thought, more or less. In the days before typewriting, if you were a writer or teacher or accountant even, you had that kind of skill with the pen. If you didn't have that kind of skill with a pen, you earned your bread by physical work of some kind instead. Tolstoy could never have written War and Peace by printing individual letters.

With such command of the technique there comes an opportunity to manifest intentionality in a way unique to the act of writing. Bringing a pen loaded with ink to a blank page, one can create flowing text by drawing whole words in a few strokes, one after another until whole lines emerge. If one has pure enough focused intention, as well as the skill, that is. If not, if the mind is confused or uncertain, or delusional, one can scrawl, hesitate, scratch out, amend in tiny characters, and generally make a mess.

The skill was always a class marker. Penmanship mastery had something like the role college education does today, in separating the job prospects from the no-hires. A class-marker credential.

The keyboard has utterly replaced the pen as the tool that serious people use to compose serious text. So it's hard for me to see a case for requiring it of every fourth-grader. Recall, back in the day, this was a separator of sheep from goats, for reasons that were adequate in the day. Now, it would just be a way of washing-out fourth-graders.

People who still want to experience the intentionality of writing cursive with a pen should be doing it recreationally, I am suggesting. It's no longer a major life skill. Though passing a legible handwritten note in a physical meeting can be a way to show some class.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 9:08 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

Things can be important to teach developmentally, without being something that kids will use later on in life. Take crawling, for example: we don’t (in general) crawl to get around beyond the age of three or so. But it’s an incredibly important stage for developing certain areas of the brain related to spatial awareness. Like, the childhood development experts I know are really negative about those bouncy-jumper seats and other things that try to get kids to walk sooner, because the kids lose out on this important brain development. It’s the same with different algorithms for basic arithmetic operations: it’s not particularly important that a kid learns this algorithm or that algorithm; what is important is that they learn that there are multiple options, and develop the resultant intellectual flexibility when thinking about arithmetic.
posted by eviemath at 9:18 AM on July 4, 2023 [10 favorites]

If the third grade curriculum is so over-full that teaching cursive will push out something else that kids “need” to know, that is a separate problem all on its own. The whole idea of optimizing elementary kids’ learning and not leaving room for play and exploration is probably way more harmful and consequential than either learning or not learning cursive.

And also, yes, often changes like this are mandated without providing sufficient, paid, professional development time and support for the teachers who have to actually implement the change in their classrooms. Ideally, learning and improving their practice is a standard part of teaching for all education professionals, and that is nominally why teachers have professional development days. But teachers are underplayed for what they do even before any such requirement, of course.
posted by eviemath at 9:28 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

About 20 years ago, I sat the LSATs during the fall of my senior year of undergrad. I was surrounded by the (supposedly) elite cadre of folks from my liberal arts college who were headed onto loftier things, most of whom had spent the summer doing endless iterations of test prep. Before the exam, the proctor read the instructions out loud to the auditorium, including the part no one had thought to prep for: the honor code that had to be copied and signed. In script.

Mass panic ensued. Maybe 2/3 of the room had learned cursive in elementary school, and half of those had used it in the 15 years since. Small sidebars immediately broke out about how to write a capital G, or a lowercase z. Meta-sidebars followed shortly thereafter, in which heated arguments were conducted in harsh whispers re: the propriety of consulting with peers to remember how to write the honor code pledge.

The proctor was merciless. No, you could not print the three sentences. Yes, failure to write properly so would risk disqualifying your results. One girl fled the room in tears. Others adopted the steely gaze of those who know they're sunk before the starting gun fires. I was able to recall enough of it to limp through the requirement, leaning heavily on writing it so sloppily that no one could tell I'd forgotten how to do a capital F.

And that was the last time I ever had any need for it whatsoever, other than reading birthday cards from grandparents. In conclusion, fuck cursive writing.
posted by Mayor West at 10:02 AM on July 4, 2023 [12 favorites]

The last time I used cursive was when I took the GRE to get into library school, in 2005 - that damn honor code that had to be in cursive for some reason. The actual test was on a computer. I was twelve years out of college and twenty years at least since anyone had asked me to write in cursive for any reason - my usual printing doesn't even use lower case, I print with small caps. I managed to muddle through, but that was a piece of pre-test anxiety I really didn't need.
posted by Daily Alice at 10:21 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

the honor code that had to be copied and signed. In script.
honor code that had to be in cursive for some reason.
that's wild! I can see making you copy it out, but why would anything other than the signature need to be in script?

Just one more of the many Mysteries of Cursive, all of which are ranked below the prime mystery in the doorstopper book by that name. That one being:

Why does capital Q look like an oversized 2?
What about 2 looked Q-ey to our vaunted handwriting forefathers? I just googled and can now clearly see how it devolved from a respectable approximation of Q into that sadness, but why was such a lazy thing permitted to happen to it? Given that everything else about cursive instruction is marked by insane dedication to preserving perfect letter proportions and slant, you're just going to jettison the top-to-bottom swoop that delivers all the Qness to Q? WTF?
posted by Don Pepino at 11:03 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've been in some testing situation where we had to copy out an honor code, it had to be "handwritten" per the instructions, and the proctor insisted that "handwritten" meant "written in cursive". Even twenty years ago this resulted in a couple of nervous breakdowns in the testing facility as people who hadn't written cursive since the sixth grade had to try and remember how in a very high-stakes, high-pressure environment. I have no idea if this was the proctor on her own bullshit or if it was actually required for some reason.

