Maybe Cursive just give up and die already?

[Titivillus]

  JakobS said:

....

That is why I think we must focus on legibility of individual hands over the mandate of cursive, as that is what is important, not only in developing something that can be widely read and understood, but in having a person develop a better sense of themselves and their individuality.

 

 

That's what I'm thinking and if they want at a later time to learn cursive and use it then have at it!

 

K

[Judybug]

  Titivillus said:

  irish_monk said:

Most of my students cannot read or write cursive very well. I write in it exclusively. It requires a different type of thinking that is underdeveloped in education. Thus we are left with people who can only regurgitate that which is handed to them rather than develop a society of creative free thinkers.

 

I find this comment interesting. How exactly is learning the gestures to print and the gestures to write cursive different enough that without the latter there are no free thinkers?

 

When did cursive become this amazing mind expanding technique? How is the printing on regurgitating information while cursive is beyond art. :roflmho:

 

K

 

I'm certainly not an expert on the brain, but I think there is some evidence that learning almost any skill can expand us in ways that aren't directly related to the skill. For example, there is evidence that when children learn to read music and play a musical instrument this creates new pathways in the brain, and this has an impact on non-musical thinking. I read a book about this before I retired from music teaching - wish I could remember the title. At any rate, learning cursive just might develop "a different type of thinking that is underdeveloped in education." I don't think it's a far-fetched idea. And yes, learning print and italic may also develop their own different types of thinking.

 

Judybug

 

[WendyNC]

What I'd really like to see is getting past the whole concept of "either, or" between printing and cursive. I do like the idea of "here are letters and when you get the hang of them, here are ways you can write with them more efficiently, which often involves moving smoothly from one letter to the next without having to lift your writing instrument from the page." Poking around online, I have found a few sites which suggest writing styles which might do this. Although they are not to my personal taste, they are simple enough as not to limit the development of individual yet legible styles.

[Gehaha]

  Judybug said:

I'm certainly not an expert on the brain, but I think there is some evidence that learning almost any skill can expand us in ways that aren't directly related to the skill. For example, there is evidence that when children learn to read music and play a musical instrument this creates new pathways in the brain, and this has an impact on non-musical thinking. I read a book about this before I retired from music teaching - wish I could remember the title. At any rate, learning cursive just might develop "a different type of thinking that is underdeveloped in education." I don't think it's a far-fetched idea. And yes, learning print and italic may also develop their own different types of thinking.

 

Judybug

 

Hello,

 

not too long ago I read an scientific article, which seconds what you assume. It has to do with the eye to hand connection and a different

understanding of the meaning of words. The "connected" writing (cursive) makes a difference in terms of synaptic networks.

 

IMO children should learn "the whole" skill of writing first. It's more difficult, but worthwhile for a whole lifetime. If they like to print later, they have a choice.

 

Best,

Anna

 

 

[Ondina]

I read all this and then I turn to my right and see the class of my kid, 3 and 4 year olds, heads bent and tongues sticking out, concentrating in learning how to write "ea" and "ae" in cursive ( underlined in dots to make it easy), and can't help but smile......

[Splicer]

  Titivillus said:

But what benefit is there from teaching printing & cursive both are WRITING? What part of the Universe is understood by using cursive?

 

Cursive writing is simply writing with less lifting of the pen from the page. I don't think it has a whit to do with aesthetics, and it certainly isn't about legibility or readability. It's about writing in a manner that is more comfortable, fluid and rapid than printing.

 

Printing is to cursive what hunt-and-peck is to touch-typing. Arguing against leaching cursive is like arguing against teaching touch-typing... after all, the kids can already hunt and peck. Why bother learning to touch-type?

[Splicer]

  Ondina said:

I read all this and then I turn to my right and see the class of my kid, 3 and 4 year olds, heads bent and tongues sticking out, concentrating in learning how to write "ea" and "ae" in cursive ( underlined in dots to make it easy), and can't help but smile......

 

The "ae" is a ligatured æ in one figure-eight stroke, entering at the top center and exiting at the bottom center, I trust.

 

[Lozzic]

My problem is not so much the printing vs cursive debate but rather the lazy attitudes of general society with respect to teaching and learning such skills at all. When I was at school not so long ago I was taught a very basic cursive and had a copy book. The style of cursive was very upright, untraditional and unattractive; it was very amateurish. I was not taught to write cursive, rather I was given this copybook and told to do what the name suggests, copy. The same teaching method (copybooks that is) was applied to everyone I know of my age group and I know it was applied later because my young cousin was taught this way.

