The problem with you kids today is that you don't write in cursive

[CreekDog]

And the problem is that we don't measure in cubits, we use computers and calculators and not slide-rules, etc. etc.

Cursive writing is not one of the 7 sacraments, last I checked.

Cursive writing is not sacrosanct.

It's to help you write with fountain pens. Who does that? If you actually know someone who does, you are proving my point.

Get over it. Cursive writing has been disappearing for decades now and it's not a moral nor an educational failing that it is. Our access and ability to consume reading materials is far higher now in many respects because cursive is disappearing.

It's not a moral failing or indicative of anything negative.

Do you miss reading parchment? Do you miss reading off engraved stones to get information?

At one point, West handed her a letter she had written with the help of a friend to Martin’s mother explaining what happened. She looked at it but then said she couldn’t read cursive handwriting.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/important-prosecution-witness-returns-in-zimmerman-trial-spoke-to-martin-right-before-killing/2013/06/27/1c26c512-df04-11e2-ad2e-fcd1bf42174d_story.html

[JustAnotherGen]

1. I just want to say

No one writes love letters in paper today.

Even 'Big' in Sex In The City Movie - he copied OTHERS love letters word for word and typed and emailed them to Carrie.

And he was supposed to be in his what? Early 50's right?

Trust me creek - this is not off topic. Love letter etiquette came into play on another thread! It just cracked me up.

[politicat]

2. There are good, cognitive reasons for cursive with regards to language processing.

But the way we teach writing in general is entirely fubar'ed.

Cursive is a whole word system, meaning the brain processes the act of writing in whole word units.

Printing is a letter system, so the brain processes each letter individually.

They both have their place, but young readers need whole word systems rather than letter systems. Thus, we should start out teaching cursive in Pre-K and add print in late elementary (if at all.)

It's also physically easier to develop fine motor control with cursive than print, and cursive uses the whole arm rather than just the fingers. (Also, pencils and ball point pens are the absolute worst instruments for learning to write -- they require significantly more pressure to make contact, which exacterbates the neophyte writer's tendency to clutch up and bear down, which tends to make writing all the more illegible at the early stages which causes the writer to clutch up and bear down further.... Fountain pens and fine-point markers are much better alternatives.)

The problem we have with writing now is that we teach print first with terrible instuments, we don't connect reading and writing well, and just as children are gaining competence with one form of writing, we shove them into another system at the very end of their language acquisition golden years.

We'd be much better served if we would just switch to an italic hybrid system and only teach one system rather than two. Hybrid italics are better for whole word processing, easier on developing musculature, and integrates well into a reading system. Some of our local schools use it, and though the first students who learned it are still only in early high school, the ones who did learn it seem to have consistently higher reading comp and writing clarity skills (when compared to similar students at other schools who learned Palmer Print then Palmer.)

[Orrex]

6. How is cursive "a word system" while manuscript is a "letter system?"

If memory serves, I still had to write every damn letter, and I sure as hell spent hours and hours on pointless cursive instruction learning how to write individual letters.

In the past 25 years I have had no need, desire or occasion to use cursive except for my signature. My ability to read and to write has not benefited in any discernable way from being forced to endure cursive instruction at the age of 7.

To date I have never seen an argument in favor of cursive writing that didn't amount to "I like it better" or "that's how we did it in my day," at least, no argument that didn't equally apply to Carolingnean miniscule.

I'd like to see hard evidence in support of the lifechanging benefits of this outmoded format.

[politicat]

13. How deep do you want me to get into cognitive processing?

Extreme high level - The fact that each letter joins together in the act of writing with a cursive script means that the language processing center (Specifically, the reticular activating system) of the brain treats that series of motion as a single entity for purposes of filtering data -- essentially instead of treating C-A-T as three specific byte of data, it treats "cat" as one byte. In print, there is a physical break between each letter, and that acts as a procedural stutter in language processing, which puts more procedural noise in the system. (This is really well known, 100 level linguistics, and most of the work on the subject was developed in Japan comparing kanji vs katakana vs hiragana.)

