If you were ever told or were made to learn cursive writing when you were in grade school.
I wanna see how many of you suffered like I did.
“Oh , you need to know this. Everything in high school needs to be turned in In cursive.”
“Everything you write in university has to be in cursive”. -high school
“I don’t give a shit as long as I can read it.” -university
“THIS ASSIGNMENT MUST BE TYPED” – University
Ok, so I’m a college professor, been teaching for more than 5 years, have had *does quick math* about a thousand students, and graded approximately 1800 hand-written exams and assignments.
I dread when students write in cursive, because I can almost never read it.
And I remember when I learned cursive in elementary school, and the loops and arounds were inefficient and I didn’t like them but I was told that I had to learn it because “cursive is standardized writing so everyone will be able to read what you write.”
THEY LIED.
They teach us to write in cursive.
But they never teach us to read in it.
And then we never use it except for signatures.
What is the point of cursive? Does anyone know?
Before the ball point pen was invented, writing with quills or fountain pens means that lifting the pen from the paper and then putting it back down was courting an ink blot. When you’re proficient at it, it’s also faster than printed letters. Because of this, for a long time it was culturally considered the proper, adult way of writing. A neat cursive hand was a saleable skill! Not just anybody could copy over a manuscript well enough to make it worth spending money on, or take down somebody else’s dictation in a way that’d be readable and usable.
It’s still useful for purposes of research! We’ve had a bunch of students doing research in the library who’ve been stymied by their inability to read cursive script. Which is pretty notable considering that hand-written documents–letters, diaries, lab notes, recipes–that date back only a couple of decades are still often written in cursive, so it’s a really sudden and still pretty painful gap.
But it looks like the time is not long in the future when the cursive alphabet will become primarily a historical artifact, a dead knowledge preserved mainly by specialists for niche purposes. Kind of interesting to watch it happen.