This wasn't the GRE though - which required no cursive when I took it in 2008 or thereabouts - definitely high school. Maybe it was an AP exam, in which case it was definitely a proctor on her bullshit because I took like a dozen APs and only remember this happening once.
posted by potrzebie at 11:26 AM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

Tolstoy could never have written War and Peace by printing individual letters.

pynchon wrote gravity’s rainbow in tiny block printed manuscript. cursive is not necessarily faster than print
posted by dis_integration at 11:30 AM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Tolstoy could never have written War and Peace by printing individual letters.

That's actually why Shakespeare only produced a few sonnets and a play or two. No cursive to help him along.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 11:49 AM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

The Toronto Catholic school board reintroduced teaching cursive in 2014.
Present policy as of October 17, 2019 is;

This policy requires that cursive writing be taught through direct instruction in all
Grade 3 classrooms.
posted by yyz at 11:50 AM on July 4, 2023

If we're talking about ableism, a diversity of people always requires a diversity of options.... So with print: some people with dyslexia and dysgraphia won't get cursive, and others really do need it

Qft. Different people need different things; swapping out one normative standard for another isn't anti-ableist, that's just the new boss same as the old boss. Cursive does seem to get disproportionately blamed for, basically, the bad pedagogical practices a lot of people were forced to endure as children. I get that it's a bit of a dog-whistle for reactionary conservatives. But it's really the same as going around crabbing that no one needs algebra in "real life". Ok, maybe you don't, but some people do!

I love cursive (and algebra, for that matter)! It makes more sense to my brain, it's easier on my hand, I don't get as distracted by the letter forms, and I think it looks nice. I could not have made it through school without cursive. I don't go back and read my journals, ever, but I like the look of the writing on the paper. And I like that I can see my mother's and grandmother's influence in my writing. Sometimes I've written something and it looks exactly like my grandmother would have written it--and it feels like she's still with me, close to me.

I don't think that educational policy should be set based on my personal experiences, however. Per the linked article, this change is being driven by the 2022 Ontario Human Rights Commission Report, which specifically calls out high rates of reading failure in the province, attributed to a "failure to use science-based approaches to teach reading and respond to reading difficulties [which] are causing far too many children to not learn this critical life skill." The report also has sections on early screening for learning differences, interventions, and accommodations. (As well as, I'm pleased to see, a section on indigenous experiences, which is comprehensive enough to need a content warning.) I would love to see a report like this in my state and to see its recommendations taken on board by our dept of education.
posted by radiogreentea at 12:05 PM on July 4, 2023 [6 favorites]

My younger kid just finished grade 3, in Ontario, and his printing is terrible. It looks like kindergarten level to my eyes. His teachers haven't said anything about it so I guess they don't see it as a problem but if he's going to start cursive next year then it's going to have a car crash-like effect on me where I don't really want to look at it but still might be compelled to.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:10 PM on July 4, 2023

My younger kid just finished grade 3, in Ontario, and his printing is terrible. It looks like kindergarten level to my eyes. His teachers haven't said anything about it so I guess they don't see it as a problem but if he's going to start cursive next year then it's going to have a car crash-like effect on me where I don't really want to look at it but still might be compelled to.

Not necessarily. My nearly-10-year-old had awful, awful printing but his cursive is clear and legible.
posted by synecdoche at 1:30 PM on July 4, 2023

What I don't think is a good idea is spending massive amounts of time on it, or making it a significant part of your grades (if at all), or enforcing the use of cursive after learning it.

The biggest challenge any teacher has is time. There is never enough time to teach everything you could, so when you devote a significant amount of time on cursive, it's at the expense of learning something else. Cursive is a tool, and can be a handy one, but the amount of time spent on learning it (and not learning something else) should be very carefully considered. The trick is to get halfway decent at a new skill you have to practice, and practice takes time. Overall I'd say that getting kids to write the alphabet and their names well in cursive is a nice goal, but all that repetitive drillwork, doing page after page of capital Qs (seriously, what the fuck is the cursive capital Q??) is simply not the best use of classtime. Some students will take to it on their own, and it should be encouraged as an extracurricular grade, but it really isn't for everyone.

As for my own handwriting, I have a kind of hybrid of printing and cursive. Cursive is good with many letter combinations, but there's too many impractical letters, like the capital Q, capital S...talk about useless and time consuming.
posted by zardoz at 1:42 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

I love cursive so much. I was so good at penmanship that Linea Adler and I were the "advanced penmanship group" and got to go work outside on our workbooks alone, while all the other kids were inside in class with their big lines and teachers hovering over them, mwahahaha. I also like algebra and phonics and PE, even though I am not a conservative.

