Is cursive writing going the way of the dodo bird?

I’m 29 and I still write almost entirely in cursive. My youngest sister uses that cursive-print hybrid, though.

I’ve noticed that most of the younger ones (23 and down) don’t really get the cursive thing. I think that’s kinda too bad, I think it’s pretty.

Not being able to read cursive sounds a bit extreme, to me.

@ANef_is_Enuf : My aunt had the most beautiful cursive writing you ever saw, and it was completely illegible. I can’t quite describe how, but it was a joke in the family when we’d say “I got a lovely letter from Aunt Ann” and we’d mean exactly that…it was lovely. No idea what she’d said, but it was pretty!

I’m 37, and my writing is a hybrid of cursive and print. Just like when I was a kid, cursive is taught beginning in third grade. As for how long they’ll use it, only time will tell. My daughter is in 7th grade and she only uses print (and she’s always had atrocious handwriting) even though she did learn cursive.

It will be interesting to see if they ever do anything with cursive once they’re past grade school. I think it depends on each person’s individual handwriting style.

@JilltheTooth I have noticed that cursive has evolved greatly. I know that working with the elderly so often in my field, there are similarities in writing habits in people of a certain age, that seem to shift throughout the decades. I can understand that. But not being able to read cursive at all? That seems extreme.

The only thing I can write legibly in cursive is my signature. We were taught how to write in cursive in school, but no one used it outside of school.

I don’t think so… children are still taught to write in cursive, although of course I think it’s up to the parents to cultivate the attitude that it is important. I have spent the majority of my life writing in journals and I believe that there are a lot of factors about writing as opposed to typing that are purposive…e.g. I’m sure the flow of writing makes the brain work in different ways..perhaps allows more exploratory thought to occur?

WHAT??? NO!! Please, say it isn’t so. Parents don’t teach cursive writing and they don’t teach cursive writing in schools? I thought you had to use cursive or you were considered slightly illiterate.

I learned it and my signature is in it but I use a hybrid of print and cursive and have done so since high school. My sons each print; I can’t remember if they were taught cursive writing or not. I kind of think it is irrelevant today when we use handwriting so rarely and there are so many other things that need to be taught.

Sadly, I think that it has.

I’m in my 50’s and the only cursive I have written in the past 30 years is my name. I stopped writing cursive when I went to university (an engineering school). I print everything. I even draw a short line through my number 7 and make my 8 with two circles -the way I was taught in drafting class.

I think cursive is beautiful and I will insist that my son writes out his papers in cursive with ink until hes required to type them just as I had to do when I was in school.

@worriedguy : I do my 7s and 8s like that, too. I’m not an engineer, but my Dad was, and I liked copying him. :-)

Just for the record, I am four pages into a letter, and the whole thing is written in cursive. It feels most natural, to me.

My son, 11, claims to be unable to read it. His piano teacher writes in cursive and he says he can’t read her instructions. Personally, I think he’s dogging it. He could read it if he wanted, but he doesn’t want to, not just because he doesn’t like her instructions, but because he doesn’t like reading, period. He is a visual guy. He wants Photoshop CS5 for Xmas. He’s into photography.

My 8 year old grand nephew prints. I believe that his school doesn’t spend much time on cursive skills. My sister, (the grandmother) says that cursive is a lost art.

@JilltheTooth Do you also put a slash though your zeros when both zero and the letter O are present?

@ANef_is_Enuf Wait, wait…. you type at, what, 200? 500 wpm? and you still write in cursive? I’ll bet it is gorgeous too!

@worriedguy , yup, I do. It’s a pretentious affectation on my part, but, like I said, it started so long ago because I wanted to be just like my Dad. The tall part didn’t happen, so the weird engineering writing things had to do… ;-)

@abysmalbeauty That’s like requiring him to write them in German because it’s how you did it growing up. I mean really.

In Elementary school, we learned, and were told to use cursive.
In Middle, they didn’t care how we wrote, as long as it was legible.
In High, we were told to use print, abstaining from cursive altogether.
In College, everything handed in is printed.

So from my experience, yes, cursive is going the way of the Dodo, and is used for little more than your signature nowadays.

I have to say that I think many people’s printing is very attractive looking too and can be very individualistic.

