"curse Of Cursive Handwriting"

[anomalogue]

"Curse of Cursive Handwriting" by Philip Ball, from Prospect magazine: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/cursive-handwriting-philip-ball/

 

Have fun!

[mboschm]

http://i1148.photobucket.com/albums/o565/mboschm/DSC_0313_zpsf96cc877.jpg

 

 

http://i1148.photobucket.com/albums/o565/mboschm/DSC_0314_zps30eea25c.jpg

[The Good Captain]

My only 'curse' about cursive is that it seems that those that practice it all end up writing the same as each other. Wonderful it may be but where's the 'cursive' individuality? Note my careful use of the word 'cursive' in the last sentence instead of the words 'expletive deleted'.

A common error.

[beak]

Like most, I learned a simplified form of printing letters as a very young child, but I can't remember any stress associated with growing up and learning joined writing too. Can anyone?

 

The reason that cursive is taught may simply be that, when mastered, it is quicker and less strain on the hand. What's wrong with that? And let's not bother with the 'printing is quicker' counter - which I believe most often means; 'It's quicker for me because my cursive is slow or messy.'

 

Are we to be stuck with unjoined writing being called 'manuscript' (sic) now that someone has decided on pushing that usage, flying in the face of: manu-script = written (in any form) -by-hand? If so, could that person please tell us what word to use when we mean 'written by hand'.

 

Was this the same person who substituted eventuate for happen? I wonder what terrible thing eventuated to him or her, souring the mind to plain English?

 

Moan. moan , moan.

Edited February 25, 2013 by beak

[The Good Captain]

Like most, I learned a simplified form of printing letters as a very young child, but I can't remember any stress associated with growing up and learning joined writing too. Can anyone?

 

The reason that cursive is taught may simply be that, when mastered, it is quicker and less strain on the hand. What's wrong with that? And let's not bother with the 'printing is quicker' counter - which I believe most often means; 'It's quicker for me because my cursive is slow or messy.'

 

Are we to be stuck with unjoined writing being called 'manuscript' (sic) now that someone has decided on pushing that usage, flying in the face of: manu-script = written (in any form) -by-hand? If so, could that person please tell us what word to use when we mean 'written by hand'.

 

Was this the same person who substituted eventuate for happen? I wonder what terrible thing eventuated to him or her, souring the mind to plain English?

 

Moan. moan , moan.

Something like Bill Kerr's comment in one of the Tony Hancock scripts: "Real writing? You mean with all the letters joined together?" Now that's real writing! Individuality.

Just imagine if one of the 'pioneers' of a form of writing or script had had a different name. Insert your own innuendo here.

 

 

[Cubane]

Wow, what a terrible article. Sorry in advance for the lengthy post, but there were a few points I just couldn't leave uncommented and I'd be interested to hear what you guys have to say about them.

 

Brace yourselves, opinions are coming:

 

 

The odd thing is that, when most parents watch their child’s hard-earned gains in forming letters like those printed in their storybooks crumble under the demand that they now relearn the art of writing “joined up” (“and don’t forget the joining tail!”), leaving their calligraphy a confused scrawl of extraneous cusps and wiggles desperately seeking a home, they don’t ask what on earth the school thinks it is doing.

 

Firstly, the child's writing prowess doesn't crumble, it evolves. Starting to learn cursive does not delete their knowledge of print from their brains. Of course their cursive will look terrible at first, but why should that be a problem? Young children learn new things all the time, and I suspect they are able to handle the fact that their first few attempts are less than perfect better than most adults.

Secondly - since when do a second-grader's block letters have anything to do with calligraphy?

 

 

The child may develop the same abominable scribble that gets letters misdirected and medical prescriptions perilously misread.

 

Unless of course the parents and teachers pay attention to his or her handwriting and make sure it's kept neat from the start.

 

 

Another [teacher] ventured the answer I’d anticipated; that the children will be able to write faster, and then added that she thought she’d seen some research somewhere showing that some children find the flowing movements help to imprint the shape of whole words more clearly in their mind. This was evidently not a question they had faced before.

 

This part doesn't make any sense to me.

The teacher is making an excellent point here, and the fact that she does apparently read up on relevant research for her field implies that she did indeed spend some thought on this topic before.

 

 

We tend to forget, unless we have small children, that learning to write isn’t easy. It would make sense, then, to keep it as simple as possible. If we are going to teach our children two different ways of writing in their early years, you’d think we’d have a very good reason for doing so.

 

I don't understand why not being easy should be a valid argument for not teaching something.

Learning foreign languages is difficult, too, so why aren't we striving to keep that simple as well? Why did I read Macbeth and Frankenstein in English class when I was 14, and why should my school offer five different languages for their students to learn, including one with four different alphabets, when we could get around just fine in most countries with just German and English?