Anyways, it's too bad learning a seond style of writing killed your family, but this thread is truly wild. School isn't meant to teach you only "useful" things, by which you all appear to mean things that make you money. It's also meant to teach you small skills you can repuporse, like how to be bad at something and not be mad about it forty years later. :)

As a side note, I am also curious if kids today are using computers for tests even? Like do they not have to write history essays by hand? Seems like using paper gets you less surveillance, so there's another pro right there.
posted by dame at 2:17 PM on July 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's interesting, I've known a fair few people who had gorgeous printing and crap cursive, and the reverse as well. It's definitely not the case that there's just one set of fine motor skills that make you good at writing by hand. Teaching cursive as one acceptable option among several for writing may well be the less ableist choice. The issue comes in when everyone is required to be good at all the options.

I do think we're not at a point in our civilization where there's no need to teach people to write by hand. There are still situations where it's useful. I worry that I'm falling out of practice; my hands get so tired from writing more than a page or two nowadays.

It's interesting to see this moral panic happening worldwide though. My relatives who read and write Chinese have expressed the exact same worries that writing by hand is something young people aren't investing enough in to ever get really good. Especially in places where traditional characters are still used, strangers will comment about how impressive it is to be able to write fluently and fluidly by hand.
posted by potrzebie at 2:35 PM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Sometime in the 70's maybe, late in grade school (so I'd learned cursive), I was helping dad at a VFW sale and working closely with folks from my grandparents' generation, and they were writing item tags in cursive. Their lowercase t's were unintelligible to me; they looked like narrow upside-down capital V's with no cross-stroke. I think it was a holdover by immigrants.

Some of you my not know about shorthand (nee stenography) in the sense of written strokes in order to transcribe the spoken word. Before there were court reporters typing on those tiny machines there was a multitude like my mom sitting with a steno pad listening to the boss and writing down what they said in order to type it into letters later. You want fast learn shorthand.
posted by achrise at 3:02 PM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm so surprised to see so much dislike! I like writing by hand in almost all its forms and I appreciate having learned cursive in school. I like the acceptance of individualist style in joined-up writing - mine is spiky and sharp, and I think it reflects my personality and tone better than print or type! It feels about as close as you can get to drawing while writing.

Also handwriting is the best excuse if what you really want to do is play around with a fountain pen, which is v fun.

my life is a lot less computer based than many, and having legible writing has been a positive for me. I've used and made money from calligraphy quite a few times, and I've found it very useful for reading contemporary history sources. Plus, did I mention fountain pens and inks?

I think we learned printing and writing simultaneously when I was in school in the 90s, so I don't think it was much of a time investment to teach, though this generation of kids will be less familiar and it will be a bit harder - my mother and grandmother both wrote exclusively in (really incredible) cursive when I was young so I had a strong real world need. And I appreciate being able to read my family recipes, which are in cursive all the way down.
posted by euphoria066 at 3:23 PM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

Cursive was the way when I was growing up, though we did learn printing as well. But cursive has always been my default. Printing just feels clumsy and disjointed to me.

But I don't think either is superior. Both can be hard to write if you are not familiar with them, and hard to read if not done well. People should use whichever is the most comfortable and legible for them.

I think the issue is more about hand writing versus keyboards. Kids need to learn both, from the start.
posted by Pouteria at 3:32 PM on July 4, 2023

My relatives who read and write Chinese have expressed the exact same worries that writing by hand is something young people aren't investing enough in to ever get really good. Especially in places where traditional characters are still used, strangers will comment about how impressive it is to be able to write fluently and fluidly by hand.

My spouse was a principal for a Japanese school for 2nd/3rd generation kids here in Toronto for a while. By the time the students graduate they are up to what maybe someone in grade 5 would be expected to know in Japan so the students that were thinking of going to Japan for university or to work later on would need to do a lot of extra study on their own to get up to the required level in any event. To my mind that means that most of the time spent inside and out of class on writing Kanji is wasted because as long as the students can recognize the character and its reading then that gets the majority of use cases they will experience and so the rest of the instructional and homework time could be spent on other things. Kanji practice is also a pretty big motivation killer for the students so if the school reduced the kanji study more kids would probably stick around longer too.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:08 PM on July 4, 2023

I was taught using the D'Nealian method, but concurrently developed a print style on my own that mimicked the type in the books I read. This printing, practiced alphabet after meticulous alphabet, tended to impress people with its precision (it still does). But I do recall, as others have in this thread, being required to use "my handwriting" (which was clarified to mean cursive) when reproducing statements connected with integrity, like pledges not to cheat on an exam. I found it profoundly ironic thus to perform authenticity by not being too much my weird, exacting, independent self. And it's not the last time I felt that way.
posted by aws17576 at 4:09 PM on July 4, 2023

It's also meant to teach you small skills you can repuporse, like how to be bad at something and not be mad about it forty years later. :)

I mean, it's easy to be winky about something that you're good at, but if you look after elementary school: the subjects I really struggled with are really just the ones the teachers also graded on handwriting, especially in cursive. And like, that "oh I'm just bad at geography" or "oh I'm just bad at researching and writing papers" really did have an effect on what sorts of careers I thought I could pursue.