I do however think that this is relevant to the cursive vs printing debate. Most people (my age group) I have known who write cursive have done so legibly enough and they have developed a more traditional slope to their writing that aids speed. Most people who I know who have been taught to print (less people are taught this to my knowledge) have writing that is also fairly legible but there is one difference. Those who I know who write cursive generally form letters in the tried and tested traditional way. In printing however a large number of people form letters that are more like Roman cursive than English and that are strangely different to any italic style or printed typeface I have ever seen. They print capitals as Roman capitals and they proceed to write lower case letters as a series of rather minimalistic though badly formed letters.

This is not a criticism on those who write italic styles, or who prefer them, rather it is an attack on teaching methods. I feel that presented with printed letters in a copy book and an inadequate writing tool, namely the ballpoint, and inadequate teaching, children will strip the printed writing style down to the absolute minimum of flair and practicality and even further. This creates an inadequate printed style that is largely their own invention in the absence of any effective teaching whatsoever.

As for those taught cursive I have found that although some people taught cursive rank the worst in legibility they generally retain a more traditional, well formed and consistent writing style. I can only assume that this is because in learning cursive, with or without adequate teaching, you have to retain letters in their entirety and you have to maintain a consistency between letters as they connect that printed styles do not encourage.

 

I think the general line of this post is slightly in favour of cursive over printing but I am trying to state that children generally do not care for writing (at that age I don't think most children really see the point) and that teaching methods are pretty much non-existent. Therefore teaching methods must be addressed and children must not be left to their own devices when learning to write. Discipline in writing, I feel, is more adequately achieved with a traditional sloping cursive style.

 

[HDoug]

I was just thinking (uh oh!) and was wondering what people thought about a hypothetical situation very much related to this one, but somewhat tangential to it. In order not to hijack this very interesting thread, I started a thread poll that asks this question:

 

"Finally, the national educational authority in your country realizes the value of handwriting, and hastens to implement a program to teach school kids to write. But to accommodate the current use of handwriting, the style taught will be brand new, and in no way related to the reliquary italic or knotted cursive so dear to you. The bold and daring new handwriting is easy to teach and easy for the kids to learn, but you may need some training just in order to read it. It comes before the voters to decide. So pops, do you push the button on it?"

 

Click here to go to poll.

 

Doug

 

 

[Titivillus]

  Gehaha said:

Hello,

 

not too long ago I read an scientific article, which seconds what you assume. It has to do with the eye to hand connection and a different

understanding of the meaning of words. The "connected" writing (cursive) makes a difference in terms of synaptic networks.

 

IMO children should learn "the whole" skill of writing first. It's more difficult, but worthwhile for a whole lifetime. If they like to print later, they have a choice.

 

Best,

Anna

 

But I'd prefer the child to learn how to create a complete sentence then write it! Why teach something that fewer people use later in life?

 

[Titivillus]

  Ondina said:

I read all this and then I turn to my right and see the class of my kid, 3 and 4 year olds, heads bent and tongues sticking out, concentrating in learning how to write "ea" and "ae" in cursive ( underlined in dots to make it easy), and can't help but smile......

 

But do you have enough time to teach the things that they need to know to be a productive member of society ( math, reading...) and cursive?

 

[Ondina]

  Titivillus said:

  Ondina said:

I read all this and then I turn to my right and see the class of my kid, 3 and 4 year olds, heads bent and tongues sticking out, concentrating in learning how to write "ea" and "ae" in cursive ( underlined in dots to make it easy), and can't help but smile......

 

But do you have enough time to teach the things that they need to know to be a productive member of society ( math, reading...) and cursive?

 

 

Well, they are 3 and 4....they are learning 2 languages, listening to at least another on the street, starting to add, playing computer games, writing words, their names, making logical connections and 50 piece puzzles...I think is pretty impressive for that age. But I'm easily impressed, they beat me up at computer games anytime, so.......

Cursive was born with Humans: the hunters and medicine men of the prehistoric caves of the north of Spain and south of France were drawing signs on the sand, the mud, the stone walls, fingers soaked in pigments, charcoal, blood and bone dust and tracing and drawing to be understood and leave their knowledge to others, a proud way of expression as an individual and as a group. It has evolved but it hasn't changed. If the US is determined to eradicate it, how will they understand the rest of the world? Because the rest is not giving it up at all.

Reading and writing ( by writing I mean cursive, which is the normal way writing is taught in Europe, what is call "printing" in the States is "writing in capitals only" over the other side of the pond) are just one in many educational systems. You learn how to read because you're learning how to write it. So one bring the other naturally. What it takes to be a productive member of a society is hard to define, but being literate, this is, being able to read and write is needed to learn the rest. Math or astrophysics.

