• mhague@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    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.)

    • starman2112@sh.itjust.works
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      11 months ago

      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

      • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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        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.

    • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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      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.

    • MrShankles@reddthat.com
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      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

    • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      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.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        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”.

        • Faresh@lemmy.ml
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          11 months ago

          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.

          • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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            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.

      • stolid_agnostic@lemmy.ml
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        11 months ago

        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.

        • TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id
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          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.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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      11 months ago

      You’re just not old enough. Cursive was everywhere when I was a kid. They should still teach it to children because children learn language and writing easier than adults do. We should be able to read cursive. It is part of our language, and our history. Every old document is written in cursive. We shouldn’t end up with a society that can’t even read its original Constitution. That’s just Idiocracy.

      • mhague@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        I grew up in a house with a rotary phone and a meticulously maintained phone book (written in cursive.) If I’m too young to have been able to reliable hone my cursive-parsing skills, what can we expect of younger generations?

        The Flynn effect suggests people are generally getting smarter, remembering things better, etc. Something is happening to cause younger generations to be generally better than their ancestors. IQ scores have their problems but it’s still a hopeful sign.

        • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.world
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          11 months ago

          Different circles I guess then. Everyone I knew wrote in cursive when I was younger. Regarding your intelligence comment, it’s not an intelligence issue, just an education and exposure issue. Learning cursive is easier than learning to write all-together, but if you’re never taught, and you’re not exposed to it, then you’re probably not going to learn it. It’s such a simple thing to learn that I don’t understand the aversion everyone on this thread has towards it. It’s pretty nice when you have to write a lot of text, like taking notes or journaling.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            The aversion in my case comes from seeing time being wasted on that when teachers could use it to teach much more useful things or making sure that kids learned everything else they’ve been taught.

      • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Language changes. Teaching an entire script to be able to read translated documents when there are practical skills that could be taught instead is silly.

        We don’t teach old English anymore, even though there’s a huge amount of our cultural history contained in it.
        We don’t even teach people about the eras when we used to use “f” in place if “s”, and that’s right in the middle of the constitution.

        Can you read the original magna carta? America would not be unique amongst English speaking nations in having issues dealing with language drift.