Because I’m talking in general about a group and not the individuals. There are tendencies in groups that are not the rule for everyone. People of certain generations share certain experiences that make them feel part of the group and separate from other groups. Time is an obvious component.
I mean, not all white Americans like mayonnaise, right? But a lot of us do. In fact, we probably like it as a group a lot more than some others.
In my social interactions, cursive defenders have been those who learned cursive in school, which is just not true of more recent generations.
Well, I think as you’ve demonstrated, it’s a more complex issue than I’ve made it seem, but remember all categories are arbitrary. We invent them to make sense of the world we live in. And in this case, at this time, in this culture, one can see tendencies in certain groups that are less common in others (but, importantly, not absent entirely). In this case, discreet generations of people in America share certain cultural experiences that reinforce their sense of belonging to their group.
In my personal experience, the ones I’ve had to listen to tell me my own generation sucks because we can’t read an analogue clock (not true of most millennials, but is true of me) and we don’t use cursive (even though we all learned it) have all been members of older generations themselves who in part identify themselves as “a generation that learned and used cursive.”
I’m sorry, I’m at my MIL’s birthday party. I was strident and glib and this is actually a nuanced and deep conversation. I’m being rude to two groups of people right now. Thanks for taking the time to get into the weeds with me.
I learned cursive in school and just don’t find much value in it. I was taught to write D’Nealian during my precursive days and New American when cursive began. I am competent at writing both scripts, but I get no joy from either. I found a certain fondness for writing block letters that I don’t get from cursive. Attractive handwriting, regardlessly loops and connections, is an art form in itself.
So being an architect who was never taught architecutral lettering, my hand writing is atrocious. My note taking is somewhere between scribbles and vague all caps writing. I think as long as people are taught a system that enables note taking and conveying of notes to other people, all is fine. Be it cursive or something else.
You must not be docking marks for not getting the slant uniform enough, going past the descender line, etc like my teacher did in the 80s. I absolutely hated spending an hour a day for an entire school year at that hand-cramping, tedious, repetition trying to stumble into some rough semblance of neatness.
Britain doesn’t do “cursive” like American cursive, which is actually more like a simplified calligraphy. There is no national style of “joined-up writing” in the UK. Each teacher teaches what they were taught, so there may be different letterforms for the same letters. And you’re right. Not managing to transition from block capitals to joined-up writing is somewhat regarded as a sign of thickness, however fair that may be or not.
I grew up learning cursive, so my signature is in it. I’ve never thought before about how those who haven’t learned it sign their names.
Do yall usually do so in block lettering? If so, are their stylized ways of doing so? (Seems like cursive allows for encourages more stylistic variety, but that could be my limited perspective talking.) Or is your signature the one time you do use cursive, despite not knowing how to write in cursive?
My signature is a weird squiggle which was kind of cursivey 30 years ago maybe, and has degenerated through a combination of overuse and disuse.
It doesn’t help that these days almost the only things I have to sign are mobile device screens when accepting deliveries. I write my name rather than sign letters and cards.
A lot of legal forms are signed electronically nowadays.
Honestly? I think of handwriting as a cognitive extension. As others here have noted, kids have a harder time composing on computers, at first. Typed notes are more extensive, but they’re not more effective at retention. If you’re writing for extended time, at speed, then cursive really does add up over time.
In the same way, our debate class wasn’t allowed to type their notes until they could hand-write them well enough. When people typed the notes, they tended to be more verbatim, but didn’t follow the argument as well and couldn’t engage with rebuttal. It’s like thinking that the student who can essentially photocopy the notes is more effective than the one who has their own SparkNotes. You avoid the same content-blindness you get from translators who just can’t remember what they were talking about afterwards.
Tl;dr: I’d expect that learning cursive helps people think and organize better.
About 20 years ago I went back to university for night school, to take a business degree over 4 years as a mature student. This was University of London, fairly prestigious, not in Oxbridge league but in the top 30 of UK universities.
Anyway, the point is that I had been writing for years on computers, although I learnt joined up writing at school. London University requires all exams to be hand written, or did 20 years ago – it may have changed. So we had to write a lot of mid-term exams and essays by hand.
What I found is that I had to adapt the way I thought about approaching a problem and structuring an essay correctly. Thanks to word processing, I have become used to simply bashing out a load of thoughts, then restructuring them into a coherent argument by cut and paste and so on. Obviously this didn’t work when writing in ink on paper, and I had to rethink the way I thought.
This isn’t necessarily a good or bad thing, and it isn’t specifically due to writing in cursive or joined-up, rather than block capitals, but it does illustrate that new modes of expression can have effects outside the obvious.
This seems like the whole question though. I don’t think any schools aren’t asking students to write on paper from time to time – joining letters up seems to be the whole issue. Is there really some great psychological benefit that people writing in Arabic have that people writing in Hebrew don’t?
While learning cursive, I always thought the point was just that it’s faster. Your picking up your implement and putting it down again far less often. And for me, it was faster.
I suppose the advantage of that while taking notes is being able to write more, and/or keep up better with what you’re listening to or watching.
There’s no one-size-fits-all method of learning or retention. Forcing people to use cursive may cause them to think differently about a topic, but that doesn’t guarantee that it will be more effective.
I learned to learn by taking handwritten notes, and cursive writing is still a part of my learning process. But what works for me certainly won’t always work for others with different experiences. I imagine many people developed aversions to writing based on experiences with awful teachers. Some kids might feel shame because poor training, motor control, or other issues prevent them from writing well. And there are any number of reasons I can’t imagine that someone might have difficulty with cursive.
Sure, teachers have to teach some form of writing. But without evidence, expecting it to improve their students’ learning abilities may be no more than wishful thinking, and possibly misguided in many cases. I’d really like to know what kinds of studies have been done in this area before judging this law as “good” or “bad”.
Even though I still SUCK at lettering, I am a bit grateful that my design classes were right at the edge of digital adoption, so my first 2 years at JUCO everything was done by hand.