 

Ondina gets interrupted by a kid that wants to know how you write "candy" and tries to trick Mom into switching fountains pens to do so, and walks away thinking she doesn't know what the whole fuzz is all about................

Edited April 6, 2009 by Ondina

[Ondina]

  Splicer said:

  Ondina said:

I read all this and then I turn to my right and see the class of my kid, 3 and 4 year olds, heads bent and tongues sticking out, concentrating in learning how to write "ea" and "ae" in cursive ( underlined in dots to make it easy), and can't help but smile......

 

The "ae" is a ligatured æ in one figure-eight stroke, entering at the top center and exiting at the bottom center, I trust.

 

 

Thanks, Splicer, any ideas on tres and bra ? Lol.

[KateGladstone]

Re:

"Cursive writing is ... about writing in a manner that is more comfortable, fluid and rapid than printing."

 

What about the research (cited in Kitty Florey's SCRIPT AND SCRIBBLE and also cited in the "Writing Rebels" page of my web-site) showing that the most rapid legible handwriters avoid "cursive writing"?

The research shows that the fastest legible handwriters join only some letters (they make the very easiest of the joins, and omit the rest) and tend to use print-like letter-shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes "disagree." In other words, writers who stick to all the defining features of "cursive-as-we-know-it" write less rapidly, and apparently no more legibly, than writers who change certain of those defining features.

 

To use your "typewriting" analogy ... suppose it turned out that the most legible and accurate typing came from typists who combined certain aspects of touch-typing with certain aspects of hunt-and-peck. What (if anything) would make it particularly sensible for typing teachers to ignore that information?

[Judybug]

This is an interesting thread, but I just can't seem to work up the passion that some other posters have for a particular style of writing. I really don't care whether people write in cursive, print, or italic as long as it is legible and we can have a means of handwriting that allows us to understand each other.

 

What I'd like to overhaul is the English language. Why should we tolerate inconsistences like the different pronounciations of all these "ough" words: rough (ruff), bough (bow), though (tho), through (throo), cough (coff or cawf if you're Southern). But that's a topic for another day. Back to the topic at hand -------------- I'm still pondering HDoug's poll, but if the whole world wrote something like Doug's lovely italic, it wouldn't bother me.

 

Judybug

[KateGladstone]

I agree that the correct spelling of English deserves an upgrade -- a carefully designed upgrade, of course, so that we oldsters can still read what the next generation writes! (Some such campaign actually appears on the Net, courtesy of a group called spellingsociety.org).

 

To bring this back to topic, I'll note that any upgrade to the standard spelling of English should come only AFTER a general improvement in the state of handwriting: when teachers handwrite poorly (as so many of them do), this impedes the teaching of reading/spelling in ANY system, no matter how sensibly designed.

 

For example: such simple words as "bat" and "but" would probably remain the same in an upgraded spelling for English --

 

but what happens to these words (in any new spelling or in our existing spelling) when schoolteachers write the letter "a" no differently from the letter "u"? (I have actually seen some teachers who wrote the same squiggle for "a," "u," "n," and/or "h" -- and who then wondered at the number of poor readers/poor spellers in their classes!)

 

 

[Titivillus]

  Ondina said:

  Titivillus said:

  Ondina said:

I read all this and then I turn to my right and see the class of my kid, 3 and 4 year olds, heads bent and tongues sticking out, concentrating in learning how to write "ea" and "ae" in cursive ( underlined in dots to make it easy), and can't help but smile......

 

But do you have enough time to teach the things that they need to know to be a productive member of society ( math, reading...) and cursive?

 

 

W

Cursive was born with Humans: the hunters and medicine men of the prehistoric caves of the north of Spain and south of France were drawing signs on the sand, the mud, the stone walls, fingers soaked in pigments, charcoal, blood and bone dust and tracing and drawing to be understood and leave their knowledge to others, a proud way of expression as an individual and as a group. It has evolved but it hasn't changed.

 

Printing was there before cursive was. It's an extension and evolution but it has gone through some forms that are not taught now and most likely be understood by most people...should not all of these forms be taught as well to ensure that the history is not lost?

 

 

 

[swierski]

Via la cursive!

[KateGladstone]

  Titivillus said:

  irish_monk said:

Most of my students cannot read or write cursive very well. I write in it exclusively. It requires a different type of thinking that is underdeveloped in education. Thus we are left with people who can only regurgitate that which is handed to them rather than develop a society of creative free thinkers.