For me, it's not a "did it in my day" argument at all (I'm from the generation that got keyboarding instead of cursive -- I taught myself cursive because I found print too slow, but I'm also of the generation where printers were very expensive but still sucked -- think tractor-feed dot matrix -- so still had a need for hand-written documentation with clarity. Also, much easier to write field notes in the rain with paper.) As far as the aesthetic factor... Eh. As long as it's clear.

Your ability to read and write would not be affected because you learned the skills during your linguistic prime whether you used them since or not. Reading and writing are riding a bike type skills -- once you have them, you don't lose the associated skill-set until death or dementia. The question is what happens when a child who is still acquiring language doesn't get one specific skill-set and gets an alternate one instead. (Keyboarding vs cursive, in this case)

The current studies I'm aware of that compare written language acquisition and comprehension between populations of students are being conducted out of the UCCS School of Education and the UCBoulder School of Linguistics. (I'm sure there are more, but this is coffee cart talk for me.) It builds on a study from 2012 out of FIU that used preK legibility as a predictor of academic success and a 2007 longitudinal study that looked at legibility and vocabulary.

The major researcher in the field is Virginia Berninger at UW -- links to her major papers in the field are here: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=virginia+berninger+writing&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart&sa=X&ei=BKHMUdSxE-jSygG9_4CwAw&ved=0CCkQgQMwAA

[patrice]

31. +1 & People don't know that physical actions have physical STRUCTURAL effects upon the neurons

involved in those actions. Different kinds of actions (or experiences) = different kinds of physical/processing patterns (potentiating, actually, or something like forming sets of tendencies) in the nervous system.

One analogy might help: the same piece of music played by 2 different types of artists can be experienced very differently by listeners.

[pnwmom]

38. This is really interesting. Thanks!

[Orrex]

44. Still seems weird to me

Last edited Thu Jun 27, 2013, 06:34 PM - Edit history (1)

If I'm understanding you correctly, we're looking at data gathered today--when cursive is rarely taught in public schools--and we're stacking that against the reality decades ago when cursive teaching was universal. That seems methodologically problematic for a number of reasons, though I don't profess to have the linguistic nor neurological chops to hash it out.

Are you saying that kids today--when they're taught cursive at all--are taught to use it as "word system?" Interesting, perhaps, and it will be even more interesting after we have a dozen or so decades of evidence to compare with the prior system. I look forward to the results.

Additionally, I'm not convinced that any comparison between the neurological impact of teaching different forms of English writing are directly comparable to the impact of teaching different forms of Japanese because the other cultural differences involved are legion. How in the world might we control for one variable while testing another, in that framework?

I also don't know why cursive writing of a word-as-discrete-unit is superior to, for instance, learning to speak a word-as-a-discrete unit. That is, we don't teach infants to say C-A-T; we teach them to say CAT. How do we distinguish between this framework and the framework imposed years later?


I remain skeptical that the "word system" model is so dynamically superior.

Still, I'm not an asshole. If the science is sound, then I say let's proceed.

[oldhippie]

14. Uh, no .....

Cursive is a whole word system, meaning the brain processes the act of writing in whole word units.

Printing is a letter system, so the brain processes each letter individually.

When I learned to write, in both cursive and printing, in kindergarten and 1st grade, in the mid-fifties, there was no such thing as a "word system." Everything was done by letter and sounded out phonetically. Everybody did it that way. Every letter, capital and small case, were written over and over again in drills for hours. One letter at a time. We learned how each letter was to be connected to the next letter in cursive, which varied letter by letter. By the time I finished 1st grade in my first rural school system I could copy from a book and write a whole sentence in cursive, but couldn't read it yet. We were starting to sound out the simple "See Bob run." and "Spot is a dog." in 1st grade.

I never even heard of the "whole word system" until recently.

And yes, I still write letters in cursive, with one of several vintage fountain pens, to my younger (in their 30's) step-sisters and their kids, who are in grade school and can read my cursive. I also keep my personal journal in cursive, in a fine old hand bound leather journal.

