In my experience, the Latin cursive that you may or may not have learned in an American classroom sucks. Common characters require too many strokes or raising the pen. Having to dot your i's and cross your t's breaks the flow. Also lots of people can't even read it.
It was only when I learned Russian Cyrillic that I grew to appreciate a good cursive writing system. It's super fast, most characters resemble their printed counterpart, and lots of words can be written without needing to lift the pen once. Yes, there's some ambiguity like ли and ш, but that's rarely a problem once you actually know the language. In comparison to the English cursive I learned in school, it actually feels like a system intended to be read and written by regular people for everyday use.
What I like about russian cursive is that most letters terminate at the bottom instead of the top which means you don't need to cross over a letter or make some other mark that is messy to start the next letter.
To me it feels like Cyrillic cursive has at least as many differences from its printed counterparts as Latin has. For example, д is written like a g, б kind of like a d, т like an m. The last one is especially confusing because м also exists.
Yeah, as someone who taught themselves Palmer script [0] in high school, I learned that it can only really be written fast if you have a fountain pen (which made me buy a cheap fountain pen), and that it's hard to write block letters using one. It's easier to accurately trace the shapes of cursive using a ballpoint pen, but because you have to press down a lot more to get a solid line on the page, you're forced to write more slowly.
I think something like Getty-Dubay Italic [1][2] is more appropriate for pencils and ballpoint pens, and for teaching children to write. It's also a more basic script than cursive. The primary thing is learning the basic shapes that make up most lowercase/minuscule letters.
To me thats a strange take. Letters that flow into eachother make it easier to write IMO. To
Me it’s a bit similar to just using a keyboard and taking the hand off the keyboard to fuss with the mouse.
With fountain pens, ink flows out steadily as long as the nib is in contact with the page, and stops flowing when the nib breaks contact. Whereas with ballpoint pens, pressure is required for the ink to flow, since the ballpoint is held in place by a small spring, and ink stops flowing as soon as pressure is removed, regardless of contact with the page.
Hence, ballpoints tend to cause wrist strain, and favour forms of handwriting which minimize contact with the page, whereas fountain pens work best with cursive. Needless to say, since the introduction of the ballpoint in schools, handwriting has gone into decline.
This is a nonsense take; look at historical scripts like uncial or Carolingian miniscule, which were written with quills and definitely involve lifting the pen, often multiple times per letter.
I've always found that note-taking by hand in school and university (implicitly through cursive, because I would find writing out in block letters way too tedious) - to really help recall and understanding, even if I was writing down what I hear by wrote. Have never had the same feeling typing out the same way into a laptop (which is what I now do at work) - that ends up more as a data-filing exercise.
In education, that's called "multiple means of representation." If you just listen to a lecture, you will remember a bit of it. If there are visuals along with the lecture, you'll remember some more. If you write stuff down, type stuff out, discuss it with a group, you'll remember even more.
I take handwritten notes all the time, but rarely have to refer back to them.
In high school I would take hand written history notes and then type them up at night (I was a touch typists in the 90s when it was relatively rare — today’s kid type blinding fast).
This gave me a really amazing recall for the notes, and often times I would type with my fingers in the air to recall passages.
In college we had far more material and I could do this multi mode note taking and I think my performance suffered for it.
Every study or article I could find in 10 minutes of googling and reading compares cursive to typing but not to block letters. I fully can believe that writing improves retention but I struggle to believe that cursive is somehow way better than block letters.
I used to take notes in moleskine notebooks for work and it think was more beneficial than typing the same notes but at the end of the day digital notes are just so much more versatile. I can move text around, change formatting, go back and rephrase/modify/etc. The benefits far outweigh any benefit to remembering better what I wrote. That's why I wrote/typed it, so I don't have to memorize it.
Maybe I'm the weird/wrong one but I try to use my brain as much as possible as an index for where I can find the full information I need. Of course I have plenty "memorized" or things I just "know" but knowing how/where to find the information you need is way more important to me than knowing the information off the top of your head.
I initially wrote cursive, then turned to block letters
as it was more intelligible and lately write
in cursive-block hybrid that is easier to read/write,
where simple block letters are written with curves
and not connected(easier to read).
The normal cursive with its dense letters is fairly
hard to read, especially if light strokes are used,
and stuff like doctors shorthand is practically cryptology-tier.
I use cursive to write a personal note, and also use many variations of typefaces in brush or cursive style for art projects. The world is aesthetically poorer without cursive IMHO. People who do not write that way are almost always able to read it when they try, in recent experience.
Interested to hear what other non-English languages have cursive forms.