My printing looks much nicer than my cursive—that’s a known fact ;) I only write in cursive when I’m writing next to someone and I don’t want them to be able to immediately read what I’m writing.

I was taught cursive in elementary school, made to use it sometimes in middle school, and then in high school and college it didn’t matter, similar to @Prosb. So it definitely did fall out of usage for me.

I don’t really see what’s so great about curisve—its purpose is to make writing faster, not to make it “prettier”.

I like to receive letters written by fountain pen in a cursive script that is almost as distinctive as the writer’s own face. It is much more intimate than email.

@flutherother It may be intimate, but if you think I write way too much now, you will probably think I write way too little if I have to write by hand. I can barely sign my signature these days and my hand seizes up.

Aside from my signature, I have not written in cursive since 3rd grade; about thirty years. Then again, my handwriting is bad enough that I was asked to use a typewriter for many of my classes. (Home computers were uncommon, and out of our price range then.)

Personally, I always found it marginally legible at best, and slightly less useful than flint-knapping even as a child, less so now unless you are trying to be all 18th-century. It’s art,nothing more.

@wundayatta My handwriting isn’t very pretty or legible either but I write more clearly with a fountain pen than a biro.

@flutherother Ah yes, A fountain pen. I went to school in your land for a year, and was required to use a fountain pen for the first time in my life. Somehow, while wandering around the living room of our rented home, I managed to shake my pen and splatter indelible ink all over the wallpaper.

So much for fountain pens. Fortunately, in the US, we don’t have biros. Only ball point pens or roller balls or the pilot G-2, my personal favorite. I need to order a new supply now.

They can be messy. I use blotting paper but still get ink stains on my fingers.

I have a fun thing called dysgraphia. Cursive is the bane of my existence, largely because it’s impossible for me to draw something the same way twice. If the purpose of cursive was to write every letter a different way every single time, I would be the world champion.

At some stage I started typing (woo!) which made things a whole lot easier. Largely because you don’t need to hit a key on a keyboard in a particular place. The whole key does the exact same thing. Marvellous, really.

I am fairly ok with reading cursive.

Though there are some forms of cursive I wouldn’t mind popping off the mortal coil. Running writing being one of them. I just can’t be bothered reading something when one letter can be mistaken for several others.

I’m seventeen, and I started learning it when I was about seven or eight. They made us practice on a pretty infrequent basis, and write all of our handwritten essays in cursive. But I can honestly say, I don’t think I’ve written in cursive since the fifth grade, and I doubt I’ve read a scrap of it in years.

I learned cursive back in school, but I’ve never used it. Printing is so much easier to read and to be read by others.

I hope not but I wouldn’t be surprised. I used to have beautiful writing but now it is truly terrible. Awful. Someone asked me if I was writing shorthand when looking at my notes the other day… far out! I type most things though or write very quickly (I call it writing anyway). So I can only imagine the handwriting skills of younger people, who seem to type or text everything, will become very poor over time.

@Bellatrix It’s not just a “young people” thing though. I know many people my mother’s age who had/have terrible handwriting. Often spelling too. As much bitching as people about the way kids today communicate, what with their txtspk and all, us adults really are not much better :/

@HungryGuy I agree. Given the rather extreme variances in cursive, the only way to read it effectively is to know at least 64,000 different versions of the English alphabet and take a guess at what each letter or word actually is. By comparison, print is pretty standardized and thus far more practical if the reason you are writing is to convey information to others (as opposed to making notes to yourself).

@jerv, I think I started off by saying my own handwriting (and here I refer to cursive rather than printing) is terrible because I don’t use it. I then went on to say this is quite likely to be a growing problem because young people particularly use handwriting less these days. I am not saying it is a ‘young person’ problem, but it is something that is likely to affect younger people more than older people in society and this is likely to become more prevalent than less.

When I went to school and college, I wrote everything by hand. Now students type their assignments at school. They use laptops in the classroom, they take laptops into lectures at university. They may not write notes but instead might enter a reminder on their phone or text someone a message rather than leaving a hand written note. When was the last time someone sent you a handwritten letter? We communicate differently now than we did even 10 years ago. I certainly don’t write as much as I did (hence my truly awful handwriting), my comment was not a criticism or judgement against young people. It is a use or lose it issue. There are differences in the way we work now than we did years ago. I think it is a pity if we lose the ability to write well by hand, but change happens. There are also positives such as being able to read our doctor’s prescriptions.

