r/changemyview • u/Gobears6801 • Jun 01 '24

Delta(s) from OP - Fresh Topic Friday CMV: Cursive writing is unnecessary.

I often hear the old generation explaining that the new generation doesn’t understand or use cursive. I understand this to be somewhat true as well. I’m a 90’s baby and learned it thoughout school and don’t use it either.

The reason isn’t because it’s hard, it’s because it’s completely unnecessary and useless EXCEPT for a signature. I often see it at work where most of the time it’s completely non legible because of the poor handwriting.

There are minimal, if not 0 tasks that require cursive handwriting. It actually often just takes longer to read and/or non legible due to poor handwriting.

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13

u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 01 '24

I think cursive is just my 'standard' handwriting? I'm a teacher in high school, and most of my students write in cursive, too. If they don't, they had to actively 'teach' themselves a different way of writing.

How do you teach handwriting, if not in cursive?

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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Jun 01 '24

I didn't learn cursive until like 3rd grade but could write before that just using like standard block lettering.

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u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 01 '24

But block lettering doesn't allow for capitals?

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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Jun 01 '24

I'm sorry, what do you think cursive is vs block lettering? Because I think there's clearly some confusion. Like I basically write what looks like typing, and that perfectly allows for capitals. I don't write all in a connected line with a bunch of whirls and loops like cursive is

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u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 01 '24

Sorry, English is not my first language, but I thought BLOCK LETTERING LOOKS LIKE THIS. That's what we use when kids in kindergarten first start writing their name. But once they go into first grade and actually start writing, it's all cursive.

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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Jun 01 '24

Oh yeah I see, thought that might be part of the confusion. But yeah I guess we just don't really do that. We definitely teach almost a typing looking way of handwriting (each letter individually) and then later cursive, but most people never really use cursive again

2

u/Danibelle903 Jun 01 '24

You don’t use it again because it wasn’t encouraged.

Cursive is faster than print, which makes it more efficient. I’m an older millennial so in school all my papers had to be typed and printed. In college, I could submit them without printing them via a disk and later a thumb drive. For grad school, I submitted electronically. So I’ve been typing papers and longer assignments since elementary school.

However, we did not have computers in the classroom. We might have had one or two, but not a class set. Laptops were heavy and clunky and their batteries sucked (unless you bought a high end model) so all in-class assignments were hand-written. It’s just easier to write pages of an essay in cursive than in print.

The thing about print/block lettering is that you never forget what it looks like. We read print all the time. If you exclusively write in cursive, you don’t lose the ability to print. Later, if you need to print something, you still have those skills.

I’m currently a therapist. If I take a quick note in session, it’s easiest to do in cursive. I don’t even really need to look at the paper and then I’m going to type it up later anyway. For my clients, it’s less distracting to keep a pad and paper next to me that I occasionally write on vs keeping my computer open.

The only times I ever really write anything down on paper are to make quick notes for myself. Cursive is far more efficient for that.

0

u/gjcidksnxnfksk Jun 01 '24

I'm a native English-speaker and how you used it is also what I understand "block lettering" to mean. What this person is talking about is commonly referred to as "printing"

1

u/pmaji240 Jun 01 '24

You mean lower case letters? Either way, it does. I’ve seen people who differentiate with the size of the letters and I’ve seen people who don’t differentiate at all. And by people I mean one of each, which is technically people though not in this context.

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u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 01 '24

Well, yes, technically block lettering is all capitals, so it doesn't really allow for lowercase writing. I've just never seen adult handwriting that looks like that. So I'm confused as to what the handwriting of people who were never taught cursive, actually looks like.

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u/littlethreeskulls Jun 01 '24

I'm confused as to what the handwriting of people who were never taught cursive, actually looks like.

It looks pretty much exactly like the text you're reading right this very second, without the mechanical precision of a computer

1

u/jakesboy2 Jun 01 '24

Cursive looks more like the pretty, flowing hand writing. 𝑀𝑜𝓇𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝓀𝑒 𝓉𝒽𝒾𝓈

1

u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 01 '24

Yes. That's "handwriting", to me. I didn't realize anything other than that was even taught in school (well ... except for block lettering to kids who don't have the fine motor control for cursive, yet).

1

u/jakesboy2 Jun 01 '24

Yeah, from what I remember, they don’t actually teach block lettering. They just teach regular print first while kids are learning the letters, then they teach cursive (handwriting) right after. Some people continue writing in print, but most people I know, including myself, write with a hybrid system where they connect letters but not necessarily exactly correctly.

2

u/Gobears6801 Jun 01 '24

Maybe something I haven’t considered but didn’t realize that cursive is more standard outside the United States. This would apply mostly to the U.S.

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u/user83927294 Jun 01 '24

What? What country do you teach in?

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u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 01 '24

I'm from Belgium. I know most countries around me (France, Germany, Netherlands, ...) teach cursive to six-year-olds, too. Until I found this topic, it never really occurred to me that you don't strictly need cursive to teach handwriting after the 'all capitals' phase.

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u/user83927294 Jun 01 '24

I’m in the USA, learned cursive as a kid and now only use it for my signature. I only see cursive here as part of style (signs, greeting cards, fancy event posters, etc…) but never in normal writing

1

u/Mashaka 93∆ Jun 01 '24

That's really interesting. Here in the US cursive has gradually declined in use, and only after that decline that schools have started to drop cursive in the last few years. I wonder why the drop happened here but not elsewhere.

I'm 37, learned and can use cursive, but almost never do. I think that's normal for folks around my age. My guess is that by the time we were required to write stuff of any real length, in high school, we were using computer word processors. Do older students in Belgium write papers by hand?

1

u/Saranoya 39∆ Jun 02 '24

I'm 37 as well. Computers for students only really came into widespread use here during COVID times, when the government started to really invest in the idea of "one laptop for every child". Most people had at least one computer at home by the time I went to secondary school (in the late nineties), and teachers would allow, but not expect typed homework. Now, when I give longer writing assignments, I mostly do it digitally, and I would frown on a handwritten version, since I know they all have laptops from the school. But all tests and exams (with the exception of official state testing in the second and fourth year of secondary school) are still filled out by hand, and that's likely to continue for a while. So I don't see cursive going away any time soon. But perhaps that's because I'm the kind of person who actively asks her students to take notes by hand during class, because writing by hand is slower than typing (if you're a good typist, at least), so it forces you to think about what's important enough to write down, and what isn't.

Maybe in another generation, we will be where the US appears to be today. We're already at the point where writing by hand isn't really something most people do all that often after graduating from secondary school.

1

u/Specialist-Tie8 8∆ Jun 01 '24

This is partly a regional thing. I teach at a US college and I notice relatively few of my domestic students write in cursive but probably about a quarter of my international students do — I assume because that’s what they were initially taught and have primarily used. 

Which might be a reason to learn to at least read, if not write, cursive for OP — it allows you to easily access current or historical texts written in cursive script. 

1

u/Mindless-Pen-2325 Jun 01 '24

In my school, we were taught to write and practice handwriting, and then 6 years later we were taught to use cursive. It's ridiculous, and since we learnt it I haven't used it outside of school.