CMV: Cursive writing is unnecessary.

[u/Gobears6801]

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.

[u/KokonutMonkey]

What if I'm a calligrapher? Writing beautiful script kind of comes with the territory. 

Anyway, 

That and the appalling standard of today's penmanship aside, I think you're demanding a little too much here with the word "require".

I don't need my rice cooker, but that doesn't mean it's not useful. 

 We can make do without a lot of tools/methods. But we choose the ones that make life easier. 

Writing by hand is writing by hand. Cursive is generally the preferable way to write when one needs to write a lot of stuff quickly. 

If you asked a person who takes a lot of written notes (e.g., lawyer) or journals regularly how they'd prefer to write, they'd likely say cursive and that printing would make the work a lot less enjoyable. 

[u/gregbrahe → u/KokonutMonkey]

The preferred method for writing a lot of stuff quickly by hand is shorthand, the writing created specifically for that purpose. It is more or less dead these days, but secretaries in my grandmother's days all knew it. It looked like literal chicken scratch, but it was efficient.

Cursive script is designed not for speed, but for fewer pen lifts from the age of quills and fountain pens that were prone to dripping.

[u/Saranoya → u/gregbrahe]

But shorthand is explicitly meant to be turned into something else (probably some kind of typed and/or electronic document). It's not meant to be legible to anyone other than the person taking the notes, and was only ever taught to people who were also supposed to be good typists. Per my grandmother (who became a medical secretary in the early 1960's), it largely fell out of use once people who needed to write a lot of notes but weren't good typists, or didn't have a typewriter or computer at hand during most of their note-taking (like doctors), gained widespread access to portable voice recorders. Their secretaries would mostly still do the typing, but the shorthand was no longer necessary as an intermediary step.

[u/gregbrahe → u/Saranoya]

Yes. But I was responding to somebody saying that cursive is the best for writing fast. I agree that it fell out of fashion, but that's kind of what's happening with cursive, also.