I think that's one of the problems people have with forcing kids to learn cursive, the way it was used to gate-keep in subjects completely unrelated to handwriting. And like if you consider that sour grapes, I guess you consider that sour grape. I'm plenty good at admitting when I'm bad at things, what I have a hard time with is all the stuff I shouldn't have been told I was bad at in the first place.
posted by Gygesringtone at 4:15 PM on July 4, 2023 [5 favorites]

I think you've got to look at this in the context of the Ontario education system, not in an abstract "kids should be getting various skills!" way. As it stands, I can't see how cursive, taught by teachers who either never learned it or barely remember it themselves, and then graded by those same teachers at the behest of a Conservative, traditionalist government, will do anything but frustrate students.
posted by sagc at 4:30 PM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm so surprised to see so much dislike!

It's something where, at least as I was taught, there's a vast amount of tedious, repetitious drill. If you aren't good enough at it, the only thing offered is more tedious, repetitious drill, generally on your own with no actual help, until you become someone else's problem next year.

It's also one of those things teachers seem to routinely lie about. You'll need this when you get to middle school! They'll only accept cursive! Which might be true in English but that was about it. You'll need it in high school! You'll just get a zero if it isn't in cursive! But everyone including your English teacher accepts whatever mix people have developed by then. You'll need it in college! But double extra nobody gives the slightest fuck, even in the 1980s.

So it's this thing that takes a lot of work and unpleasant work, held up to you on the promise that you will desperately need this precious skill, and when you finally get to the places where that skill was supposed to be needed it turns out to be entirely superfluous.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 5:08 PM on July 4, 2023 [9 favorites]

I'm dysgraphic and left-handed, and I'm perplexed by some of the responses here - I was taught cursive by a loving and patient teacher who didn't freak out when my penmanship of "fork" rather resembled another four-letter word. Now, writing by hand still isn't easy for me, but I find a blend of cursive and print to work best for me in terms of comfort and speed. In short, I'm glad I was taught cursive, and equally glad that like others, beyond cursive lessons, my school didn't force one writing style on anyone.

So yeah, I don't think the problem is cursive. Being able to write at least somewhat legibly is useful, and I can see value in teaching kids more than one way to do it.
posted by coffeecat at 5:38 PM on July 4, 2023 [4 favorites]

My fine motor control issues meant that I could not learn to write cursive up to the standards of the teachers at the Catholic elementary school I went to. I don't want anyone to go through what I went through there (in the late 1970s, as a right-handed person), with cursive, with math, or any other subject for that matter. With regards to math I could get the right answer when it came to long division, I just couldn't do it the way the teacher wanted me to, so that earned me a D. I straight up failed handwriting. Thankfully this did not affect my future success in school, although it was pretty shitty to go through as a young and sensitive kid.

The problem isn't offering students a chance to learn another way to write. It's making it part of the graded curriculum with no exceptions regardless of whether it's appropriate for each and every student. Granted, a lot of this comes down to how it's implemented, and that's probably what a lot of us are reacting to here. What are the chances it will be implemented with sensitivity and discretion?
posted by mollweide at 5:52 PM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

Being able to write at least somewhat legibly is useful, and I can see value in teaching kids more than one way to do it.

And what would that value be? If cursive didn’t exist today, would you be inclined to create it?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 7:13 PM on July 4, 2023

There are four things that I know of wrong with my hands, and I find cursive exponentially easier and faster than printing because I don't have to keep picking up and putting down the pen so much. I vote for teaching kids both and then letting them use whichever works for them.

I wasn't really taught to write in cursive. In parochial school I finished the Grade 2 English curriculum early, so the teacher handed me a sheet with the cursive alphabet on it and said, "Copy these until you can do it by yourself," and I did. When I transferred to public school, my classmates were learning the Palmer method as a group, but the teacher said there was no point in me starting all over again. Same deal at the next two public schools. When I got to high school, all my classmates had identical pretty, loopy handwriting, while mine looked like I was trying to forge prescriptions. But it's stood me in good stead all my life. (And not just for forging prescriptions.)
posted by The Underpants Monster at 8:16 PM on July 4, 2023 [2 favorites]

The specific value in teaching kids more than one way to write by hand was described in the comment you quote, Tell Me No Lies, as well as a couple similar comments in this thread, where the commenter found it helpful in creating their own mixed form that worked for their particular learning difference. That there is evidence for this likely being a more widespread benefit was described in the second link in the fpp, as I noted above. The developmental importance of hand writing to learning to read and to reading fluency was touched on in both links in the fpp, with some indications based on actual evidence that, if taught well, learning multiple ways to write by hand seems to be more useful (though larger studies to confirm this would be helpful).

The “if taught well” part is important, and it’s quite clear that many folks here weren’t taught cursive well, and that the experience ranged from painful to traumatic for them/you all. That poor pedagogy is unfortunately common is the issue there, not the subject matter being taught, however.

The distrust of the current Ontario government is quite understandable, as well. However, provincial departments of education include a lot of public servants who are knowledgeable and whose jobs are not just political appointment, but are ongoing careers that last across multiple provincial governments; and these are the folks who will be implementing the return to teaching cursive. It’s possible that the provincial government will hamstring or sabotage the initiative by not providing enough funding for teacher professional development and creation of new resources to be used. On the other hand, when assessment requirements were mandated federally in the US by the inaptly named No Child Left Behind, education professionals in some of the more progressive and proactive states were able to adapt the requirements into something that was actually useful, gaining federal money to support positive, evidence-based teaching initiatives. I don’t know enough about the non-politicians in Ontario’s department of education, but potentially they may be able to take this requirement and craft a very useful program out of it. It certainly should be possible to teach teachers how to teach cursive through professional development days over the summer. Continually learning new things as well as new teaching techniques is supposed to be part of the job, after all. Although, as I noted in a previous comment, nowhere in North America really pays teachers enough for that work, so that is certainly a structural obstacle to a successful implementation (and would be regardless of the political party in power).