Yes, it's a dying skill. And I don't like that it, and so many other things, are being abandoned.

[oldhippie]

19. And that was such a great post ....

.... that for some reason DU seems to have posted it twice!

[politicat]

43. And linguistics has massively improved since the 1950s.

Which means we understand better what is going on in the brain and can therefore apply it to practice.

If you go back to earlier education systems (mid-late Victorian and Edwardian are the ones I've looked at most), written alphabet drills were an early and limited part (and were dependent on the writing method being taught -- Spencer vs Palmer). Spencer and Palmer are supposed to move on to whole words after about 30 lessons (which is 2-3 months in instruction time). Oddly, in the 1910s-20s, those drills were massively increased because there as a theory that the drilling would improve English language acquisition amongst the children of non-native/colloquial English speakers. Obviously, once that theory was taught in the teaching colleges, it would endure for decades.

What you were learning was absolutely functional practice, no doubt. What we don't know is if that functional practice made learning to read, write and process written language easier for your cohort. (And we can't find out because that would be proscribed human experimentation.) I don't know which reading system your school used (the 50s were the transition point between the whole language/core words system and the phonics system) but I would suspect that yours was a core words system.

What we do know is that functional practice of skills is absolutely essential, and that is the thing that gets dropped from most modern education. Functional practice sucks -- it's boring, it's repetitive and we all hate doing it because it feels like we never really progress. It's the same concept as practicing scales on a piano, or lay-ups, or basic math drills. (Note that teachers don't especially like doing functional practice lessons either -- students hate them, parents hate them, everyone thinks it's a waste of time -- but they're actually quite necessary.)

Part of the reason you still write is because you got the 10,000 hours of practice in while you were still acquiring language. We've got a few clients in the memory clinic who learned to write between 3 and 5 and we find that they're losing writing much more slowly than math or other, later skills.

[Link Speed]

54. I never learned to write cursively.

And I am past 60 years of age.

I can read it, I just cannot write it. I know what the letters look like, but my hands just will not do it.

[Populist_Prole]

71. I had to and did, but never did it well.

My cursive writing even in HS looked like that of a 2nd grader. Never used it since then other than my signature ( which looks like hell )

[oldhippie]

14. Uh, no .....

Cursive is a whole word system, meaning the brain processes the act of writing in whole word units.

Printing is a letter system, so the brain processes each letter individually.

When I learned to write, in both cursive and printing, in kindergarten and 1st grade, in the mid-fifties, there was no such thing as a "word system." Everything was done by letter and sounded out phonetically. Everybody did it that way. Every letter, capital and small case, were written over and over again in drills for hours. One letter at a time. We learned how each letter was to be connected to the next letter in cursive, which varied letter by letter. By the time I finished 1st grade in my first rural school system I could copy from a book and write a whole sentence in cursive, but couldn't read it yet. We were starting to sound out the simple "See Bob run." and "Spot is a dog." in 1st grade.

I never even heard of the "whole word system" until recently.

And yes, I still write letters in cursive, with one of several vintage fountain pens, to my younger (in their 30's) step-sisters and their kids, who are in grade school and can read my cursive. I also keep my personal journal in cursive, in a fine old hand bound leather journal.

Yes, it's a dying skill. And I don't like that it, and so many other things, are being abandoned.

[aquart]

40. Good points.

[Neoma]

45. I'd rather know short hand.

Taking notes would be a heck of a lot easier...plus instant privacy! I only really need to write my name in cursive and know how to read in cursive when it comes down to it. I only learned half the alphabet in cursive though.

[Ms. Toad]

51. You aren't seriously promoting D'Nealian, are you?

The worst idea ever.