My writing is so horrible that I print. I can read and write in cursive though.

I’m seventeen and haven’t used it since one stint in fifth grade where I was trying to impress the teacher, which lasted three weeks. However, I do know it and can read it, sort of; my handwriting has developed into a three-way-hybrid of regular print, cursive and nonsensical scribbles. All in all, I’m really the only one who can read it, even though my teachers get pissed off by it, so yeah.. Although, I know this one guy in my grade who spent his time up until high school in a Catholic school and doesn’t know anything else, so there’s a niche for it out there.

@Bellatrix I understand that. I am just saying that it’s more of a 21st-century thing.

As for reading prescriptions, that really is another language. Do you know what “q.a.e.” means? Here is a hint; it’s short for quoque alternis die. Being able to make out the letters won’t help much there. Just saying…

We were graded on penmanship in elementary school. It is sad that it isn’t taught and stressed.

@ddude1116 My handwriting has improved exponentially since I started writing Tengwar.

My son is in 4th grade and so far has not officially been taught cursive in school. He has expressed an interest to learn it on his own though, so I have been teaching it to him.

@worriedguy it makes sense, doesn’t it? Cursive never requires me to lift my pen from the paper, so it seems quicker. I think. lol, 500wpm.

I hope not. When I was in elementary school, they told us we’d better learn it because our teachers later wouldn’t even accept things in print. I haven’t had to write in cursive once since then. But I still do (for the most part. I have a sort of half-cursive-half-print handwriting.) I’ve encountered a few people who have an issue reading it, but whatever. I quite like it.

@Seaofclouds now that I think of it, my kids were all taught cursive in third grade, they are in 7th, 6th, and 4th now and none of them has used it since. @martianspringtime I was told the same thing, but I was forced to use cursive throughout middle school and high school. When I got out of school and got my first real job my boss insisted I print because my cursive was so unreadable. Because of that I still print pretty much all the time. I will use cursive when I want to write fast and when I journal. @ANef_is_Enuf I totally agree that writing in cursive is quicker and really more efficient since the pen doesn’t have to be lifted from the paper as much.

The part that really blew me away about what my step-daughter said was that she can’t even read cursive. Thinking of cursive writing as a foreign language that a native English speaker/writer cannot decipher really rubbed me the wrong way.

@SuperMouse Your cursive is not my cursive though. Like I said, cursive is highly variable. It may well be another language.

@jerv Although we were all supposed to be learning the Palmer method of cursive writing – at least in the US. People’s printing is also very individual and some harder to read than others.

Don’t forget the lefties who write cursive with their elbow hooked and wrist bent and their slants often going to the NW rather than NE.

@Joker94 Are you…serious?

Since they discovered, by testing it, that printing was just as fast to write as cursive, there’s been much less emphasis on it. It’s easier to make printing neat and legible than it is cursive.
See @KoleraHeliko for the reason why. The curving backwards and forwards is more difficult for our nervous systems and the small muscle systems of the hand to master. We are not all asked to do Calligraphy anymore either. It’s a problem for some people to learn other variations of the letters they learned first. Once they are older, kids may make more sense of cursive and be able to read it.

It’s strange to think that a younger person may not be able to read my handwriting at all! I love writing in cursive and I think my handwriting is distinctive. I would hate to give it up. It has so much more personality than printing. I even have studied handwriting analysis as a hobby. I prefer cursive for writing journal entries and poetry. It seems to flow better from my brain to the paper.

My sister once told me that my handwriting is an unusual combination of legible/illegible, lol. I am actually proud of that strangely enough.

My father had a distinctive handwriting that was a little angular in form. I have seen it said that it was a common Germanic style of writing. We sometimes don’t know what we are losing. I think it is a little piece of our humanity. But then, I am a bit of a romantic.

@Earthgirl I find it odd that people cannot convert numbers to/from binary in their head or recite the powers of 2 out to 2^16 (65,536) from memory, so I guess we all have odd standards.

@jerv: Perhaps if we had only one finger on each hand, we’d be more comfortable with the binary system. I have trouble understanding why 2^0 = 1, for example.

Right now, @jerv you and @worriedguy have exactly the same lurve count! How cute is that?