I do highly recommend reading both links from the FPP. I had not yet read the second link when I first commented either, but the part where it describes how people in France have this exact same argument but with the roles of cursive and printing reversed (because they teach cursive primarily or only, with print being the secondary or not-taught form) was both eye-opening and amusing.

Note that there are several variations on cursive (American, UK, German, French), just as there are several variations on print (different letter forms for lowercase a, using small capitals instead of lowercase letters, the strokes used to form letters in drafting versus the way many of us were likely taught to form individual letters in elementary school, etc.), as well as some third alternate forms that have been mentioned by previous commenters, such as hand-written italic, and various calligraphic styles.
posted by eviemath at 8:36 PM on July 4, 2023 [7 favorites]

I had a bitter old counting-the-seconds to retirement sixth grade teacher who really, truly, and quite obviously disliked me. She called me out publicly more than once to humiliate me; one of times involved my handwriting, because as a left-handed person forced to use one of those right-handed desks, my hand was always covered with a smears left by lead pencil. Her ultimate insult was to tell me, a girl, that I had handwriting like a boy's. Take that, you useless girl!
PS: My construction paper stained-glass window art project was also really terrible.
I also think cursive has value but that's probably because I've used it for so long.
posted by etaoin at 9:02 PM on July 4, 2023 [1 favorite]

optimizing elementary kids’ learning and not leaving room for play and exploration

I think learning both printing and cursive would be great for kids at this age--Teaches fine motor skills, shape recognition, and prepares a kid for people who will write differently, both in cursive and print. If a teacher were to tell kids that their goal is to be able to identify letters and read both types of writing, then their reward would be the choice of what script will be their personal style. I think it would be great to toss a bunch of fonts at young kids after they have their letters.

Teaching cursive is like teaching art. I know one 8th grader that writes an almost perfect Times Roman as fast as I can write my cursive. I commented to my niece that she prints in comic sans, and she had never heard of the font, just knew that she thought certain types of lettering appealed to her, so she practiced that look.

It doesn't have to be an ablest exercise. Lefties are going to work on developing coordination and style with their own hand preference. Dyslexics may do better with cursive both in reading and writing.

People break looping cursive and join their printing-- I know I do, and my 21F grandkid was taught only printing, but she now will join certain groups of letters. I showed her how to break apart the letters in cursive to decode what is written, but it would take a lot of reading in cursive for her to be comfortable with it.

Those folks with some background in both cursive and printing can read older documents and seem to be able to read different handwriting styles easier. They can also look at gothic, copperplate, and calligraphic styles and recognize, or at least puzzle out what is written. Kids with a printing background only seem to be lost when presented with different scripts/fonts.

Just for fun, look at the fonts on this website: There are only a few that I can't decipher. (lookin' at you, Blackletter Hand)
posted by BlueHorse at 9:56 PM on July 4, 2023 [3 favorites]

I was taught cursive first at school, in South Africa in the early eighties. I think we called it "lopende skrif" (flowing script, but you could make a pun and translate it to "walking script" as well ).

I could already write when I started school, print (druk skrif). My sisters taught me.

I spent a year in an American school in 1981,( in New Haven. Worthington Hooker school) and there was a general sense that cursive was being phased out.

It was an interesting experience as American cursive shapes so many letters differently from how I'd been taught, but of course it was presented as the only correct way which was a valuable lesson for 9 year old me in how humans are.
posted by Zumbador at 12:15 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I mean, it's easy to be winky about something that you're good at, but if you look after elementary school: the subjects I really struggled with are really just the ones the teachers also graded on handwriting, especially in cursive. And like, that "oh I'm just bad at geography" or "oh I'm just bad at researching and writing papers" really did have an effect on what sorts of careers I thought I could pursue.

If it makes you feel better, there are things I was bad at and stayed bad at (lab science); things I was bad at and later found out I was good at and might have changed my whole life (art, especially drawing); and things that I thought we learned stupidly and did my own way instead (multiplication table minute-tests). There are things I was taught well and fell in love with that other people hate, like history.

And while I do hope that children are taught art better than I was, I also think teaching them that sometimes teachers are wrong and like fuck them if they don't like you; sometimes putting practice into something does pay off; and sometimes you are just bad at things and no one is good at everything is probably better than advocating no one learn cursive.
posted by dame at 1:16 AM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I think people are saying "this is a personal story about how a shitty teacher used cursive to traumatize and/or gatekeep me/others & that raises concerns for me when I hear about cursive being mandatory in schools" more than they're saying "I dislike cursive as a letterform & I don't believe anyone should learn it"

that's pretty much what I'm saying & I use cursive all the dang time (except I print the capitals because too weird & curly, also I read a handwriting personality analysis book at age 15 & deliberately gave myself "lesbian 'g's" which the book breathlessly described as looking like breasts)
posted by taquito sunrise at 1:46 AM on July 5, 2023 [7 favorites]

Yeah, that’s probably getting lost in the arguing between the couple folks who are specifically anti-cursive and those of us who are saying it could potentially be a positive addition, if taught well (and if not taught well, then probably print isn’t being taught well either and there are some other, larger problems to address). Apologies for that.
posted by eviemath at 5:25 AM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

→ Great. Now do FORTRAN.

