Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
I don’t know if cursive is exactly obsolete. Don’t most people use a form of cursive to sign their names? I do agree knowing it is not absolutely necessary. But knowing it makes some jobs easier. You might want to leave a note on someone’s desk, perhaps. Or you might need to jot down a line from a poem or play. And for grocery lists, well using cursive is faster than keying it into a phone—at least for me it is.
But since there are other means of setting thoughts down, I do get why cursive is not being taught in regular school curriculum.I also don’t see anything wrong with teaching your kids to write in cursive, or in having them attend a special class to learn it.
I can sign my name, not that I actually do that with any regularity these days. Some legal paperwork submitted to courts or appeals boards require wet signatures, for everything else it's electronic.. I can't write with any effectiveness in cursive. Heck, I can barely read cursive. I can text/email on a phone faster than I can write. I can write in printing faster than I can write in cursive. They were still pushing it when I was in early elementary school before abandoning it.
It might be good for the fine motor control but as a skill it's not of any use. I push paper for a living but it's all done on computers nowadays. I don't use a pen for anything except jotting down sticky notes. I get annoyed when I have to fill out a form and there's not a PDF format since it takes so much longer to fill it out with a pen.
I still don't understand why people seem to think you must be taught formal cursive in order to sign your name. I don't know anyone who's signature looks like that. I can read and write cursive just fine, but my signature is not the perfectly formed letters in my name. Anyone can figure out a signature for their name without knowing how to write cursive.
As somebody else pointed out the clerks at that person's PO cant read address on letter if written in cursive. So am I suppose to assume nobody knows and thus I shouldnt use it? Perhaps children of the AI future dont need cursive, but shouldnt they learn how to read it until us old fogies die off?
As somebody else pointed out the clerks at that person's PO cant read address on letter if written in cursive. So am I suppose to assume nobody knows and thus I shouldnt use it? Perhaps children of the AI future dont need cursive, but shouldnt they learn how to read it until us old fogies die off?
Your letters will be processed faster if you use print.
I know a lot of our younger employees aren't familiar with it, so I don't use cursive at work, unless it's out of habit from time to time.
I do think knowing cursive is a bit like knowing a second language, maybe not necessary but still useful.
Quote:
The address on the front of each letter is scanned by an optical character reader. Images of letters that could not be successfully read are transmitted to a remote encoding center for further processing..
OTOH we will always have historical documents that were written in cursive. I find it kind of sad that fifty years from now people will look at a copy of the original constitution and it will be like looking at hieroglyphs to them.
Writing and reading are different things.
Anyway, so what? Shakespeare is semi-archaic. A modern English speaker can usually parse out the meaning, but it uses a lot of obsolete words, and many words that are recognizable have changed definitions in the 400+ years since Bill S. wrote them. Who can read the Magna Carta? Who can read Beowulf in the original?
Read the Declaration of Independence. Its use of capitalization is archaic. It contains British spellings, as the coming American spelling differentiation was mostly incomplete in the 1770s. It contains archaic phrases like 'hath shewn'. It has the letter 's' occasionally configured in an elongated fashion that looks like an 'f'. This is usually the first of more than one consecutive 's', so that Congress looks like Congrefs and dissolved looks like difsolved. English isn't going to stop changing just so people can forever read our historical documents.
People can learn cursive if they want it, but in this day and age it has limited utility and isn't necessary.
Count me among the "old fogies" who had NO idea that cursive (or as it was called during my childhood, "script") handwriting is no longer being taught to students, or that there is any literate person alive who would be unable to read it.
My son who was born in the mid-1980s was taught it, although he began shifting to printing during high school except for his signature. To be honest, I always thought he was simply being too lazy to bother taking the time to write non-signature things in a legible script. For myself, I have always found script/cursive to be much faster and easier than printing. All my to-do and shopping lists, post-it notes, etc., are written in script for that reason.
If it's true that postal employees actually have any difficulty reading cursive, I suppose I should start "dumbing down" to printing when I send greeting cards (and yes I do send those.) On the other hand, I have been assuming that almost all postal mail is now scanned by optical readers that are able to read all but the worst handwriting, and I do make sure that when I address envelopes or packages my handwriting is clear and legible.
I agree with HJ99 that as long as people are still writing in cursive, anyone who expects to get a job as an adult should be able to at least read it, even if they don't have the inclination or the ability to write in that format themselves.
What's next? Teaching kids that it's just as acceptable to write "u r" instead of "you are" in their English essays or term papers, merely because many people choose to use that format in text messages or even emails? (hint: I am not one of them.)
Interesting. We live in NW Indiana and cursive is still taught in elementary school here and in middle school the students are required to write in cursive only.
Anyway, so what? Shakespeare is semi-archaic. A modern English speaker can usually parse out the meaning, but it uses a lot of obsolete words, and many words that are recognizable have changed definitions in the 400+ years since Bill S. wrote them. Who can read the Magna Carta? Who can read Beowulf in the original?
Read the Declaration of Independence. Its use of capitalization is archaic. It contains British spellings, as the coming American spelling differentiation was mostly incomplete in the 1770s. It contains archaic phrases like 'hath shewn'. It has the letter 's' occasionally configured in an elongated fashion that looks like an 'f'. This is usually the first of more than one consecutive 's', so that Congress looks like Congrefs and dissolved looks like difsolved. English isn't going to stop changing just so people can forever read our historical documents.
People can learn cursive if they want it, but in this day and age it has limited utility and isn't necessary.
Perhaps one reason for failing to teach cursive is to prevent future generations from being able to read the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, forcing them to rely on "official" transcriptions instead.
People can learn cursive if they want it, but in this day and age it has limited utility and isn't necessary.
Which I've already said. But what you're talking about happened gradually, a natural occurrence over hundreds of years. The loss of of ability of the general public to read cursive writing is a deliberate action that will take place over my lifetime, less than a hundred years. I find it interesting, and maybe a tiny bit alarming.
Status:
"I don't understand. But I don't care, so it works out."
(set 1 day ago)
35,580 posts, read 17,923,325 times
Reputation: 50612
Quote:
Originally Posted by DubbleT
OTOH we will always have historical documents that were written in cursive. I find it kind of sad that fifty years from now people will look at a copy of the original constitution and it will be like looking at hieroglyphs to them.
Have you ever looked at an original copy of the Constitution? It's like hieroglyphics to us now.
Anyone who has to read census data from 100 years ago for ancestry purposes has great difficulty doing it now, although we all know cursive.
Block print, as teachers do it, is the easiest to read. Everyone can read that. Once you get cursive, and especially old cursive, it's up for debate what's written there.
Have you ever looked at an original copy of the Constitution? It's like hieroglyphics to us now.
Parts of it can be difficult, but I can read and understand it, it's not hieroglyphs to me, and probably not to most people who grew up with cursive.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