I really hope I'm misreading this, but this sounds like Mr. Ball is saying that learning something complex and, yes, difficult is somehow a bad thing that children need to be protected from. I know nothing about education and child development, so I'm most likely wrong about this, but something about this idea is making me feel very uncomfortable.

 

 

Now, I admire the elegant copperplate of the Victorians as much as anyone. But no one writes like that any more.

 

How is this relevant to whether or not cursive should be taught?

There are plenty of people who still write in cursive and/or see tidy handwriting as a sign of class and sophistication. It is a part of how we present ourselves, like dressing well and using appropriate language, and I believe it is wrong to teach a child that these things aren't important any more.

 

 

How can we insist that to drop cursive will be to drop beauty and elegance, given that most people’s cursive handwriting is so abysmal?

 

It won't.

It will, however, drop attention to detail and diligence, which I think are incredibly important skills to learn, and a failure to teach them from a young age can be of serious disadvantage for these children later in life. I'm speaking from experience here.

Also, we have to ask ourselves if "most people's" (by the way, who exactly is he referring to here?) cursive is bad because it's cursive or simply because they aren't taking very good care of it, and if their handwriting really would be any better if they hadn't been taught cursive at all. I think Mr. Ball is putting the cart before the horse here.

 

 

Once you need to write fast (which you don’t at primary school), you’ll join up anyhow if and when that helps. I know this to be so, because I missed the school years in which cursive was ground into my peers, and yet I never suffered from lack of speed. Research supports me on this.

 

Children do not need grinding to develop good handwriting. I know this to be so, because I was lucky enough to have an excellent primary school teacher who relied on positive encouragement and motivation rather than brute force, and my cursive at that age was perfect, as was that of most of my classmates. Research supports me on this.

 

Seriously though, I think Mr. Ball is underestimating the impact of good educating skills here. Learning a new, "grown-up" task can be fun and exciting, and as long they have a competent teacher and a supportive home environment, I can't see why it shouldn't be possible for any child to be motivated to do it gladly.

 

 

Champions of cursive will always unearth tenuous arguments from dusty corners of the literature: it makes it easier to learn how to write words, b and d are not confused and children don’t write backwards letters. None of these claims counts for very much—on the merits of learning cursive versus manuscript, Steve Graham, a leading expert in writing development at Arizona State University, avers that, “I don’t think the research suggests an advantage for one over the other.”

 

At this point, I would love to see an either an extended statement from Mr. Graham or links to the studies he is referring to. Without that, this argument is exactly what Mr. Ball criticises in his adversaries - tenuous and unfounded.

 

 

It’s not necessarily cursive per se that’s the problem, but the practice of teaching children two different systems, perhaps in the space of so many years, without good reason. Research seems to show that it may not much matter how children learn to write, so long as it is consistent.

 

Okay, now he's starting to get on my nerves.

I understand he's not writing for a scientific journal here, but for heaven's sake, start. Quoting. Your. Sources. Properly!

I am honestly beginning to have a hard time taking this fellow seriously. He has been throwing the word "research" around for several paragraphs now without naming any concrete studies or literature he used and without even making clear what it was that was being researched. Take, for instance, the quote above - "it doesn't matter how children learn to write", matter for what? How did they find out, what standards did they use, etc? Without this information, his points are meaningless.

 

Also, I don't like how he almost mockingly keeps referring to pro-cursive arguments as anachronistic, "dusty corners of literature", and so on. It seems like he didn't put a lot of effort into researching both sides of the debate and in fact never really questioned his own belief. Frankly, it doesn't feel like very good journalism.

 

 

But that’s a smaller matter than forcing them to struggle though one of their hardest early-learning tasks twice, with two different sets of rules, apparently because of nothing more than the arbitrary and tautological belief that only the kind of writing you had to (re)learn can be “grown-up” and “beautiful.”

 

Isn't beauty always arbitrary?

 

And again - "forcing"? "Struggle through it"? Where does all that negativity come from? I mean, I understand that some children have difficulties with this, but that's the case for all school subjects and I strongly disagree with the idea that it should somehow be used a reason to dumb things down for them. That, for me, would be contradictory to the very purpose of school itself.

Everybody has to do things they struggle with at some point in their life, many of which we don't understand why it has to be done, and I fail to see how learning to handle such situations early on could do a person anything but good.

 

Oh, and another thing - did I miss something or did Mr. Ball completely ignore any differences there may be between learning a new script and learning to write from scratch?