Chinese and Japanese characters also have cursive traditions. The normal handwritten form of a character often looks significantly different to its printed form. Lines that are separate in print form become one squiggly line in cursive form, so stroke order is pretty important. For example, this is 私, a pronoun to refer to yourself in Japanese:
Brahmic scripts such as devanāgarī, Gurmukhī, and Bengali are noted for joining glyphs with a long horizontal line across the top (shirorekhā). However, other examples such as Tamil use more curls and curves, and lack the shirorekhā.
I am told that one reason for this change was because manuscripts in certain regions used parchment or vellum, and in other regions used palm leaves. Writing on a palm leaf, if you made long, straight horizontal marks on it, you could split the fibers.
In the UK I don't even remember any other option than joined up handwriting. I'm pretty sure it is still the only option in schools. Writing in block letters was seen as juvenile. I presume that's not the case in other parts of that world?
Yes, though I realised what Americans call "cursive" is much much more prescriptive than our joined-up handwriting. There are rules... whereas ours is pretty much "join each letter to the next one".
I’ve tried to find studies that actually differentiate cognitive development improvements for cursive writing but everything I found has the same results for manuscript and cursive, but that active writing with either script is the important thing.
Does anyone have references I missed?
This feels on the surface suspect. Why would cursive have some special value over any other script for cognitive development?
I think it's just typical psychology bollocks. Cursive is faster to write, but much more difficult to read, especially if written by someone's else. So with cursive you can write down more and if you just assume that the more you write the better then you arrive at the 'obvious' conclusion that cursive is better for the cognitive development. I guess it all comes from the very old school of teaching where during a lesson a teacher literally dictated a paragraph from a textbook and the pupils carefully transcribed what they heard into their notebooks.
If I had learned shorthand instead of cursive, it would have helped me in every class I took after that. Being able to take notes at the speed which the lecturer is talking would have been an enormous help.
Just transcribing the lecturer may not be the best way to learn the material. If you need to identify the key points and summarize around them, you’ll better understand the material than just literally capturing the words. Short-hand was designed for verbatim transcription. Long hand may force you to be parsimonious in what you write.
My print handwriting is terrible but my cursive is pretty good. For that reason I have switched to exclusively cursive when writing anything personal. Also, you can create your own little embellishments and style which is fun
Meh. I write almost exclusively in cursive because I use pens, particularly fountain pens, and it's much faster to write that way. In my experience cursive also works a lot better when using styluses because the flow of the letters helps hide that 20ms lag. When I use pencils, I tend to write in block letters because I think that flow helps a lot with cursive and my personal opinion is that pencils don't give as many of the same advantages as a good ink pen and that graphite works better when done in short strokes rather than curves.
It's not a useless skill. I'm happy to know cursive and I enjoy writing it, and I like the way that it looks. There is an intrinsic joy in writing in a beautiful way. It's a faster way to write. But it's certainly not a skill that anyone needs to feel obligated to learn or shamed for avoiding. I'm skeptical of claims that it improves cognitive outcomes, I'm not sure how that would be tested in the first place in a controlled way.
I'm also largely unsympathetic to arguments about aesthetics, tradition, etc... Reminds me a lot of the "everyone should learn to play an instrument/do a sport/etc" arguments. Things can be good without being mandatory. Lots of stuff will improve your cognition, social skills, and character, but not every single thing that does so needs to be a requirement.
----
I kind of put cursive in the same bucket as Vim. I'm glad I know Vim, I think it's a faster way to edit text, I think that over time it becomes more intuitive even if only being used at a basic level. Practicing modal editing certainly could have cognitive benefits I suppose. And I think it's just an elegant and an aesthetically pleasing way to reason about text.
But do I think people should be required to learn Vim? No, of course not.
----
I don't think it does any harm to teach stuff like this; a lot of early elementary education isn't really about the stuff that's being taught so much as it is about learning how to be taught and how to operate in group settings and how to excel at something. But I'd find it difficult to justify passing a law about or caring enough to try and mandate cursive; I'd be tempted to take those requirements and expand typing programs even more than what's currently required.
Learning to type well had an immense positive impact on my life that I think is easy to quantify. In contrast, learning cursive... :shrug: I'm hard pressed to think of how my life would have been different if I never learned it, other than that I might not have become quite as snobby about pens as I am today :)
[+] [-] snovymgodym|2 years ago|reply
It was only when I learned Russian Cyrillic that I grew to appreciate a good cursive writing system. It's super fast, most characters resemble their printed counterpart, and lots of words can be written without needing to lift the pen once. Yes, there's some ambiguity like ли and ш, but that's rarely a problem once you actually know the language. In comparison to the English cursive I learned in school, it actually feels like a system intended to be read and written by regular people for everyday use.
[+] [-] mnky9800n|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cko|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nhellman|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mig39|2 years ago|reply
They should teach good handwriting, and not worry so much about having letters that have to flow into each other.