I was completely in your camp completely until you got to what sounds to me like a generic description of D'Nealian writing. They taught that garbage to my daughter. It is much slower to write with than cursive, and adds time to anyone who ultimately does something other than cursive as an adult, so it still ultimately ends up with the student learning two (and sometimes 3) systems of writing: D'Nealian plus at least one of either cursive or printing - I don't know anyone who is willing to accept, long term, the time disadvantage of the neither-printing-nor-cursive system over the one which ends up being a personal long term preference.

And - when the child does move to one or the other, s/he either writes very awkwardly (as my daughter does nearly 20 years later - making many print strokes in the backwards direction) or has to relearn stroke flow, since D'Nelian flow matches neither printing nor cursive.

[politicat]

62. No, not necessarily d'Nealian.

There are several hybrids. I'm agnostic about which one is "best" -- actually, I don't think any specific handwriting format is "best". My MIL is a lower-grades special Ed teacher who works primarily with reading and writing; she uses just about every system invented, depending on the kid. I think the best system is whichever one is most consistent.

I think that all of the systems we have are relatively poor -- they're all non-intuitive, they're all geared towards bad pencils and wretched paper, they all start with too small details when the early practice should be geared towards clear letter formation, they're all regimented, none of them blend with the others (so a kid who moves from one district's standard to another gets dinged for Doin' It Rong which is just stupid) and they all fail to take into account the 15% of the population who are absolutely backwards because we are left-handed.

The "font" I dislike least is the one Montessori uses -- it works fine as print (minus the joining strokes), it scales well (because Montessori starts with 6" high letters drawn on sand tables) and it lacks the ornate flourishes of Palmer, Spencer and Peterson. It's also highly legible for most Indo-European language speakers, no matter their first language.

I sympathize with your daughter -- half the reason I didn't learn cursive (as part of my lessons) is because we moved frequently when I was a child and the districts weren't in sync. D'Nealian isn't bad if it's a consistent, district-wide, system and kids don't move in and out. It's a terrible system if any of those are only partially true. It's also a poor system if emphasis is placed on speed before precision (and given current standards, it's all about speed) or if there are unrealistic expectations of neatness early on. On the other hand, my nephews' district uses d'Nealian, and it seems to be working for both boys. One's in 1st, one's in 6th; for their ages, they write well and quickly, but they have never known anything else.

[Ms. Toad]

68. We're not going to agree about D'Nealian.

My opinion is that it is about the worst idea to hit elementary school education since new math. If the other italic printing styles are similar I expect I would find them equally offensive and a waste of time. Merely eliminating cursive and focusing on creating an efficient and crisp printing style would have been a far better idea than doing cursive (the slant and extra flourishes) that isn't really cursive (because there are breaks between the letters).

And that is coming from a former teacher, with a daughter whose entire K-12 education was in the same school system. She has no effective or particularly readable longhand writing style, and I blame that almost entirely on the D'Nealian fad - for the same reasons I blame a fair amount of math illiteracy in the 70s and early 80s on New Math: Fad chasing, the long term implications of which were not well thought.

[politicat]

70. I don't think it's a reasonable system, I just don't think it's the script of Satan.

For some kids, it IS a workable system, just as New Math was a workable system for some kids. (New Math is better for students with strong reading and abstraction skills, while arithmetic emphasis utterly fails with a lot of kids who have test anxiety.) I don't think the problem is so much any specific system as the fact that we have too many kids per classroom, too few hours, too little time for supervised practice (of anything) and too few resources for functional individualized educational plans.

There's no real reason at every child in a district needs to learn the same handwriting system -- it's just cheaper to buy one instructional system and hope everyone can get to a degree of competence.

The cheapest system is currently one of the stick and ball systems, which don't work well on the cognitive level because of the procedural stutter, and frustrate the kids because just when they're starting to get competent and find their own writing aesthetically pleasing, they have to start over with an entirely new system. No wonder penmanship is consistently considered the worst subject. The systems as they exist set students up to fail.

There's a comparison of the major systems here: http://www.cep.pdx.edu/samples/compare.pdf
Getty-Dubay fits all of the cognitive parameters for a functional system, but I don't know if it's in wide enough use to provide a functional data set.

