My mother tells me a story in which she works long and hard on a term paper (written in longhand cursive). when she got it back there was a note attached to it that said “This look like it wight have been a good paper, if only I could have read it.” at which point she switches to a hybrid of print and longhand. her hybrid is neat and flows well and fast, like cursive, but is easy to read also.(when she’s not in a oh-my-God-I’ve-got-thirty-seconds-to-write-a-paragraph frenzy)
i learned to write cursive in my earlier years but have dropped it in favor of my own hybrid. I can type much faster than I can handwrite, approximately twice as fast, and would choose typing over handwriting any day. The only cursive I use on any sort of regular basis, is my signiture, and that is absolutely horrid.

As the article, and another commenter, stated, there appears to be a link between cursive writing and cognitive development. That is important, despite what us tech-minded folks think and experience at work. There are alot of things we do that don’t make 100% sense, like speaking to infants using proper grammar, good vocabulary, and adult tones (instead of, “whoosa special-wecial poopy pants?!?) even though they can’t understand any of it because it helps their development and learning.

If cursive writing helps children develop and learn, then they should learn it and be encouraged to use it for that reason alone.

It is kind of sad that the butter churn has gone away, it seems to have been replaced by “The Ritalin Racket”

There are currently nine cursive fonts on my computer…do they count?

Personally, I’d be a lot more concerned and worried about the percentage of kids who can’t type well and/or lack basic computer skills (which, unfortunately, is a sizable number and primarily composed of kids with poor backgrounds). Simply, that’s going to impact their overall communication abilities – and consequently, employment prospects – a lot more than cursive writing will.

i remember playing Worms with friends – we were concentrating so heard as we waited for our turns that we kept passing a bowl of cream round (which we were whipping to add to cheesecake – a bad case of the munchies) and it turned into butter. I suspect this has happened a lot around the world and that therefore home churning of butter could be making a comeback.

I can honestly say that I write one thing, the same thing in cursive on very frequent basis, and it seems to be about the ONLY thing cursive is good for and useful for these days….

My signature when signing a document!

That’s about it!

I do data entry while I’m going to school, and I must say that cursive is far overrated. The forms I enter are filled out by primary and secondary teachers, and many use cursive. Of all people who should be able to write cursive well, you’d think it would be them. Alas, no. On the contrary, these educators have some of the worst hand writing (and not to mention spelling) I have ever seen.

On the flipside, print is usually clear, uniform, there isn’t much “signature” letter changing. In short, it makes my job a whole lot easier.

I wonder if these people who are lamenting the loss of cursive writing skills also want to force everyone to be right handed again. I had a freshman English teacher in high school in the mid-90s who wasted six weeks of the year on penmanship (that could have been much better spent on ANYTHING else) because she claimed she couldn’t read our writing (but refused to allow us to turn in assignments that were typed or written in anything but cursive). Then no matter how carefully i wrote she marked me down because my letters slanted “wrong” since i’m left handed. My mother is also left handed and has aesthetically beautifull writing that would have made that same teacher scream because, again, it’s technically “wrong.” Her father had horrible chickenscratch that even he couldn’t always read because they forced him to be right handed.

I have no need for cursive. Even on a personal letter (if i must snail-mail it) i can print it out with a nice font on nice stationery and sign it. Anyone who knows me (the only ones likely to get a personal letter) would thank me for not having to decipher my “writing.”

Everyone that says they have no need for cursive…

Do you print your name on legal documents?

Of course that’s the only need I see for cursive.

I only print, and I ‘scribble’ my name on legal documents.

When residential electricity was first becoming available, homeowners would put shiny metal plates around the outlets to call attention to the fact that they had it. Now that most people in the U.S. have electricity, it’s no big deal.

In an age of high literacy (and exploding computer literacy) I suspect cursive is going the way of shiny brass switchplates. Good handwriting is no longer the mark of education and refinement that it once was.

If there is indeed an important (read: demonstrable) link between cursive and some aspect of cognitive development, it’s time to embrace alternatives that have similar developmental benefits. Has anyone investigated whether keyboarding (the typing kind) is beneficial in the same way as piano playing? I have a strong suspicion that teaching children how to draw, paint, tap dance or use chopsticks would make up for skipping cursive.

