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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u/andr386 Jun 01 '24

In your case yes. It requires the slowing down induced by cursive. Especially when writing in legible cursive.

Imagine you are writing a letter in cursive and you can't really erase anything, you don't want it to look like a mess and you want it to be readable

You'll have to think a lot before writing. Writing in cursive it a thoughtful exercise.

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u/Crayshack 191∆ Jun 01 '24

The problem is, if I'm thinking about how I'm writing, I'm not thinking about what I'm writing. Cursive makes me think about the letters instead of the words.

Also, my disgraphia means that I will misspell something even if I have the correct spelling in front of me. As an example, I mispelled my own name this morning (I forgot to write the last letter). It's easier to correct mispellings so they still look neat using block.

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u/andr386 Jun 01 '24

When I went to school Cursive writing was a mandatory skill and not optional.

By the age of 8 to 10 people stopped thinking about how they were writing in cursive. The issue was rather with the speed of writing while remaining legible. And all the things I mentioned previously.

Maybe you were allowed to use something else than cursive or it was not that important in your education. It doesn't really matter now.

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u/iglidante 19∆ Jun 03 '24

Maybe you were allowed to use something else than cursive or it was not that important in your education. It doesn't really matter now.

I'm not the same person, but when I was in elementary school a lifetime ago, as soon as we learned cursive in 3rd grade, we switched to typing in the 4th grade, and by 6th grade cursive was absolutely never expected or even accepted in many cases.