Funny you should mention that: in the 1960s there was (extremely briefly) a movement among computer types to teach an all-caps font that would be easy for computers to digest via OCR. It looked weird and contrived, and of course it only included characters that FORTRAN needed. Since everyone was going to be a FORTRAN programmer, it seems like a good idea to someone at the time.

I have completely lost the reference to the paper. It may have been in Datamation or one of the paywalled ACM publications. ISTR I had to go to sci-hub to read it. The paper used the word "alphameric" a lot, which I'm glad has fallen into desuetude
posted by scruss at 5:45 AM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

Now do FORTRAN
WATFOR?
posted by yyz at 7:24 AM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

In general, text with small letters is easier to read because the shapes of the words are helpful.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:54 AM on July 5, 2023

Now do FORTRAN
WATFOR?

WATBIZness is it of yours?

(This may be a deep cut -- WATBIZ is the programming language we learned in business class in the early eighties, but I see little record of it on the wider web now. Possibly our teacher created it.)
posted by ricochet biscuit at 8:06 AM on July 5, 2023

I haven't written in cursive since probably 5th or 6th grade, I want to say? We were still turning in hand-written assignments, but I don't recall teachers being sticklers for cursive. My cursive today would absolutely look like the handwriting of a 10-year-old, hideous D'Nealian script, upright and loopy, maybe owing to my left-handedness.

I always envied the beautiful cursive that my grandmother wrote, which was so perfectly identical to that of her siblings that I couldn't tell it apart in cards and letters. I was not willing to spend the time learning to write it, of course.

Anyway, they half-heartedly taught cursive in my kid's (New York) third-grade class last year. I think she learned all the lowercase letters, and actually does a pretty great job of it. But what's the point, other than being able to read old handwritten documents, maybe? Connected printing isn't any slower, generally-speaking, and I find it much easier to read.
posted by uncleozzy at 11:02 AM on July 5, 2023

School isn't meant to teach you only "useful" things, by which you all appear to mean things that make you money. It's also meant to teach you small skills you can repuporse, like how to be bad at something and not be mad about it forty years later. :)

GCU Sweet and Full of Grace has got it - it’s something that was classically taught through repetitive drills that, if your fine motor control wasn’t great (presumably the ableism angle) sucked and took forever. And the reason people make a big deal out of it not being useful is the sense of betrayal, at least for those of us born in the 80s and 90s, that came with being told that we needed to go through all this because it would be mandatory in Xth grade and then it wasn’t, the Xth grade teacher didn’t care, nobody ever cared again. My mom made me practice cursive in the summer!

Of course the reintroduction here is actually being framed with a contrary disability angle - that it helps with learning if you have dyslexia - and there may be an argument that the practice helps with motor skills, too, but the way it was taught back in the day as a (fake) core skill was just legitimately miserable for a lot of people.
posted by atoxyl at 12:37 PM on July 5, 2023 [2 favorites]

I was never concerned with whether cursive would make me money, I was concerned about whether I needed to be good at it to get through elementary school!
posted by atoxyl at 12:46 PM on July 5, 2023 [3 favorites]

I didn't have much use for cursive in high school but in university it was pretty useful for exams where I'd have to write long essay answers. My penmanship would get pretty bad so I'd always be amazed that my profs could even read my answers but they did somehow. I guess it's all laptops these days but maybe with all the cheating aids that are now available the pen and paper exams will make a comeback.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 2:27 PM on July 5, 2023

A couple more memories that have cropped up thanks to this thread:

. in the third grade because my handwriting was so bad, my teacher and my mom agreed at P-T interviews that I would write out 5 definitions from the dictionary every schoolnight, for practice. (the comments about misery breeding misery made me remember). I remember arguing long and loud about the exact terms of engagement (not needing to write "noun, from Old German" for example) and spending a lot longer trying to find the shortest possible definitions than i probably would have spent copying 5 randomly selected ones. (I was def one of those kids who'd spend an hour to avoid half an hour's worth of work).

. in my 30s I had to write the PE exam, which happened to occur at my alma mater and in the same room as my first lecture in first year, years before. It was probably my last experience of getting a handed-out photocopy question page and a ruled booklet, and having to fill it up. I had to get a second book! I had not handwritten that long in years and my hand was S O R E.

aaand I already crapped on Doug Ford above but he desperately deserves to be crapped on. I keep reading this thread and thinking "good story! interesting argument!" and then am reminded that this is all coming about because of an ON CON public school pedagogy policy decision, and I just become unutterably depressed. They could have a mandate to teach grade schoolers how to eat cotton candy and they'd fuck it up somehow.
posted by hearthpig at 4:26 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

I skipped the grade where cursive was taught in my school and for the rest of elementary school got straight A’s except for D’s and F’s in Handwriting.