[Ms. Toad]

72. New math is not a different system for teaching math

It was intended to be a fundamental transformation of the mathematics curriculum.

New Math moved theories which are absolutely essential for advanced math (sets, matrices, non-decimal number systems, and boolean logic, primarily) into elementary school - where they were watered down enough so that they could be taught by often math-illiterate elementary school teachers, virtually none of whom had enough advanced math (Calculus and beyond) to understand what the heck these things were good for.

So rather than teaching the fundamentals of beginning mathematics, elementary school teachers began teaching these theories by rote - with absolutely no appreciation of what they might ever be needed for. This meant they were incapable of teaching them in a way that was anything other than a waste of time. To be honest, even most of my peers at the high school level, did not understand the power of these simple theories and could not do them justice.

It has all but vanished, aside from nominal mention of each of the primary theories in a standard math curriculum - which are still being taught by teachers who mostly don't have a clue what or why they are teaching. So - I'm not sure what you are thinking of, but (as a former math teacher with two degrees in math) I can tell you that it isn't New Math. I was subjected to New Math via a workbook my parents bought, and imposed on a teacher with no more than a high school education in the 60s, when they realized I was gifted in math. And my first years teaching in the late 70s & early 80s were spent trying to rescue some of the last of its victims.

As far as handwriting - Getty-Dubay looks less offensive than D'Nealian, but since the cursive version isn't really cursive, I see no reason to add the complexity (and time).

[LWolf]

52. Agreed.

Cursive also helps with the letter reversals common to younger students and older students with visual processing problems.

"Hybrid Italics;" is that like D'Nealian, or?

[politicat]

63. There are half a dozen methods that fall under hybrid italics.

Barchowsky Fluent handwriting, Getty-Dubay, French school script. Montessori script. Getty is considered one of the easiest for children to learn; Barchowsky is what's recommended for adults who need to re-learn to write legibly.

Also, according to my MIL, pretty much any italic serif font can be translated into a functional handwriting script if the child's motor control or intellectual abilities won't allow for using one of the standards. (She's special Ed with an emphasis on language disorders.)

[LWolf]

73. When I taught younger kids,

I used D'Nealian or a similar alphabet. It made the transition to cursive easier.

I teach middle school in a different state these days. I've noticed that my students don't form their letters in a standard way; those that struggle with printing (very few of them know cursive) don't start at the correct place on the line, and they don't flow logically. Also, most of them struggle with the difference between a capital and a lower case letter. I'm told it's because, in the current era, penmanship is given less time and focus than preparing them for reading tests.

Last year, it was announced in our district that primary teachers would go back to teaching penmanship more directly. They've chosen a ball and stick alphabet.

[duffyduff]

60. The kids don't have the fine motor skills in pre-K to do cursive yet

You have it exactly backwards. Your system would never work.

[politicat]

61. Montessori does it all the time. They start with cursive in pre-k.

We don't have it backwards. It takes no more or less fine motor control to do this


than it takes to do this:


http://www.montessoriutah.com/why-cursive-first/

Next time you're in the company of a small child, give the kid paper and a marker (not a pencil or crayon -- those take more pressure to use effectively, and thus, take a long time to learn to use). Watch the child's arm, not hand. Note that a child should naturally use zir elbow and shoulder to draw. Zie will make fluid, complete movements with purpose; zie will start and stop very close to where zie wants to make the mark stop and start. (Technique is not motor control, after all.) Those are the same movements for writing. (Writing from the fingers is unnatural and actually a sign of poor teaching, but that's for another day.)

Admittedly, for the first year a child writes -- be it print or cursive or a hybrid italic or kanji or Roman script hand -- zir script will be shaky and uneven. That's technique, not motor control. I'm a first year knitter. My scarves are uneven and shaky and badly counted and my tension sucks. It's the same concept, except I'm not in pre-K.

