American CursiveFollow

Learning cursive is mandatory? I never really learned it until high school when my german teacher wrote in it exclusively. It was "taught" for about 10 minutes in third grade or whatever, but i never learned it. Fortunately most letters are basically the same, so reading it is manageable without any previous knowledge, but it takes me much much longer to read than regular print. I have never been able to write cursive.

Cursive is one of those things that probably should have been eliminated decades ago, but continued to be taught, more or less out of the assumption that each generation should know how to read/write it because the last generation was. It hasn't actually served a purpose since the invention of the ball point pen. I don't think it was as big a deal until computers came along and everyone started communicating with type rather than by hand. But yeah, now's a great opportunity to put the whole thing to bed IMO.

I say split the difference and make them learn Fraktur.

That's not what makes cursive cursive though. The point of cursive is to write with a minimum amount of lifting the pen tip from the page. It developed out of the necessity of dealing with ink quills back before we had things like ball point pens. The quill was dipped in ink, with the surface tension of the ink drawn into the narrow quill tip holding it in place until you touched it to the paper. But once touched down, you had to keep it on the page as much as possible until the ink was expended or you'd get drops all over the place. In cursive each letter should flow into the next letter allowing you to minimize the number of times you might have to lift the quill from the paper between dipping for more ink. Simply putting a bit more curve or loop into letters while still separating them from each other has nothing to do with writing in cursive.

Obviously, since no one has used quills and ink pots to write for the better part of a century, it's long past time we got rid of cursive. It was not developed to be easier to read (cause it's not), nor to be faster to write (cause it's not). We continued to use it even after modern pens were invented more out of inertia than anything else. As long as we were still writing by hand, why not continue to teach people to write in the same style? There wasn't a super need to change. But now that nearly all correspondence is done by typing, I don't think we need to teach kids how to write anything other than print characters.

The only time my letters blend together is when I'm using one of those stupid gel pens and it leaks. I may double over on a letter P, d, b, etc and end up making the upright portion look like a loop, but my letters are still separate. And my signature is pretty just just a bunch of scribbles these days. Occasionally it looks like the cursive leters, but most of the time it's just "up down up down up down up down slash"

Nope.

I used to at least start with an R to sign my name. Not anymore though; it's just scribbles.

I do however connect some of my letters when writing, as alma is talking about. Particular with e, l, i, and t. It's pretty silly when i write "little" in cursive but nothing else

If I do have to write anything beyond a shopping list, I typically use script. It's faster and funner.

My cursive is bad. I don't remember a handful of letter, or the right way to connect them.
I hate reading cursive, as a "personal" style makes each person's cursive different.
When I was in school it was taught in 3rd grade, and we had to write in it up until I was in the 7th grade. Once in Jr.High and we had to start taking notes for different classes, the teachers didn't care. It was our notes.

I do still sign my name is cursive. My signature, something I hate to look at, looks like that 3rd grader who learned how to write his name

To the OP poll: Maybe teach it, to learn how to read it, but not force it.

Edited, Aug 30th 2013 9:12am by Sandinmygum

Well, I was talking about what we teach them to write, not what we teach them to read, but honestly if cursive is written clearly, reading it isn't an issue, even for someone who's never been taught it. As pointed out above, the issue with reading cursive is that most people don't write it clearly, so it's hard to read even if you've been taught it and used it all your life. Someone who's never been taught to read or write anything but printed letters, upon being exposed to something typeset in cursive should be able to make it out just fine. It's not like the letters are not still recognizable (with a couple minor exceptions which should be easy to adjust for when reading).

Given her age while still in high school, I have a sneaking suspicion that her inability to read the letter wasn't just because it was written in cursive. There was presumably a reason why she dictated it to someone else to write rather than write it herself. And, as a couple of us have pointed out, difficulty in reading cursive has less to do with whether someone has learned to write it, as whether the specific thing you are reading was written in clear cursive. Anyone with a reasonable reading capability should be able to read cursive, even if they've never been taught to write it. The letters just aren't that different.

Yeah. I had given up on my signature. Then I got a job where my signature would sometimes be on things. I pretty much spent four hours training my hand to make it look presentable

Type your name underneath is like a normal person? Anyone I know who worked anywhere they had to sign for many things (including me) has a signature that's basically, at most, 2 legible letters and a line.