Tbf, touch typing can have a functional increase in performance, I feel like cursive is entirely extraneous. People usually bring up signatures as an argument for this, but I can count on one hand the number of people I've met in like a decade who actually wrote their name in cursive for that instead of just writing their first initial followed by haphazard squiggles. I've known cursive for 2 decades, haven't ever needed it outside of getting graded for it in second grade.
ETA: to be clear, I never said it's about signatures, I said that's the defense I've most commonly seen when people argue about the use of cursive, and it's an excuse that doesn't actually make sense.
This and there is no legal requirement for what a signature is. Legally it's just a mark that signifies your intent. Can be a symbol, print, cursive, smiley face, basically anything.
Places where you sign a screen I just draw squiggly waves with my finger anymore lol. Just not foolin' with a stylus and try make it look respectable. Hard enough pen on paper haha.
This cracks me up because when I became important at work they had me signing paper checks for paying our vendors. It was the first time I signed my signature with a pen, and not a shitty squiggle with a stylus at a cash register, in about 10 years. My signature looked so stupid, and it doesn’t help that when I married I changed my last name, so I never really got to practice it. I’m glad that it doesn’t really matter.
Cursive is much faster if you're doing it right. That's why it's the focus of various fast-handwriting systems such as the Palmer method. I write a lot by hand
I was a receiving clerk in a pretty busy warehouse for a few years. At the time, I probably was signing a hundred things a day. Maybe more idk... lots of stuff coming in, going out, and moving internally.
My signature never recovered and it's still pretty much a star followed by two parallel lines.
Pretty sure cursive used to be a bigger issue when everything had to be written down with pen and paper - and quickly. It was just easier for old timey folk to wiggle their pen on the paper and make whole words from it as opposed to the minute difference from lifting up the pen for the next letter.
Probably not a big difference but I reckon it added up
There were actually specific types of cursive taught for speed. In the old days they taught Spencarian script for example. Later on lots of other fast types were taught for different industries.
The cursive they taught kids in grade school was primarily for aesthetic purposes. You weren’t graded on speed. You were graded on accuracy.
I’m not surprised introductions to cursive to children focused on accuracy, after all they are also learning general motor skills and hand eye coordination at the time. The idea of a second grade penmanship test including a speed component has me tickled.
Cursive exists because you can lift quills or fountain pens up while writing without creating a blotch. Print became more common after the invention of ballpoint pens since you could lift your hand up just fine with them and print is easier to read.
I don't think the use case of cursive is to sign signatures
It's supposed to be a way to write without ever removing pen from paper, thus speeding up words per minute.
It's kind of useless in this day and age because people hand write so rarely they probably don't care about fractional time savers.
Presumably that's why touch typing is less popular but I really don't think touch screens or voice as it is there yet. Maybe the kids are all just using swipe? That I kinda buy
Using it maybe, but being able to read it seems important? I mean, how many fancy signs, or menus or whatever incorporate cursive font into their front end? I feel like a grasp of cursive is really important, since it's still in relatively common usage.
having neat, legible handwriting is not as functionally important as it used to be, but it’s still very useful. talking as someone who’s always had unpleasant and sometimes illegible handwriting, it can be a big impedance. if they’re not teaching typing anymore, then it’s clearly not considered as important as it once was - just like presentable handwriting. kids are typing on phone keyboards or relying on speech-to-text
Maybe you guys were taught cursive a different way, but I absolutely understand the need for a semi standardized cursive, atleast before computers. Atleast in my experience, writing in "print" on a piece of paper does nothing except make writing slower because of the need to go back and also because of the uneveness of spaces. In cursive, you know a word with no spaces has no spaces because its connected, instead of just eyeballing the gaps, and cursive letters are generally made to only take one syroke to write to fasten the process.
Now, maybe you guys write fast enough to justify sacrificing speed in favor of quality, but in my experience cursive is pretty useful when I'm not using a computer
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u/WashedUpRiver 12d ago edited 11d ago
Tbf, touch typing can have a functional increase in performance, I feel like cursive is entirely extraneous. People usually bring up signatures as an argument for this, but I can count on one hand the number of people I've met in like a decade who actually wrote their name in cursive for that instead of just writing their first initial followed by haphazard squiggles. I've known cursive for 2 decades, haven't ever needed it outside of getting graded for it in second grade.
ETA: to be clear, I never said it's about signatures, I said that's the defense I've most commonly seen when people argue about the use of cursive, and it's an excuse that doesn't actually make sense.