Utterly Meaningless » Blog Archive » 2 OUT OF 3 AIN’T BAD
  • 2 OUT OF 3 AIN’T BAD

    Filed at 6:08 pm under by dcobranchi

    Death to cursive!

    Gladstone promotes italic cursive, which she says is the fastest, most natural, and most easily readable form of handwriting. It’s also the easiest and quickest to teach children, she says. She also claims it’s the fastest-growing way to teach handwriting: 7 percent of students are learning this method, compared with 1 percent ten years ago. For homeschoolers, that number is 1 in 3, she says.

    Keyboarding (i.e., typing) is a much more useful skill. And since kids in college now routinely take notes on their laptops, who needs the slightly faster speed achievable by writing in cursive. Pecking away on a keyboard will always be faster than any kind of handwriting.

    4 Responses to “2 OUT OF 3 AIN’T BAD”


    Comment by
    RWW
    November 20th, 2007
    at 1:36 pm

    When I was in 5th grade (circa 1990), one of my teachers forced us to do all our work in cursive, and part of our grade depended on having pretty good handwriting. I was a slow writer, and I argued that by the time we were adults, we’d be typing everything, either on typewriters or computers, so why bother spending so much time on perfecting cursive (a type of writing which, by the way, I hardly ever saw even back then and considered unreasonably difficult to read)?

    Needless to say, the public school teacher wasn’t swayed by reason.


    Comment by
    Toni
    November 20th, 2007
    at 1:55 pm

    Well, my older sweet pea always ‘resisted’ learning cursive while homeschooling, although we did go through the basics in 2 different styles. Even his pediatrician had suggested I simply get him on to keyboarding. Cursive and south paws… ?

    However, once in college he realized in short order that some speedy –and legible, lol — handwriting was necessary for writing in-class papers and exams. All to say, ya never know when some gold old fashioned speedy paper and pencil writing will be needed. Practicing once in a while cannot be a bad idea.


    Comment by
    COD
    November 20th, 2007
    at 11:43 pm

    I may have to boycott Cobrabchi.com until this post scrolls off the front page. Every time I see the title I hear Meatloaf in my head.


    Comment by
    Kate Gladstone
    November 21st, 2007
    at 11:36 am

    Cobranchi and all — “Italic cursive” counts as “cursive” ONLY in that some (NOT all) of its letters can join. All its letters look like streamlined fast printing (no “cursive-ish” shapes of letters required), and its writing involves only optional joining (and only the easiest joins at that: joins such as typically appear in very rapid printing.) For instance, an Italic handwriter will often join letter-pairs such as “an” or “on” or (joining from the cross-bar) “to” — and will NOT join other letter-pairs such as “qu” which have to join in conventional cursive.
    “Death to cursive!” makes sense to me — enough sense that you just may wish to check out the “handwriting rebels” page on my web-site. In fact, when I return from Thanksgiving vacation and subsequent out-of-town work (teaching Italic handwriting to four classes of MDs in Pittsburgh-area hospitals), I’ll probably add to my “handwriting rebels” page a link to this blog-entry of yours!