I rediscovered cursive handwriting the other day. I asked around in my school what they thought about it. I looked up articles on it vs print online. Wonder what anyone here might have to say?

________________

My friends and I joke that the hardest part about taking the SAT's was trying to remember how to write in cursive. Most cursive handwriting I've seen are pretty much illegible so I try to avoid them as much as possible. Of course, my signature is in cursive, but then signatures are illegible anyways.

Too time consuming to try and write legible, good cursive. I sometime do a mix of print and cursive. My vowels and "h", I tend to write in cursive, simply because they link well into other letters when taking notes fast, lol.

mine tends to be a weird combination of the two.
the faster i write, the more cursive-y it ends up, and the less legible. >_>

I`ve written cursive in school, and all my teachers said that i have to change, because they couldn`t read it =P
So i had to write in print, but its a pain in the ass because i write very slowly using print.

funny thing about my print writing. It looks very immature. Likely has to do with having been taught to write in cursive at around the third grade. So my print writing skills are about similar to a child's. That's not to say my cursive is very fancy either. But at least when I write in cursive, people can tell I had some schooling.

________________
Sarcasm just doesn't work over the internet.

is cursive an American thing? because i never learn cursive in school.

nope I am not from America and learned it too, not that I'm using it anymore. My cursive handwriting is so bad, that even I am unable to read it, so I switched. I'm even faster doing print now. I don't even write my own signature in cursive.

On a side note, I don't know of any student that writes pure cursive anymore, I've seen some girls that mix it, and it looks really fancy, but the rest just uses standard print... Seems to be a school issue only...

________________
in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

Like Lorska said, cursive is definitely not an American thing!

I had to learn it as well, and I know lots of people who write cursive. It can be done with any language using the Latin alphabet, and most Kyrillic handwritings are solely using cursive.

I belief that, originally, most languages (even those using signs like Chinese or Japanese) had developed some sort of cursive in order to be able to write faster (you can still see it in the form of calligraphy).
It was only after the letterpress was invented that people reverted back to using print.

I personally prefer pure cursive writing.
Even though it can be illegible for anyone except the writer (which may be an advantage if you don't want other people to read what you're writing), it is more fluent and elegant and gives the text a certain cultural note (e.g. French cursive has a different style and origin than the German one etc.)


Last edited by Tripitaka at 6:44 am, Jul 11 2013

________________
"Stories are what death thinks he puts an end to.
He can't understand that they end in him, but they don't end with him."
- Ursula K. Le Guin, Gifts

To be savoured:
- Blood Alone by TAKANO Masayuki
- Otoyomegatari by MORI Kaoru
- Gangsta. by Kohske
- Seishun Kouryakuhon by AKIZUKI Sorata

Ha, that's nonsense. I'm Indian and schools here make it compulsory to write in cursive, though towards the end its a choice based on inability. Here if you pursue a medical degree it'd be foolish to write in print (more like, you'd never finish any assignments) and even all the adults use cursive, with the exception of a few based on inability (or personal dislike).

________________
No matter how messed up you are in your life, just remember that your story is still better than the Twilight series.

I only wrote using cursive for the first 20 years of my life, then one day I switched to print on a whim. The thing is, I still mostly use same letters in print as I used in cursive (I started using different "s" and "F" in print). Anyway, thanks to the switch, my writing became 100% more readable.

How can it be nonsense that I don't know of any students that do so? I don't live in India and at least the people in my uni don't use it...

________________
in need of romance?
uncommon, sad, sweet

I've been using a combination of print & cursive for 25+ years now - for me it's faster to write and easier to read than "pure" print or cursive. I can write in plain printing if I think about it, but it's hard to not join certain letters; writing correctly in cursive is just about impossible for me unless I'm looking at examples of how the letters are supposed to go. :^/

My older boys are 17, and though they had to learn cursive in school (3rd-4th grade, I think?) they never use it.

________________
"[English] not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, can.general, March 21, 1992

Like popetaffy, my handwriting also tends to be more cursive as I write faster, but remains a combination (I don't write "b" in cursive as it looks too much like a "f" etc). My first elementary school required everyone to learn cursive, but my second did not. None of my teachers from then on required cursive, and would much prefer print because it makes it easier for them to grade essays. Personally, I can't read cursive well, but I like the aesthetics of cursive writing, it's just a lot harder to decipher (for me even my own handwriting).

________________
Nulla in mundo pax sincera
"Always go too far, because that's where you'll find the truth." - Albert Camus

Here, everybody is first taught cursive handwriting in elementary school; it is also mandatory to write with a fountain pen. You would only be asked to write in print if your handwriting was completely illegible.
My handwriting is almost completely cursive, and I prefer it that way; it's faster, and I rarely have trouble reading cursive handwriting.

________________