In high school I started using fountain pens and gridded notebooks and started enjoying the feeling of writing in cursive. It got even better in college where I learned to write Cyrillic in cursive.
posted by bendy at 5:04 PM on July 5, 2023 [1 favorite]

So in an interesting related development, I just gave an exam in my postgrad class this semester that was back to F2F for the first time in three years. We had (too) many exam formats, so I chose handwritten exam books, as was normal prepandemic, just in case the tech options failed. (My university loves cheap and untested new tech where the disastrous results fall to us, the faculty.)

It was… not good. My exam marker told me it took forever to decipher people’s handwriting and blew up her grading times. From the exams I checked, I suspect some students were also limited by the need to handwrite vs. type, although as always, I quite admire the careful script or block letters of the students who grew up writing characters vs. letters.

So I guess in the future we’re going with typing on the “bring your own device” option with software that locks you down to only the exam portal. What makes me sad is that this option prevents students from doing charts and diagrams, which can be quite useful for displaying one’s learning, often in quite time efficient ways.

Relatedly, although hopefully not too much of a derail, I will also flag that my preferred input for IOS is swype. Yet somehow the native Apple keyboard and even the Google options are TERRIBLE compared to what I had with my Samsung phone back in what, 2015? Literally zero product improvement in years, as well. Not like I’m going back to Samsung devices, as I like Apple’s privacy focus, but I truly miss having the good swype options. I keep using swipe to type nonetheless, as I don’t type well on a touchscreen - I need keys. (I learned proper typing in middle school.) Mentioning this as it seems relevant in the brain-to-text-output discussion.
posted by ec2y at 5:42 PM on July 5, 2023

So hey, writing in cursive is one thing, but reading is another, and I'll just say that as someone who dabbles in genealogy, there are waaaay too many people who will post requests for help 'deciphering' handwritten information from records that are, on examination, perfectly clear cursive writing. It's always slightly shocking. Not being able to read documents with handwriting is a form of illiteracy. It would be a terrible handicap to anyone who wanted to do serious academic research.
posted by bq at 5:02 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

@dis_integration:

> pynchon wrote gravity’s rainbow in tiny block printed manuscript. cursive is not necessarily faster than print

OK, if you insist, Tolstoy could not have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Resurrection and 18 novellas and some dozens of stories and a couple of dozen fables and a half-dozen plays and a couple of dozen volumes of philosophy, by block printing. What's Pynchon's total oeuvre again?

Cursive runs, printing plods. I mean, score another unique achievement for Pynchon, but this does not demonstrate what you seem to think. Cursive is faster, when used by someone who's good at it. Being good at cursive used to be one of the ways that owners oppressed non-owners. My observation about what cursive is good for is not an endorsement of teaching cursive, in case you missed that.

@Tell Me No Lies:

> That's actually why Shakespeare only produced a few sonnets and a play or two. No cursive to help him along.

William Shakespeare's handwriting is known from six surviving signatures, all of which appear on legal documents. It is believed by many scholars that the three pages of the handwritten manuscript of the play Sir Thomas More are also in William Shakespeare's handwriting.

Shakespeare's six extant signatures were written in the style known as secretary hand. It was native and common in England at the time, and was the cursive style taught in schools.

Have you got a better cite than Wikipedia to back that up? Why would you think that Shakespeare couldn't write in cursive? Cursive writing was invented soon after the alphabet.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 5:48 AM on July 6, 2023

Shouldn't we be teaching shorthand, if speed is of the essence?
posted by sagc at 6:01 AM on July 6, 2023 [3 favorites]

OK, if you insist, Tolstoy could not have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina and Resurrection and 18 novellas and some dozens of stories and a couple of dozen fables and a half-dozen plays and a couple of dozen volumes of philosophy, by block printing. What's Pynchon's total oeuvre again?

i don’t know if pynchon moved to typewriters or computers but he’s put out a more than a few thousand more pages since V and GR. That’s not the point though. There’s no evidence that cursive is faster than printing or more conducive to thought. Generally when writing the barrier to production of more words isn’t the instrument in your hands but the one in your brain. it’s very strange to fetishize it this way as if the thoughts had in cursive were better thoughts (i’ve read a great deal of tolstoy’s “philosophy” and can promise you that his thoughts are not very good ones). it’s just one way of writing by hand that has no magic powers and that isn’t proven to be faster then another way and that no longer serves any real purpose that isn’t also served by print.
posted by dis_integration at 7:13 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Not being able to read documents with handwriting is a form of illiteracy. It would be a terrible handicap to anyone who wanted to do serious academic research.

Cursive runs, printing plods.

If you're wondering why people are like "hey, the way society talks\thinks about cursive is often used to reenforce existing social hierarchies," this is why.
posted by Gygesringtone at 7:58 AM on July 6, 2023 [6 favorites]

I guess nobody is reading what I wrote, which is namely that yes, cursive writing has historically been, maybe not an elite skill, but one that was used as a barrier to social mobility. You are Goddamned right, it was used to reinforce socioeconomic hierarchy.

I'm pretty sure the people who keep saying "there's no evidence" are themselves not very skilled at cursive writing. Or they're looking at studies of the performance of writers who were themselves not motivated to get good.

