Cursive Handwriting - Disappearing? UPDATE: Post Your Writing Samples!
 

Do you use cursive or printing, when you handwrite?

How often do you handwrite anything? 1x week? 10x week?

Do your kids use cursive or printing? How often do they handwrite anything? How old are they?

Is there any reason to teach cursive? To learn cursive?

Do you have a nice pen? Do you give a hoot about a nice pen?

In 10 years, do you think cursive will still be used?

In 20 years, do you think handwriting will still be used?

Just curious. I'm reading that the current crop of high school and college kids hardly use, or know, cursive anymore.

Personally, I seldom handwrite anything - maybe 3x week I'll write a grocery list (but increasingly I type it into the iPhone). I have a nice Waterman fountain pen, but use it maybe 3x year. I do write cursive instead of printing. My kids learned/are learning cursive, part of being educated in the French system. None of us have the beautiful cursive script that my parents and even more my grandparents have/had. They learned Western handwriting from an old-school Chinese background, after spending years practicing traditional brush calligraphy. Which is no longer a standard school subject, even in China.

EDIT

Okay, guys. Let's see it. Post a photo of your handwriting - printed or cursive, whatever you do.

the quick brown fox jumped over the very lazy dog

I print and always have. You can't read my cursive; you will have a hard enough time with my printing. Yes, I hand write every day. Mostly lists. Some logs.

I hand print my proposals in a notebook before I prepare a formal.

I'm sure it would be hard for anyone but me to read.


KT

My penmanship has always left something to be desired. I droped cursive writing in college, I couldn't read my own notes sometimes. I switched to all printing shortly into my first sememster and found writing in all caps was the neatest form of penmanship for me. It is odd, but it works for me. It took a while for my coworkers to accept it as my "normal" writing. Lol

I hand write my clients invoices and I don't use cursive. Like Tim, my penmanship is lacking too.

I use a computer so much that when I write I print and do cursive, sometimes in the same sentence.

When I write by hand, it's all Calligraphy. I cheat though and use the Calligraphy pen.

I have gone as far as buying a fountain pen and tried to retrain myself cursive.

Hard to imagine that which was easy as a pre-teen is now almost imposable. :(

Since I worked an order desk decades ago, I have always used a cursive version of printing - fast but accurate.

Ian

Quite a few years ago I relearned cursive so that I could more quickly enter text into a computer.

Yes, that's right, (write?) . . .anyway, tablet computers have had quite good handwriting recognition software for quite some time. I found that they make better work out of sloppy cursive than out of an engineers block letters (which are slow, btw). Anyway, they must have designed that software with doctors in mind. I'm always amazed at how well it nails the slop.

Even my mobile phones have had the feature for years. I write all sorts of notes and such with it. I'm a bit conflicted about the newer phones which have speech to text. That sounds good, but I can imagine times where I don't want to speak out loud, what notes I'm putting down. ...and the newer gen of phones have cap-sense screens, which usually are not fine enough resolution for the hand-writing app. ...giving a one or the other choice. :-/

In college I had to change from chicken scratch to ALL CAPS. BUT ALL CAPS IS NOT FAST AND POST-COLLEGE ACADEMIA REQUIRED THAT I WRITE FASTER so I got a book on writing and learned a writing style that is part cursive and part printing - very legible and fast.

I found that using my Newtons and then my Windows tablets improved my cursive quite a bit. I wonder if there is a HWR input option or app for the iPad. I know there are conductive styli for the iPhone that should work on the iPad. I think modern HWR is pretty decent. Maybe they'll perfect it just in time for handwriting to disappear. We'll all just think at our computers, then hit print. Sorty, think print.

I print. I only use Pilot black felt tip pens.

I take notes on everything...phone calls, meetings, etc.

I blame the Nuns.

I write much of my data collection using cursive which then gets scanned into records. I'm still hoping for a "smart" template that can be shaped to my needs but we are changing software providers so it's going to be some years away again.
I get teased about how very legible my handwriting is as I'm in a profession not known for legilbility.

Pawn tickets and gun log is all hand written. Like others have said, I switched to printing during my (regretably short) stay in college. Cursive only for my signature and an occasional forgery.
Jim

Wasn't cursive born out of the need for speed because the old world required such vast amounts of writing. Now, enter the typewriter, the copy machine, the fax, and the PC - is there really still a need for speed?

I have not written cursive in 30+ years. The only time I actually write anything down on paper is when I fill out a hallmark card.

Printed since HS, that was forty-six years ago. They don't even teach cursive anymore.

I do sign my name in cursive.

I print every day. I hand write all invoices in the shop. I'm an all block letter printer too. I can still writes in cursive but choose not to.
My 12 year old daughter writes in cursive. Her hand writing is very nice.
I am very picky and possessive of my pen. I have had the same one for 10+ years. I prefer a medium point, blue ink, not too skinny, and not too fat pen.
Try to steal my pen from me and you might lose the limb you took it with. :mad: :)

I was forced to learn cursive in a private school that I attended from the 5th through the 8th grade. I don't know if I learned/was taught cursive before that or not, I can't remember. What I do remember was that my report cards at that private school usually looked like this

math -- A
Science -- A
English -- A
History -- A
Art -- A
PE -- A
Handwriting -- C- (with the occasional, rare B- or D)

That crap kept me off of the honor roll most of the time that I was there. Based on my cursive, I should have been a doctor.