Also, do recall that many children start violin and piano lessons at 3; bowing and fingering take as much fine motor control as writing. Then there are the kids who can manage the DVD player (or the Kinect or the Wii) by 2 or 3. And blocks, Lego, beading.... If a child has sufficient control to pinch a cooked bean and convey to zir mouth, zie has sufficient motor control to begin cursive or kanji or Arabic script. Will zie be perfect first time? Nope. But nobody is.

[MineralMan]

3. What's coming next? The Metric System?

The center cannot hold. All is lost. We are well and truly damned.

[TrogL]

4. Whadja mean "kid"? I'm 57 and I can't write cursive. I can barely print.

In grade 6 my typing speed was 120. I broke typewriters.

[randome]

11. Whoa! I never reached 120 wpm. I can do 80.

I'm reminded of something Mitch Hedberg said: "I type at one hundred and one words a minute. But it's in my own language."

[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]I'm always right. When I'm wrong I admit it.
So then I'm right about being wrong.[/center][/font]
[hr]

[TrogL]

57. I can type faster than I can think

Makes for interesting output

[OneGrassRoot]

20. I'm with you. I won cursive awards WAY back in elementary school...

(I'll be 50 soon), but after typing for decades (130+), I can hardly write anything -- legibly, that is. I'm pathetic, really.

[lumberjack_jeff]

5. screw cursive.

[font color="black" size="4" face="Comic Sans MS"]Use Comic Sans when you want that dextrous, fine-motor, whole-word look. It's close enough.[/font]

[GObamaGO]

8. Comic Sans needs to go right along with Cursive

Banish them both

[aquart]

42. And conceals all personal information.

I thought handwriting analysis was up there with gypsy fortunetelling and then I went to work for an analyst and learned a little.

Since then I've been shocked at how reliable handwriting is for learning about people and situations.

[Buns_of_Fire]

47. I'm a Blackadder fan, myself.

Not that I'd dare use it in any kind of "official" correspondence, unless I'm feeling like a pirate that day.

But I DID use it to replicate the actual fax cover sheet that Ben Franklin used when communicating with the other founding fathers.

[Demoiselle]

7. Old Left-Handed person here.

For some reason I never had any problems with it, although I've been told many Lefties had to twist their hands over the words, smearing the ink, back-slanting the letters, etc.
The only time I use it now is on thank-you notes and birthday cards. But I can understand the theory that cursive does help us, very early on, to think and "see" words as a whole.

[johnp3907]

9. Ever try Russian cursive?

A lot of it just looks like a line of "u"s.
http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Russian+cursive.+It+says+%D0%B4%D1%8B%D1%88%D0%B8%D1%88%D1%8C+-+you+are+breathing_7153ac_4348295.jpg

[CreekDog]

10. In Russia, cursive tries you!

[johnp3907]

17. Good one!

[Aerows]

27. In Russia, Cursive sentences you.

[madrchsod]

12. 65 and never could write in cursive.

[pipi_k]

21. If he

were alive today, my dad would be 88 and likely still printing in his own neat, precise style.

Not that he never learned how to write in cursive, but he just preferred to print. His printed letters were works of art in themselves.

[FarCenter]

16. Why didn't she write in whatever script she writes in? Or doesn't she write at all?

[JI7]

22. i'm guessing she wanted something that looked nice

cursive usually looks more nice and personal. and maybe her writing isn't that well to begin with.

also we know she is 19 and still in high school so she may have some learning difficulty . look at how she is being criticized for not speaking well on the stand.

but one thing i notice is that she is very much aware of her limits so i can easily see her asking someone else to write a letter. especially the his mother.

[CreekDog]

24. no matter her reading and writing skills, what matters is that she is a witness to what happened

i think it's presumptuous of you to suggest that she needs to perform or do things to meet a threshold established by you.

she doesn't.

[FarCenter]

36. To enter a writing as evidence, you need a witness to testify that it is genuine and unaltered

If the purported author of the writing cannot read it, how can she testify that it is what she intended to write or have written?

[LiberalAndProud]

18. Here, let me help.

http://www.myfonts.com/search/Cursive%20Fonts

[Mosby]

23. cursive is much, much faster than block printing

That's why it was developed.