The last time I was required to hand write anything other than my signature I was REQUIRED to use block capitals for everything except my signature. Even when writing notes to myself I will not use cursive becasue I would like to be able to read them later. In my opinion cursive writing is a hinderence to clear communication and should be eliminated from the general curriculum. It can be moved to art classes and covered as part of calligraphy.

Have you seen the handwriting recognition technology? Yeah, Palm came up with its own “graphitti” and later actually recognized standard print. However tablet PCs are supposed to be able to recognize cursive.

However, I wonder how long it will be until voice-recognition becomes common place as well. Cursive, printing, and typing may be on its way back out….

There we were taught the letter shapes for cursive wtriting (using a much simpler form of cursive than is popular in the US) in Reception (1st year of school). students would then begin to werite cursive whenever they were good enough writing in print. the stupid ball and stick writing is never taught in most counties. the students can move to cursive when ready (i.e. when thety stop lifting the pencil off the paper). almost all people educatd in the english system who are taught writing in this manner write cursive

I don’t see why anyone would worry, decent cursive doesn’t take that long to learn, and thats all you really need in todays world. I’m talking about signing your signature of course, which is useful when distributing the responsibility of whatever that signature is tied to (whether its a check, signing for a package, signing for an order, etc). Besides that, cursive isn’t really needed, and while there will always be people who excell in such. Mostly such skill will be used for pretty writing on wedding invites, or some such other place that it’ll be purely decorative. The reason for this is that cursive just isn’t needed anymore, it was on the way out as an important tool anyway and I don’t know why anyone would worry about it.
Mostly because typing is much more efficent, and which would you rather you child take? A calligraphy class or a typing class? My bets would be that it would be a typing class, because they’ll actually use such skills. While the calligraphy class will take you far beyond the basics that you need, and leave you with pretty writing and nothing else. Nobody wants cursive (teachers, business), it just isn’t useful in todays world.

If I took the handwritten letters that my Dad, Mom, Nana and friends have written to me over the years and typed them out, I know for sure, 100%, without a shadow of a doubt that they would not carry near the heart and emotional value that they do seeing them as they were written. Typing words into a computer and seeing them in black and white makes the writing more real and final, but getting the emotion out first through cursive writing before typing it can be a very powerful process. I have taken many creative writing classes and have been consistently trained to handwrite first, then type it in. The reasoning for this is because our emotion goes from our brain down through our arm, then through our hand whether it be our right or our left that we naturally write with and then onto the page. If we lose cursive writing, not only will cursive become a lost art, quality of writing will diminish and great writing will become a lost art. Journal writing will be gone and handwritten letters a thing of the past. If you feel that cursive can be done away with because you are not good at it, please take a moment to look at the insanity of that thought. Learning cursive writing in school is like anything else, some people connect with it and some people don’t. I hated algebra. I don’t see any use for it in my life. Do I think it should be done away with? Hell no! Those of you who see no use for it need to look past yourselves and think of those who will benefit from it so that great wiriting won’t become a thing of the past. I believe this with all of my heart.

I remember being taught to write print letters and getting poor grades on them because I wrote more “square” (read: computer font-like; I could type before I went to kindergarten but wasn’t allowed near pencils at home because the walls were nice, blank canvases) than what they demanded — the first grade handbooks were all curly-cued so that we’d transition easily into cursive. My grandmother grew so frustrated that she taught me her pretty, spirally cursive.

My print handwriting is always nice and blocky & looks nothing like what they tried to teach me. My longhand looks both similar to my grandmother’s old-fashioned script and the round letters they taught at my school. Both are very legible (and the longhand a novelty!).

Most people nowadays have crap handwriting. I hate it! If you can’t write for someone else to read, you need to practice. My grandfather got me a notebook when I was nine in order to practice my writing in the form of a journal. For a year, he checked it weekly; it steadily improved.

Looking back at all my journals that I’ve kept in the decade since, I can see where I practiced with different styles of writing, different letters and forms, and how “bad” my handwriting is/was, yet how much nicer it grew and can be if I think about it.