[+] [-] trealira|2 years ago|reply
I think something like Getty-Dubay Italic [1][2] is more appropriate for pencils and ballpoint pens, and for teaching children to write. It's also a more basic script than cursive. The primary thing is learning the basic shapes that make up most lowercase/minuscule letters.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty-Dubay_Italic
[2]: https://handwritingsuccess.com/italic-examples/
[+] [-] lacrimacida|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atlantic|2 years ago|reply
Hence, ballpoints tend to cause wrist strain, and favour forms of handwriting which minimize contact with the page, whereas fountain pens work best with cursive. Needless to say, since the introduction of the ballpoint in schools, handwriting has gone into decline.
[+] [-] wrycoder|2 years ago|reply
Note: the ink doesn’t ”spill out”, if you cut the quill correctly, and it certainly doesn’t spill out of a metal nib.
[+] [-] floren|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] denali53|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mig39|2 years ago|reply
I take handwritten notes all the time, but rarely have to refer back to them.
[+] [-] nytesky|2 years ago|reply
This gave me a really amazing recall for the notes, and often times I would type with my fingers in the air to recall passages.
In college we had far more material and I could do this multi mode note taking and I think my performance suffered for it.
[+] [-] joshstrange|2 years ago|reply
I used to take notes in moleskine notebooks for work and it think was more beneficial than typing the same notes but at the end of the day digital notes are just so much more versatile. I can move text around, change formatting, go back and rephrase/modify/etc. The benefits far outweigh any benefit to remembering better what I wrote. That's why I wrote/typed it, so I don't have to memorize it.
Maybe I'm the weird/wrong one but I try to use my brain as much as possible as an index for where I can find the full information I need. Of course I have plenty "memorized" or things I just "know" but knowing how/where to find the information you need is way more important to me than knowing the information off the top of your head.
[+] [-] countWSS|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|2 years ago|reply
Interested to hear what other non-English languages have cursive forms.
[+] [-] trealira|2 years ago|reply
http://db.yamasa.org/ocjs/kanjidic.nsf/a7397e6ad510cc2a49256...
[+] [-] krab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoZebra120vClip|2 years ago|reply
I am told that one reason for this change was because manuscripts in certain regions used parchment or vellum, and in other regions used palm leaves. Writing on a palm leaf, if you made long, straight horizontal marks on it, you could split the fibers.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thiruvaymoli_palm_ma...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palm-leaf_manuscript...
[+] [-] forgotusername6|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IshKebab|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] netsharc|2 years ago|reply
I'm surprised you also call it joined-up writing. Are you a regulation listener?
[+] [-] fnordpiglet|2 years ago|reply
Does anyone have references I missed?
This feels on the surface suspect. Why would cursive have some special value over any other script for cognitive development?
[+] [-] pi-e-sigma|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rhelz|2 years ago|reply
If I had learned shorthand instead of cursive, it would have helped me in every class I took after that. Being able to take notes at the speed which the lecturer is talking would have been an enormous help.
[+] [-] Tagbert|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baerrie|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danShumway|2 years ago|reply
It's not a useless skill. I'm happy to know cursive and I enjoy writing it, and I like the way that it looks. There is an intrinsic joy in writing in a beautiful way. It's a faster way to write. But it's certainly not a skill that anyone needs to feel obligated to learn or shamed for avoiding. I'm skeptical of claims that it improves cognitive outcomes, I'm not sure how that would be tested in the first place in a controlled way.
I'm also largely unsympathetic to arguments about aesthetics, tradition, etc... Reminds me a lot of the "everyone should learn to play an instrument/do a sport/etc" arguments. Things can be good without being mandatory. Lots of stuff will improve your cognition, social skills, and character, but not every single thing that does so needs to be a requirement.
----
I kind of put cursive in the same bucket as Vim. I'm glad I know Vim, I think it's a faster way to edit text, I think that over time it becomes more intuitive even if only being used at a basic level. Practicing modal editing certainly could have cognitive benefits I suppose. And I think it's just an elegant and an aesthetically pleasing way to reason about text.
But do I think people should be required to learn Vim? No, of course not.
----
I don't think it does any harm to teach stuff like this; a lot of early elementary education isn't really about the stuff that's being taught so much as it is about learning how to be taught and how to operate in group settings and how to excel at something. But I'd find it difficult to justify passing a law about or caring enough to try and mandate cursive; I'd be tempted to take those requirements and expand typing programs even more than what's currently required.
Learning to type well had an immense positive impact on my life that I think is easy to quantify. In contrast, learning cursive... :shrug: I'm hard pressed to think of how my life would have been different if I never learned it, other than that I might not have become quite as snobby about pens as I am today :)