Again, I know nothing about children, but isn't it easier to practice new letter forms when you already have required the set of motor skills? I don't know how relevant this actually is, but it does seem like something worth mentioning in this context, especially if one wants to focus their argumentation around how difficult it is to learn how to write.

[inkstainedruth]

@Cubane:

I have a sneaking suspicion that the article's author has cruddy handwriting and is trying to justify it.

A lot of the points you bring out and rebut make me think that there's been a lot of "dumbing down" going on. Also a lot of coddling (at what point did kids become so fragile that they have to be driven to "play dates" instead of just going out on their bikes someplace, the way I did when I was a kid?).

My mom was a writer, and she had one very silly short science fiction story that kept getting sold over and over. She wrote it to be "sixth grade humor" as she put it (and handed it off to my brother's friends to see if they thought it was funny). At one point (I want to say late 1980s), she was approached to have the story republished in a new reader for (IIRC) the Minnesota Dept. of Education -- they were putting together a volume of SF stories, and wanted to include it. But it was for eighth grade students. When she protested that it was probably too juvenile for eighth graders to *want* to read, she was told "but it has hard words in it...." I kid you not. She was *completely* appalled (although she did let them buy the story).

I don't remember cursive being all that horrible to learn in school (I think it was second or third grade). At some point I switched over to printing, and my handwriting is pretty atrocious as a result. But I learned cursive without any trauma. I had probably more trauma when I took a calligraphy class in college when it came to doing italic (and a little bit with blackletter) in order to get it neat enough. Of course, I started out studying graphic design, so I was also taking classes like typography.

It just occurred to me: my parents were about the same age (born in the early 1920s) and though they grew up in very different places (Flushing, Queens vs. and somewhat rural West Virginia), their handwriting was actually pretty similar looking. And that was considering that for doing manuscripts, my mom typed everything (first on an old manual Royal, and then, starting in the early 1970s, on an IBM Selectric); she eventually switched over to a word processor sometime after I graduated from college (she called me one time after I got married, all excited because she had figured out the "find/replace" function, and I was sort of like, "um, yeah, my Mac has that...."

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Lisya72]

I like how the author refers to his position as being supported by research, but instead of referring to any clinical studies or other true research, he refers to the unsupported opinions of researchers.

[WaskiSquirrel]

Part of the reason we start with printing is that we are teaching children to recognize letters. What better way than actually having them write the letters? This involves more parts of the brain in identifying the letter.

 

That said, I have also read that the curved shapes of cursive writing are easier for children (especially boys, who are slower to develop fine motor skills). The trouble here is that the letter looks one way in a book, the other way when written. It might be a bit confusing for a child.

 

I have a lot of sympathy for this issue because I am learning to write. I have been learning Chinese. Speaking it and understanding it were awkward, but I made pretty good progress. However, when I started trying to learn the writing system, my progress has slowed to a crawl. Nothing I write looks like what is in the books. Worse, I've realized I'm learning to print, just like a little kid, not to write Chinese in the "cursive" form. I'm actually ok with that because the printing is helping me to learn to recognize characters. I was excited to recognize a few characters the last time I stopped in a Chinese restaurant and I looked at the menu.

 

To a child (or me with Chinese), the writing is a lot of mysterious symbols. It's good to start them out learning only one both for reading and writing. Later, after they master the basics, show them how to do it faster and more smoothly.

 

One mistake a lot of education reformers make is that they confuse how an adult perceives and thinks about things with the way a child does. Lacking experience, the child has an entirely different way of interpreting the world.

[imahawki]

There is no longer any reason why books couldn't be printed in a "joined up" font now that we no longer use typesetting. That is as valid a course as the suggestions in that poor and biased article.

[Unky]

There are some modern manuscript styles that are very similar to cursive letters but are unjointed. There are a limited number of letters that are different from the cursive. The corresponding cursive program simply adds the joining of the letters.

[MaddyMarcel]

beak, learning to write cursive was in no way traumatic for me.

 

I don't use the perfect script I was taught in grade school, but I do still join my letters. It IS faster than block printing. I use a semi-Italic style that's quite legible and I think reasonably aesthetically pleasing.

 

Lisya72, you are right. Some actual data would have been nice.

[Trebster]

Here's a short essay on cursive writing as taught (or not taught) in school:

 

Why professors should object ....

[MaddyMarcel]

Here's a short essay on cursive writing as taught (or not taught) in school:

 

Why professors should object ....

 

Fantastic article, thanks!!

[beak]

Indeed worth the time to read. Thanks.

[inkstainedruth]

It's a very nice, eloquent rebuttal to the original posted article. Thanks for posting.

Ruth Morrisson aka inkstainedruth

[Dimitry V.]

-snip-

 

I concur.

 

 

Kind regards,

Dimitry