I am a highschool student, and I had to refresh myself on how to write in cursive before I took my SAT’s. I learned cursive in Third grade, and after they stopped grading me on it I quit using it. Cursive writing is dead!!! I have figured out how to take notes extremely fast writing block letters (by not writing vowels unless the word begins or ends with one), and that helps out alot more then if I tried writing in my horrible cursive.

Cursive writing is a skill that everyone should know how to do and do well. I admit that once students leave grade 3 it is no longer required in the curriculum to teach cursive again. Upper elementary teachers usually try to include review time and encourage students to use cursive in their everyday work. Unfortunately, if a child is still struggling with it by grade 5 or 6, they are often encouraged to print or a combination of the two because it is quicker. If we expect children to use cursive writing throughout their lifetime, I think we should encourage the government to change the curriculum and make cursive writing mandatory throughout grades 3-9. Let’s face it, to learn a new skill such as cursive writing, it will take more than one year of teaching. We give students 3 – 4 years before we expect them to master adding and subtracting to 18. Cursive writing should be no less.

I have been wrtiting cursive since I was 7.It´s easier for me to write this way and much faster. It also makes my ideas flow faster. A lot of people are impressed because of my skills. I don´t know why it is so “horrible or hard” to do.

I think that while it is true that different people have different skills: fine hand coordination vs. larger movement coordination, it is better for the human brain to develop more fully when it is required to expand in various practices. If I always favor my right side, then that side will develop more, but the left side will atrophy. The brain functions better when all parts are exercised. Why do away with a skill just because it is hard? What athlete won a gold medal for that attitude? Building skill in areas that are more difficult will stimulate the brain and fight its aging. So, do not lose this practice for the benefit of bettering the mind.

I recall getting lots of cursive practice exercises in first and second grade, and when I transfered to a new school in third grade, the teacher had an “all cursive” policy for writing work. She’d say “write it cursively.”

The problem with learning cursive is that you have to write it far more than you read it. Books, worksheets, and most text you encounter in daily life is written in print form, so the cursive you see on the worksheets is just plain “strange.” How can you learn to write in a form you don’t read very often?

Also, print is much simpler because every letter looks the same regardless of the letters around it. In cursive, letters “morph” if certain letters follow them. For example, if I write the word “lost,” the S looks different from how it would look if I wrote “last,” because the “tail” on the right of the O causes an issue with how the S connects to it. Also, the M and N do weird things with their “humps” when preceded by certain letters. I’m sure that these “exceptions to the rules” overwhelm many young kids.

There was a comment above about “printing like young children.” I don’t agree that printing is “childish.” It’s just standard. After all, this blog is not typed in cursive.

I prefer cursive writing at any time. It’s beautiful, I can read it just fine, with curls and all. I have never learned to write differently. I notice that my young children, growing up in the U.S.A. do not write legibly. The spaces between words and letters are the same, the size difference between short and long/tall letters is nearly non-existent with the result, that they can’t read their own writing! Yes, it slows your writing down, and makes you concentrate more on spelling and contents.
Cursive was not meant to be fast. I think it challenges your creative spirit, and many kids can use that in this Cyber-age! I also find that my children don’t have to write a lot at all. Most work comes home on pre-printed sheets, with game-like excercises. They rarely actually have to fill in a word. What kind of language program is that?!
It seems to come down to teachers not having enough time to actually come up with real writing exercises.
I brought some writing books from Belgium for them to start working on a good skill to know in life.

I am a high school teacher and have done some research into the benefits of cursive writing. It is much more than just communicationg in a written manner, which you pointed out can be done in other ways, but what you don’t know is that cursive writing promotes cognitive thinking skills and many other things. Before you say that our students don’t need to learn to write you should do your research, and remember, Grandma still loves hand written notes.

i am 13 and i can hardly write to where anyone but i can read then and people expect me to write i cursive? um also i cant read cursive

I have a ten year old grandson that really hass’t been taught how to form cursive letter. He has a workbook. but he said they never use it. He is in the 4th grade. Another thing I h ave always wondered about was when we teach our children the alphabet they learn to recognize them well, but in books and the keyboard the “a” is different. Why is that????