If you want to write slow though by all means write in block letters.

[CreekDog]

25. if you want to write fast, you will use a keyboard or other methods

if you want to write slow, you will handwrite.

the speed of cursive vs. printing? who cares. with keyboards and a million other ways to transcribe, handwriting is the slowest of the slow --even the fastest handwriting isn't anything to be impressed with.

[Mosby]

29. and that explains the change in focus.

Better kids learn how to type than learn cursive.

The only issue left though is signatures, I see hundreds per day (due to my work) and sigs of young people are unreadable and not consistant. Some are now just printing their names. Others just scribble something. So much for security I guess.

http://www.bankersonline.com/articles/bhv13n07/bhv13n07a25.html

[CreekDog]

33. it's pretty arbitrary of you to say that a printed signature is less than a cursive signature

it's just reflecting your own biases.

[Aerows]

26. "I can't read and write

in the two forms used in modern day English at 19 years old, but that's okay because..."

I'm curious under which scenario that is okay, because to graduate you need to be able to do both, to enter college you need to do both, and to get a job anywhere above running the fry cooker (not that there is anything wrong with that), and probably even then, you need to know how to at least read it.

[CreekDog]

28. She's just a witness at a trial --she doesn't have to pass your tests

i dare say if you tried to run the jury in a way that discredited a witness if they couldn't read or write, but could speak to what happened, --you'd risk a terrible decision and/or a mistrial.

what you don't say is: "wow, she can't read or write in cursive, therefore she can't possibly tell the story verbally of what happened that night".

if you want to insist on that, it calls into question whether you would even be fit to judge witnesses in this case.

[Aerows]

32. In other words

Well "..."

Doesn't change what she is a witness to, but it will change jury perception of her. I'm sorry, that's a failure of the modern jury system - if you are perceived as rather ignorant, your testimony is regarded as less valuable.

That's just the way it is, and it's probably wrong, but then again articulate people that are illiterate have been found as worthy witnesses.

Your guess is as good as mine how the jury will rule.

[CreekDog]

34. do you see her as ignorant or less reliable?

[Aerows]

35. Ah

But you forget - it doesn't matter what any of us think.

It matters what the JURY thinks.

For the record, however, I think she's rather unreliable, and not just for her inability to read cursive.

ETA: And Zimmerman is guilty is as sin. Let me add that part in, but I want to be clear that I don't think she was all that helpful in establishing that, but it doesn't change the fact that he should have stayed in the damn car and not chased the young man down.

[WCGreen]

30. There's an app for that...

[demwing]

37. I speak cursive !

And am fluid in multiple dialects, damn it.

[Aerows]

39. Damnit demwing

I think your shit is pretty clear, you are fucking right the hell on target!

[demwing]

69. Son of a bitch, thanks a shit load!

it's always nice to hear someone speaking in the ancestral tongue of my mother fucking forefathers

[Aerows]

74. No fucking problem

my damn friend

[Cleita]

41. I write in cursive and no one can read what I write. My penmanship is that bad.

I have to print in block letters or type it on the computer and print it out if I want someone to understand what I'm saying. I have to admit though if someone has a fine hand, it's a work of art. I believe it's an art worth preserving for those who like doing it and who do it well. As far as not being able to read cursive, I think it's closer to the truth to say she probably can't read very well period, a blame I put on our deteriorating education system for not teaching her well, not her.

[Posteritatis]

46. But - but - but - things are different now! That means they are bad! (nt)

[Brigid]

48. Lots of people can't write cursive.

Just ask anyone who has ever tried to read a doctor's handwriting.

[alarimer]

49. The NC state legislature passed a bill requiring cursive be taught in schools.

I think they should bring back the abacus too, while they're at it.

[elehhhhna]

50. schools require you turn your work in over the net now

my 17 y/o HS Senior (straight A student) can't write cursive, and reads it slower than typed text. But she keyboards and texts like lightning. And she can spell, thank god, so there's that...

