Yeah, the kind of texts I cut my teeth on in palaeography class looked like this. A very readable gothic textura with a single kind of abbreviation is a vacation. When it comes to palaeography us medieval Nordic folk always envied the continental vernacular/medieval Latin folk with their vellum and their spacious hands and their illuminations, not written cramped on every misshapen scrap of parchment with as many abbreviations as would render the text just about readable
Well as a Brit, it has been my experience that if you can’t write joined-up you’re lumped in with those who can’t spell or can’t do sums. Just write curly and don’t take your pen off the paper. Nobody is going to inspect to see if you’ve done the correct open “o” as opposed to a closed loop.
I have always been of the opinion that cursive as a style of handwriting is inefficient and has an unpleasant aesthetic appearance from most people who deploy it. When people explain the idea of cursive, it sounds more efficient. Why wouldn’t it? Those milliseconds of time you spend lifting and dropping your pencil between characters adds up… Right? I believe the amount of time you save writing in cursive is negligible at best and is lost to error corrections (you can easily insert a missing letter into a word when you print) and general legibility (the average cursive writer stinks at writing readable cursive).
Should children be taught cursive? If they want to learn it, yes. If it is a non-elective time waster in an English class that could be better spent teaching reading or grammar, no.
I guess I am mildly anti-cursive. I have never bought into how a rigid, pseudo-artform like cursive gets lumped into the concept of artistic endeavors when it has all the creative flexibility of a dress code.
They say things like, “You’re trying to take away the students’ creative outlets.” How? The students who love cursive usually develop their own style outside of the academic environment. People who have good cursive rarely have the same style they were introduced to in school.
Patrick Bateman, is that you?
Have you heard the new Hewey Lewis and the News?
But seriously, I don’t obsess over the details of business card typesetting and card stocks (Not to mention the murder) enough to be him.
Learned it in the 90s. I frequently got marked down later on in middle school and high school for illegible writing in unrelated subjects like science and math. In college, I started writing in all caps.
Screw cursive.
Yup pure culture war nonsense. Older generations are convinced all the problems of the younger generation would be solved by living exactly like they did.
I’ve worked very hard to see that younger generations of trans people didn’t have to grow up like me.
So I’m going to call bullshit.
Right? It’s a problem of reactionaries, not of age. Reactionaries can be quite young, in fact. Just look at FL, where people are pushing “back to traditional schooling” authoritarian nonsense. Desantis himself is younger than I am and so are many of the people supporting his shitty policies on education in the legislature.
Not that I’m young anymore, but I guess I’m not old either…
Nick Fuentes doesn’t qualify for Medicare for quite a long time.
Nor shitty rapper Ben Shapiro!
If you spend enough time on YouTube or TikTok you will see plenty of very satisfying videos of people doing lovely calligraphy and typography. It’s not a skill I’ve ever been able to master, in spite of my other artistic talents. But there are a lot of people who enjoy and appreciate it without having been expected to adopt it for everyday/academic use.
I guess the question becomes whether or not cursive or writing in general has some general educational value over all… there have been some stories floating around about how writing on paper is better for retention than just writing on a computer… whether or not cursive adds any extra value, I don’t know, but likely it’s the act of physical writing of any kind that helps with retention… So maybe greater use of writing in general at the elementary level would be a good thing.
Oh please. Look, I’m grateful you care about social progress and justice. I am! It’s not personal. Every generation reaches an age where they decide the ones that followed theirs are in some sort of decline. It goes back to the invention of writing itself (and almost certainly before). I say that as someone who briefly majored in linguistics and anthropology. If there’s one constant in every human culture it seems to be inter-generational conflict.
And it may not be your opinion, but it is mine that the push for mandatory cursive in school curricula primarily appeals to people who want to return to a traditional cultural ideal that never really existed.
I am 39. I already see my peers complaining about Gen Z. Because of the way my generation was treated, I feel particularly sensitive to this attitude.
Edit to add: I don’t think I was particularly clear here. Obviously older people are not a monolith. At least I hope it’s obvious. There are plenty of reprehensible younger people. As we would have said in my anthropology classes, there is more diversity within groups than between them.
I would happily endorse cursive training if the evidence is on its side, in spite of my personal feelings on the issue. I don’t think cursive is inherently bad—my animosity is mostly an emotional reaction based on my personal experiences. I’m sorry if my comments aren’t particularly nuanced.
I didn’t say anything about cursive. I did imply something about ageism.
Yes, I caught that. And I was speaking in generalities about generations, not age. I’m sorry. There is nothing about being older that automatically makes your attitudes regressive.
Older generations has nothing to do with age seems counterintuitive.
I"m sorry, but I don’t think that’s how things actually are… I think it’s how it’s been sold to us… in part. And yes, everyone points to quotes from greek philosophers as evidence of that, but it’s not really the kind of evidence of how inter-generational relations were actually were, outside of other contextualizing information (like how families dynamics worked, how young people entered their adulthood, etc).
I think it can be an aspect of human society, but the reality is that the rise of a discreet youth culture created a greater sense of conflict than ever before (in part to shift to focus from other kinds of conflicts like race, gender, and class). When teenagers became a thing (when compulsory education became widespread and the culture industries started to directly market to the demographic known as teenagers, which was a consumer category as much as anything else), conflict became a major focus on the newsmedia. They read all sorts of conflicts via that lens and so did the public in general. Hence the rise of the counterculture, which, again, was as much a feat of marketing as it was a general sense of unity among young people.
Generations aren’t really a “thing” either, so much as they are another marketing scheme that we all have made into a reality. And pretty much every previous generation complains about the previous and next generations. The Boomer centric-media had a whole bunch of fun shit to say about us Gen Xers (slackers was probably the best of it). They really had it out for punks and D&D in the 80s… at least if you just took the news media at it’s word…
But the Boomers are just as complex as the rest of us, in terms of how they are as a generation. They gave us both the concept of a counter-culture (which some managed to turn into a real thing, despite the questionable origins) and of social and political activism as a key part of youth culture. But it also gave rise to the reactionary movement conservativism. And as @KathyPartdeux noted, plenty of activists worked hard to move the rights of marginalized groups forward. We should absolutely appreciate that hard work and honor it.
So… it’s complicated and just looking at it via the lens of “inter-generational conflict” leaves out quite a lot…
Understood.
So not sure why I continued typing all that above out… 
TLDR!