 

I find this comment interesting. How exactly is learning the gestures to print and the gestures to write cursive different enough that without the latter there are no free thinkers?

 

When did cursive become this amazing mind expanding technique? How is the printing on regurgitating information while cursive is beyond art. :roflmho:

 

K

 

Yes -- I wonder whether "Irish_Monk" would like to go back in a time machine, a few hundred years or so, and tell Michelangelo, Queen Elizabeth I, Copernicus, Mercator, Erasmus and/or Raphael (Italic handwriters all -- and all living well before the invention of the cursive that the Monk so vaunts), "You underdeveloped intellects! Cursive hasn't been invented yet, so you will never become a society of creative free thinkers: all you can ever accomplish is to regurgitate whatever was handed down to you!"

[KateGladstone]

Re:

 

"Cursive was born with Humans: the hunters and medicine men of the prehistoric caves of the north of Spain and south of France ... "

 

What leads you to equate cave drawings with cursive writing? I've seen many cave drawings: not one contained (e.g.) Palmer or Spencerian.

(By the way, how do you detect from the cave drawings that their artists were, in particular, medicine *men*? Can you indeed look at a drawing 10,000 years old and somehow know with certainty whether a man or a woman drew it?)

 

Re:

 

"It has evolved but it hasn't changed."

 

Self-contradictory -- as if someone said that French did not change from Latin during its evolution from Latin. That which does not change does not evolve.

 

Re:

 

"If the US is determined to eradicate it, how will they understand the rest of the world? Because the rest is not giving it up at all."

 

Your absolute statement (claiming that no nation outside the USA has discontinued cursive "at all")

falsely presents the situation of at least two European countries (Finland and Iceland) whose schools discontinued cursive in the 1980s when they adopted (and still employ) monoline Italic styles. In another European nation, Sweden, the teaching of Italic in schools has grown (and the teaching of cursive in schools has correspondingly diminished) since 1971 as a result of national curriculum changes.

The rest of the world (that you present as so unanimously adhering to cursive) includes also ...

 

Australia (where four of that nation's six states, as well as the educational system of the capital city, Canberra, teach variously-named monoline Italic styles rather than cursive styles: they adopted these Italic styles at various times 1970 - 1990 and still retain these),

 

South Africa (which designed/adopted an Italic national school style, named "Natalia," in 2003),

 

and about 4/5 of Scotland and 1/3 of England (a variety of programs all easily identifiable as monoline Italic.)

 

Please note also that you have incorrectly stated:

"what is call[ed] 'printing' in the States is 'writing in capitals only' over the other side of the pond" -- here in the States, those who teach printing generally teach a form of printing that consists of (and that requires) capitals AND LOWER-CASE together -- at least, for children above age 5. You would dislike it greatly, and you would rightly object, if I ventured to define incorrectly some term used in the handwriting program of your own country -- please show a similar respect for factual accuracy when (for instance) you describe American practices to an audience which includes Americans.

 

If all of the cursive-using world wrote its cursive alike, you might have some grounds for asking the United States to do the same. But not all the world -- not even all of Europe, not even every cursive-using nation within Europe -- writes the same cursive ABC.

 

Please see the attached material from a chart prepared and sold (inexpensively!) by the handwriting-styles research project http://www.manuscribe.org -- showing just some of the vast differences in how different European nations' cursive systems write the alphabet (This section of the chart shows the letters "T" and "t" written in two French school styles, two Spanish school styles, two Italian school styles, a Czech school style, two Polish school styles, three German school styles, two Austrian school styles, three Swiss school styles, two Dutch school styles, and two UK school styles. The chart also includes some USA school styles, but I have not reproduced these because your message urged the USA to write cursive in order to follow the example of Europe.)

 

You do not complain (I think) against any European nation for writing very differently from other European nations -- not even when (as the illustration shows) the differences make the cursive of one nation partly or largely unintelligible to persons who learned to write cursive anywhere else. Why castigate only the United States alone?

 

Of course, all of these various cursive styles share a common ancestry. They all descended and differentiated from Italic: a writing-style whose letters anyone can read (no matter how he or she learned to write) wherever people use the ABC. Since you very laudably wish to see handwriting understood internationally, logically you should support a handwriting style whose letters do not differ (or hardly differ) between nations, rather than supporting a handwriting style which differs so greatly from one nation to the next. Teach people to write a consistent style of the ABC, and to read other ABC styles that they will likely encounter, and you need not fear that the handwriting of one nation will become, or remain, a closed book to people who went to school in some other nation or decade.