[Soundman]

53. I guess reading cursive is not needed either, well unless

You care you read the Declaration of Independence as it was originally written, or any other important document penned by our founding fathers.

Just think, after the wing nuts/fascists rewrite history there won't be anyone left to refute what they say, because, ya know... Cursive is on par with the abacus.

There is nothing like a love letter penned in currier, it shows how much you truly care.

[Mister Ed]

55. How are you supposed to write in cursive with your thumbs? n/t

[Raine]

56. Printing is way to slow. I hate when I have to fill out a form with

printing. If I'm sending out snail mail I like to do it fast with cursive. I feel sorry for those that have to take so much longer to print all the letters because they can't write. What a bummer.

[CreekDog]

59. i print, but i began printing because i preferred it

and i had pretty nice cursive handwriting, in high school, when i all but stopped writing like that (i'd been printing a lot, but writing out things like essays) --then i simply printed everything that i didn't type or do on a computer.

[Riftaxe]

58. Waiting for a half literate person

to slowly scrawl out print letters when writing down instructions is annoying as all heck.

[BainsBane]

64. It's a failure of schools

Writing is cursive is faster and more efficient than printing. Students who don't know how to use it are going to be at a disadvantage in essay tests or other situations where they will have to write without a computer, and those still exist.

[CreekDog]

65. i think you are in a 20-years-ago mindset, sorry to say

the idea that we would teach an entire way of writing which is really just for fountain pens, which is harder to read, only to use on essay tests that will soon be on computer, if they aren't already --that's ridiculous.

but where i know that you are completely wrong, is that you blame schools. if most are deciding it shouldn't be taught because there are other things to teach --that's a choice not a try and fail thing.

[BainsBane]

67. Essay exams are still given in college

You still need to write essays for a variety of standardized tests. We aren't in a purely digital world.

[Auntie Bush]

66. I think Mr. West knew she couldn't read cursive and

deliberately tried to make her look stupid...therefore less credible. That was mean and nasty.

[Dale Neiburg]

76. How about what the kids themselves want?

Anecdotally, grade school teachers I know tell me that their students are asking to learn cursive.

[djean111]

77. Some cursive is impossible to read. Not everyone perfected writing with the Palmer Method.

I still write in cursive, I love it.
I am in my late sixties.
Just found a charcoal portrait I did of my aunt, done when I was 15 or 16.
My signature was beautiful (IMO and all that!).
As the years have gone by, my signature has become more of a "suggestion" .

A bad thing that happened when I learned to write, though, is that I was born left-handed, like my Dad, but the teachers I had were having none of that. So I use my right hand for writing and drawing, but use my left as dominant for more physical things that I do not think about before I do them, like using tools and playing cards and a very short-lived foray into golfing.

[HockeyMom]

80. I can write in cursive with both hands

but, but it is so difficult to write in cursive. Other things, I use both hands depending on what I am doing. My adult daughter can draw using either hand. Maybe being amby is genetic?

[djean111]

81. Yes, I do think it is genetic.

[HockeyMom]

78. Can you type 100 wpm?

I know Gregg shorthand and used to be able to take dictation at that, but couldn't type that fast. Both printing and cursive is SLOW in comparison to "formal" shorthand.

Yes, I still use shorthand when I need to write something, verbatum, very fast. I used it in law class when we were not allowed to bring in electronic devices by the attorney who did not want to be recorded. "I will PAY you for your class notes", other students said to me. lol No, the professor did not complain about me taking "dictation" by hand.

Print out your notes, or type them, and see who will have better notes. Even better? If you think nobody can read cursive, try Gregg shorthand!!!!! PRECISELY!

Edit: If you do Genealogy, you will be totally screwed if you do not know cursive. Do you think they PRINTED out vital records a hundred plus years ago? Hey, this might open up a whole new occupation. Cursive TRANSLATORS. Can I apply?

[CreekDog]

79. I type 80wpm

but that's faster than your shorthand because anybody can read it, it need not be translated.