I still write by hand several times a week, I ALWAYS print. Most of what I write is notes at work, or when I'm illustrating something on a white board. My printing is legible. Even my name when signed mostly looks like the first 2 or 3 letters and then trails off to nothing. I can write in cursive decently if I really concentrate and go really slowly. Who the hell wants to do that.

I'd love to have beautiful handwriting, but not enough to do anything about it. There are far more important things. I am glad that I know how, and can recognize it when I see it. I occasionally find someone that doesn't recognize certain letters or doesn't know how to write it. That seems so odd to me. I guess I'm getting old.

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Both kids learning cursive - their handwriting is actually very nice. When our Son uses block letters it looks like he is having a detox episode! Our little girl write like a typewriter or a draftsman. Very very clear.

I rarely write anymore - mostly type or text everything now...

Interesting questions. There may be no need for cursive writing anymore. It may still be taught as something that's good to know but seldom used - like Latin..

Okay, guys. Let's see it. Post a photo of your handwriting - printed or cursive, whatever you do.

the quick brown fox jumped over the very lazy dog

Then we can do some amateur graphology.

This is so sad. They have used it for more then one thousand years and now gone within the last 20 years.


I had to write a quick note in someone's office a couple of months ago. She mention that I don't do much writing anymore. I noticed that my sentence starts to sag toward the right hand side of the white paper.


One day I ask the designer's young helper about placement of something on the construction job site. I was looking for the plans. He pulls out his cell and started scrolling across the tiny lil' screen and claimed that he took a picture of the plans. It covered an area of about three feet on that thing. I made him go out to my truck and fetch my full set of drawings. Pushing buttons is easy, but what is so hard about using a pen? I can't understand these kids. I couldn't read his hand writing.

I'll play. I wrote (printed) this as fast as possible & as legible as possible. 3rd try btw. The first 2 I blew a word.

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Ian

Alright kids here's mine- written with a Sheaffer "Italic M" in my color o choice - "King's Gold". Its funny, a lot of my gfs have told me they really really appreciate a card written in that style (it works lol!). How I took up the fountain pen: my dad made a hobby of it sometime before I left home and I guess I picked it up subconsciously; I always noticed he always writes checks and such in calligraphy, but never tried it on my own until recently. Anyways I have TERRIBLE print but with the pen I try to take my time; let me know what you think


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They still taught it in my school.... ;)

I won't say I am good at it... I'm real fast though!

i am a cursive writing fool. i have gotten lazy, and my handwriting conserves movements.

for example..my lower case "y"..looks like a "j"..i dont cup the upper part.

i'll show an example later..when i can scan something. great THREAD!!

I don't use cursive except when I am filling out cards.

Print legibly and neatly when charting, sign my name, block letters of my last name and office phone number. This gives the nurses the illusion that I would be happy to have them call me, but they can read the orders and chart note so they don't need to do so.

Black ball point pen, almost invariably

But you scribble all over the prescriptions right?

I had to learn cursive in like the second grade. I think by 8th grade they started preferring printing. By high school, you had to write in printing or else. And the name, class, etc. in the upper right hand corner. :rolleyes: In college now, I print. I think I can still use cursive but I never try. Being an engineering major, capitols are the way to go. Engineering drawings on the computer, of course, use all capitol letters. Most everything other than in-class quizes is typed, anyway. Most hand stuff is just math symbols so I have become better at writing the curvy, cursive-like little greek letters like zeta than at English cursive.

Some of my engineering instructors, who happen to have PhD's, use a sort of printing when writing comments on papers, but it might as well be greek since no one but themselves can read it. :)

My mom has absolutely textbook perfect cursive writing. I love reading letters and cards from her - they're beautiful simply because of how elegant the text looks.

I haven't used cursive since I was required to in 8th Grade or whenever it was. Everything is printed out - years of doing "architectural annotation" on drawings by hand has pushed out everything else. I doubt I could even do cursive anymore. It's a dying art, IMHO.

Cursive looks too much like Arabic, which scares me.

(Can I have a job at NPR now?)

Does anyone remember the "Palmer method", that's what I was taught in grade school. Of course my hands were crippled since the nuns beat my knuckles to a pulp because I just wanted to print.

This is all bringing back too many bad memories. I hated school!

+1

My mother has beautiful penmanship, she hand wrote all of the invitations for my wedding and a few other relatives' weddings as well.

I could never forge a note from her in grade school. :)

My father, now that is where I trust I got my penmanship gene. His writing is much better than mine, but no where near my mother's writing.

Being that my cursive looks like hieroglyphics, I stick to handwriting/printing (which isnt much better...)

While we are on the subject of writing, does anyone else have two different signatures? Such as a "casual" one, and an "official" one?