I wouldn’t describe it as thinking of the action of writing so much as a pause so I don’t follow the pattern for my dead name. Once my fingers start moving, I’m good. (“Okay hand, start with an E instead of a F … very good!”)
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So how many schools stopped teaching this? I thought it was mostly a boomer complaint.
Though IIRC I didn’t learn until Third Grade?
It WAS like a secret language. I remember I was getting pretty good at reading the comics I liked, until Snoopy’s brother, Spike, wrote him.
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It is still a useful skill, and I suspect there is something to the idea that the combination of language and hand movements activates some set of neural pathways that are beneficial to learning.
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And yet, I don’t see people up in arms trying to make sure that shorthand (Pittman or Gregg) doesn’t disappear.
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I remember that my dad had those bent-nib fountain pens for left-handers in his desk. Which he never used because quick drying ball point pens were much easier for him to use.
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I scraped a degree by constructing a revision plan of reading an entire year’s worth of essays (not all mine) and rewriting them in summary form. Then writing a précis of each summary. Then writing bullet point summary of each précis. Then reproducing that on an index card. By then I could have rewritten the entire essay just from the index card, if not from memory. The writing of it all, several times, is - I am convinced - a major part of why I was able to regurgitate everything that was required in the exam hall. Fortunately, we did not have keyboards then.
ETA I wish I still had those index cards. They were works of art (in my memory, at least).
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I write the same way. It was a necessity because we were taught cursive in 3rd grade and were required to use cartridge pens with those damned split tip nibs. Pushing a sharp tip as a Southpaw was awful compared to drawing the pen away like the righties did. They finally let us use ball point pens a couple of years later.
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The hook technique. That’s what you do when you’re allowed to use your left hand, but must turn your paper and have your letters/characters look exactly the way righties do it.
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I very rarely write in cursive, largely because I can print faster (note: I never said anything about printing legibly) on those fairly rare occasions where I still write. Still, I’m glad I learned, and I support keeping it part of the curriculum.
It has not been part of the curriculum at my kids schools, and I don’t think my kids will ever be fluid at writing it, which makes me a bit sad, though I have at least made sure they know how to read it.
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I’ve kept a diary for years, in an actual diary, and so still scrawl out a page or so of cursive every day. It’s hard for even me to read.
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I’m sure being able to write does something, but why do people keep acting like joining the letters together is special? Is there some special magic that Arabic writers get and Hebrew writers don’t?
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I’m a teacher, and so many non-teachers I’ve met think that this is the magic bullet, the one thing that’s going to fix education. It’s not, because magic bullets don’t exist. But cursive is also a waste of time.
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“mmmmmmmm” ???
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Same here. Nibbed cartridge pens. From 5th grade on our nuns were adamant that we use those instead of ball points. I don’t recall our left-handed Anthony ever using anything other than a ball point. Nuns took pity on him, I guess.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with being able to read older documents, neither.
WTF?
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Great question. I’d guess that it is generally faster if you don’t need to lift the pen between characters (or within characters in the case of Chinese), but we also need to think about the amount of information in each character (high in Chinese, low in European languages). I don’t know specifically about Arabic vs Hebrew, so it would be interesting to hear from people who are equally fluent in both – if you take the same text translated into both languages, which is faster to write by hand? Of course, even someone who is a fluent speaker of both languages may have had more practice in handwriting in one vs the other, so not sure how you control for that. As we academics always like to say, further research is needed.
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If you don’t join the letters together than you’re agreeing to accept the legality of the US government. By joining the letters you nullify their claims over you!
(Okay, I type that with full intent of sarcasm. I’m not sure I want to know if any of the SC fools try to claim something like that as a tactic.)
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I took Russian for two semesters, and even after getting the Cyrillic down pat, it was all but imposs to cope with the cursive, which we were required to use when doing our homework and taking tests. Fucking awful.
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