It's a thing I've practiced for long enough to get reasonably good at, but I recognize it as the elegant weapon of a different (if not more civilized) age. I'd advocate it as sort of self-disciplinary practice, for people who feel that they could benefit from such a thing. I don't advocate for it to be part of elementary school curricula: it has been replaced by the keyboard as the way that serious people make serious text, and kids have better things to do with their time than not being good at an obsolete skill.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:21 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Shouldn't we be teaching shorthand, if speed is of the essence?

I actually tried looking into this, but hoo boy, is learning shorthand dead. And from what I found online, SUPER confusing.

I actually like cursive. It looks better than my chicken scratch printing and I do write faster with it. I don't always have the ability to type notes these days, so it's useful for that.
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:27 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

Proposal: kids only have to learn cursive if their parents can text with both thumbs.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 8:50 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I think we should have to learn to use T9 texting. It forced economy of thought and ensured we only sent the most succinct expression of our ideas.
posted by dis_integration at 8:58 AM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

I'm pretty sure the people who keep saying "there's no evidence" are themselves not very skilled at cursive writing. Or they're looking at studies of the performance of writers who were themselves not motivated to get good.

I mean, yeah, not everyone's good at cursive. That's the whole point. My being bad at cursive doesn't make me worse, it doesn't make my opinion less informed, it makes my opinion informed by different experience.

Look, I get you're not in the EVERYONE-NEEDS-CURSIVE camp, but your language is totally loaded with a being good at cursive makes you better attitude. You literally call it "more civilized" and use phrases about people's writing style as something that "plods".
posted by Gygesringtone at 10:43 AM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

(And I know that's a Star Wars quote, the context doesn't make it less snobby)
posted by Gygesringtone at 10:44 AM on July 6, 2023

It’s also worth noting that the data on speed of writing is weak - the study often cited apparently doesn’t say what has been claimed, and there is considerable variation based on national variation in curriculum (unsurprisingly, counties like France that focus on cursive over print have different results than countries like the US that focus on print over cursive) - according to the second link in the fpp, which does a nice little review of the evidence for and against cursive. Also according to that link, learning to write by hand has been shown to be important for development of reading skills (that is, reading and writing are closely tied skills), and there is some evidence for learning more than one hand writing style contributing to stronger reading skills. Touched on briefly: print, with separate letters, helps learners focus on individual letters and phonics; while cursive, where whole words are the contiguous unit, helps learners focus on word recognition and related reading skills. Both of these are helpful for different aspects of reading.
posted by eviemath at 11:11 AM on July 6, 2023 [4 favorites]

Liking cursive, or not, and finding it useful, or not, is arguable.

But the fact that the current govt of Ontario is odious, and the (argh) minister for education in Ontario is force-feeding cursive as a blatant distraction ploy from how shitty of job they've been doing at educating Ontario students is... obviously not arguable.
posted by ovvl at 4:46 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

You literally call it "more civilized"

They literally didn’t do that: “but I recognize it as the elegant weapon of a different (if not more civilized) age”
posted by Atom Eyes at 7:24 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

I learned to write, as opposed to print, as a small child (from American handwriting books). I didn't learn how to print fast until university where writing wasn't cutting it for physics assignments (prof insisted on assignments submitted on paper, handwritten, because even if you computer-generated it, at least you wrote down the right answers and maybe learned more than nothing, but he couldn't read my writing. I am still sad about this. My writing was really pretty back then). After a couple injuries to my dominant hand, my writing is scratchy and I can only print legibly if my hands are warm. It's winter. My lab notebooks are all horrible from about May to September.

Cursive is for dip pens and fountain pens and other things where lifting the pen causes hideousness. It is not for ballpoints if you're the kind of person who writes like they're engraving stone tablets (I am), because that wears your hands out super fast.

For things only I plan to read, I do use a bastardized speedrun version of Aurebesh, (also an elegant script from a more civilized &c) which resembles nothing as much as very cramped Burmese but is very quick for transferring thoughts to paper.
posted by ngaiotonga at 7:57 PM on July 6, 2023

>>You literally call it "more civilized"

>>They literally didn’t do that: “but I recognize it as the elegant weapon of a different (if not more civilized) age”

But they did? Rewording, the meaning is "If that age is not more civilized than ours, then they are at least different" with the implication being that it was more civilized

Or this explanation from helpful people on stack exchange explain it better:

[A] if not [B].

[A] is certain while [B] is not certain but may be possible.
posted by LizBoBiz at 2:42 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I interpret “but I recognize it as the elegant weapon of a different (if not more civilized) age” as saying that the previous age had pretensions to be more civilized, but it wasn't.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 4:00 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Perhaps what the poster meant, but a more clear phrasing in that case would have subbed ‘though’ for ‘if’, or ‘not necessarily more civilized’ for the whole parenthetical phrase‘ - or just have omitted it. Relevant to the discussion: both writer and reader bear some responsibility for clarity of communication (that is, using a standard phrase in a non-standard way will generate some confusion, just as using a no longer common script).
posted by eviemath at 4:28 AM on July 7, 2023

[A] is certain while [B] is not certain but may be possible

"[B] may be possible" is not the same as "[B] is literally true" which is the sentiment that was attributed to Aardvark Cheeselog. (But granted, language can be a mushy minefield.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 4:38 PM on July 7, 2023