Cursive writing rapidly becoming passé

I was talking about this the with someone the other day. I haven't used cursive in so long, i'm very sure I would makes loads of mistakes trying to use it today.

I don't use cursive because I can't read my own cursive handwriting. Block letters force me to slow down and form the damn letters.

On the other hand, when I was a reporter I got very fast with my little block letters. Reporter shorthand helps, too.

I never used cursive. I'd do the worksheets back in grade-school, but that was it. I never used it in real life. My fiancee still does, as does my mother, but they're the only ones I know of. Bottom line: who cares? I'm glad to see it go. :-)

I would hate to see cursive go. It can be very elegant.

I'm old. The other day, my mom sent me a letter and picture I sent here when I was four. My penmanship was better then. I was always sloppy and now just don't write. Usually I can't read my own notes.

In my adult life I have always said that someday cursive writing will be a lost art. So I take every opportunity I have to "practice" my script. I love to write and I think if it is done well it is beautiful to look at. Great article by the way thanks for sharing.

I'm 20 now, in my 3rd year of college. I was taught cursive in grade school, but I never got good enough at it to actually write in it on a regular basis. It was primarily presented as an alternative to printing (as in, "use this if you like it better, use printing if you like that better"). My printing was (and is) neater and faster. I don't know if it's a bad thing that fewer kids are using cursive, and I think you'd have a hard time proving that computers have had anything to do with it.

My dad has never written in cursive, and growing up I thought that rather odd. I couldn't wait until they taught us how to write in cursive in elementary school. In college, one of my drafting classes had us write the alphabet in proper drafting style 25 times per week for the semester. After that, I can't bring myself to write in cursive anymore. I'm just as quick writing block letters as I was writing in cursive, though legibility ends up about the same depending on how fast I'm writing.

I don't think I've used cursive since being taught it in... 3rd? 4th? grade. The closest I get to using cursive is signing my name, and even then it's more or less just sloppy, tilted printing. To me, cursive is just harder to read. It almost takes more effort to figure out how each letter is supposed to lead into the next, and differentiating a lowercase M from a lowercase N is just... no.

I mostly write in small caps anyway. So does my brother, and my sister. We picked it up from my dad, who for all I know picked it up from his dad.

HA! take that Mrs. Haskins - I knew I didn't need to learn cursive - I win.

Unfortunately, my cursive writing still looks the same as it did in 1981 when I was in third grade and relegated to the remedial handwriting group.

When I shared this article with a friend, she suggested that often more technically minded people will write with all caps.

Handwriting and spelling both a lost art. Maybe technology will catch up, its already started with ups and the department of motor vehicles with ink less signature computer pads.

My cursive used to be excellent, but it got so sloppy that I began writing in small caps. My question is, if nobody learns cursive, is everybody going to be signing their names in block letters?

My cursive is horrible these days. I remeber having to write an affirmation on a test (might have been the SATs) in cursive and how painful it was and I had only given up cursive a few years earlier then.

I gave up cursive in 8th grade. I remeber it being an active decision because I liked writing in print better. I also remeber that is was 8th grade because I remeber my 8th grade history teacher taking off 5 points
on an essay because I did not write in cursive!

No one seemed to mind my print in high school or college. I write so little now it acutally cramps my hand when I have to write at length!

I'm sorry, am I missing something? Why, again, is this a crisis?

I don't understand the problem. Soon, writting with pen and paper won't even be happening.

Big deal. I never officially learned to write in cursive. The reason escapes me but I was dead set against learning it. Most of my school experience was dominated by truly awful hand cramping, which we now know as carpal tunnel.

Pen and paper may be a creative force of some sort, but when it hurts like hell, that's torture, not creativity. I still have trouble writing more than a few paragraphs without pain, and what comes out is not easily readable even by me.

As a result, I moved to typing early and discovered I was good at it and that typing at speed unleashed a desire to write which I had never before been able to express. Looking back, I feel sorry for my penpals who would send me a simple handwritten letter and get back 12 pages of single-spaced typing. What a daunting thing that must have been. :(

Carpal Tunnel occurs more frequently in keyboardists (like typing not like Frankie Goes to Hollywood). I think learning to write by hand helps your o read more than just printed pages. I think it would be terribly sad to have to whip out a hand written note to my sons teacher in 10 years and have her not understand what I wrote. Composition is an art form to some and in that art is handcrafting - which entails handwriting - specifically cursive. Any monkey can print letters.

@MartinEZ

I don't understand the problem. Soon, writting with pen and paper won't even be happening.

Really? pen and paper are cheaper than most anything, easy to keep track of, if you lose it you don't care, and it helps to sign for things or to write a prescription if you are a doctor... Pen and paper are underrated.

Yeah, paperless signatures, but if you never learn to write by hnd, you scribble something and it becomes worthless. Its just an example of how parts of society give up and then cheer about it.

Technology is so advanced we dont have to use primitive tools like pens in our hands - YAY!... how do you spell writted again? er writtinged?

Also it greatly helps with spelling (writting) and vocabulary becuase you rely more on your brain than a spellcheck when writing a word out.

@tigerblade

I think it's considered part of the "dumbing down of America." We're all so dependent on computers for everything that we might be losing some of the more basic skills.

I agree, if you think about it - these new web apps and aweb based OS suppliments are free now, but then they were just created. We're not getting any less connected to our PCs, and eventually we'll be paying 5 or 6 fees to just turn the damn thing on. Handwriting, has always been free...

cursive is gay...... i resisted cursive from the 4th grade on and insisted on printing all my school work.

Has nobody here seen Idiocracy?

I used to do calligraphy when I was a kid so I took great care when I wrote cursive. The again, I was also was very anal about how neat my block letters would look, too.

A few months ago I tried to write a few sentences in cursive and amazed at how much I had forgotten the rules. What the hell is a "z" supposed to look like, anyway? And my cursive was an eyesore. I also realized that my block writing looks terrible, too!

But you know what? I don't care. At this point in my life I'm more concerned with the content of what I'm writing, not how pretty it looks.

My cursive looks like it was written by a semi-retarded monkey, and my block letters are almost as bad....I used to be able to write pretty well, cursive and otherwise...with both hands. Got lazy about a decade ago, now I'm quicker and better at the Grifiti writing system for my pda then the real thing.....sad I suppose in a way...but....meh.

I was reading these comments and started to wonder if my cursive writing was "proper" so according to wiki I am not making my letters the way I was taught. Oh well, something else I have forgotten. : )

Cursive writing, like anything else, is a skill. The ability to write in that fashion or read it, is just no longer a life skill. Reading cursive, because of all that has been written in that form, will remain a necessary skill for historical research (as noted in the article), albeit it is likely to be used less and less over time. Writing in cursive is obsolete. While there are technical aspects of the form and (some) yearning for the aesthetic quality in comparison to printing, it no longer serves any useful purpose.

That's funny; here and in India people love to see my signature (especially young people) because they are eager to learn script....evidently it is more difficult for them than the block printing, for obvious reasons, and not as widely taught. But they do want to learn it.

I'm a twenty-year-old college student, and I write almost everything in cursive, except for short notes which I tend to write in capitals. I feel like I must be one of the last of my age group to not only write cursive, but be able to understand it, because people my age and younger constantly remark that they have trouble reading my handwriting. It's not because it's bad—I don't mean to sound immodest, but I've always had excellent handwriting—it's simply because they don't know how to read cursive anymore.

It's something I don't understand. Sure, typing is great and all, but for things that have to be handwritten, cursive is so much neater than printing while still being a lot faster to write.