this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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[–] [email protected] 88 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (5 children)

I don't remember people ever writing cursive like what I was taught growing up. People just self-servingly turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day. The kid who can't read our B-movie elvish script isn't the one with literacy issues.

We either write within the ballpark of standardization, or we don't. I think kids should be required to put in as much effort into learning cursive, as people put into actually writing cursive. Which is to say, absolutely none at all.

(Sorry to people who actually write legible, clean cursive. I wish I got to read your output in the wild.)

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

The thing is, it's easy to read good cursive. It's just another script. It took me 5 episodes of Last Exile to memorize the Greek equivalents to English letters so I could read all the text without looking up the translation guide. But when their writing looks like Jack Lew's signature, there's not a whole lot I can do to decipher it

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Yes but really only the artistically minded and those with great manual dexterity have even a slim chance of doing it well. The rest has to write letters hundreds of times while their classmates go to recess.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago

feels like a lot of older people just use cursive as an excuse to cover up bad handwriting, because it's harder to tell when it's all squiggly in the first place

like, there's a reason we don't write in fancy serif typefaces, that would result in most people's writing being even less legible than it already is.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I used to have really legible, accurate cursive. Someone made me feel embarrassed for still using cursive in middle school, so I stopped using it.

Now I can't remember cursive well enough to use it quickly, and my print looks like an elementary child did it. ALL CAPS print is a good way for me to make my print more legible

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

turbo-scribble some chicken-scratch and call it a day

But that's cursive, isn't it? I always considered cursive the script to be written when you just quickly need to write something down,being the style where the pen is raised the least, which happens to be the fastest way to write, at the cost of legibility. So cursive to me seems like the opposite of fancy.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Well,my teachers at the least insisted that cursive must be written perfectly, or you had to write it again.
As in, "rewrite the assignment because the arch on this lower case n is too high".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I only had that in primary school, because it's important to have legible handwriting (so the teachers can properly grade you being one of the reasons), and it's easier to change behaviours early on in life before they become habits, but after that I never had anyone insist on or expect perfect handwriting.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Cursive was taught separately from print. In elementary school an assignment wouldn't be accepted in print, and afterwards it wouldn't be accepted in cursive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

The thing is that back in the day you were expected to hand write all of your college assignments and printing or typewriting were not allowed. Because of that, it took decades and decades for enough older educators to die before people could use a computer for homework.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Right. Depending on how old you are, you may have or did have older relatives who wrote in impeccable cursive. My grandmother, for example, who was a high school teacher from the 1940s through to the 70s, wrote cursive that looked almost machine-made because it was so perfect. But they actually taught penmanship as its own subject back when she was a kid in the 1930s.