School Information System: Dropping cursive isn't a capital idea

December 5, 2011

Dropping cursive isn't a capital idea

There's a debate brewing - mostly via keyboards - about whether schools still need to teach cursive writing to classrooms of digitally wired kids.

I'd be a better defender of beautifully flowing handwriting if my own hadn't deteriorated over the years to a hybrid of cursive, printing, squiggles and shorthand. My wife nudges me out of the way every time we step up to sign a guest book. My lame defense is that I'm left-handed.

Still, I'm glad I learned cursive at Our Lady of Sorrows, my Catholic elementary school where every classroom came with a strip of capital and lowercase letters above the blackboard. Even if a person doesn't write that way very often - thank-you notes and postcards come to mind - it's nice to be able to decipher other people's hen-scratching.

Wisconsin is one of more than 40 states that don't require cursive in their core curriculum standards, though the state Department of Public Instruction doesn't have any data on schools or districts that have actually dropped it in favor of spending more time on other subjects. Cursive may indeed fade away, but who wants to jump first?

What's most important, said DPI spokesman Patrick Gasper, is learning the various types of writing - persuasive, storytelling, speeches and so forth - and not whether it's written, printed or typed.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at December 5, 2011 1:52 AM
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Comments

Define "cursive" writing. When I was learning cursive over 50 years ago, it seemed there was an agreed upon standard. Over the years, it has become obvious, there was no such standard. But writing cursively is really not a goal in itself.

I do remember one embarrassing incident in the late '70s. I had written something so illegible that I couldn't read it, and I had to beseech my friend Beth to decode it -- she was very good at that.

Legibility and speed has become something of an issue. I have tried to rework some of my writing habits to speed up writing and still keep the writing understandable. Some cursive writing now discourages connecting every letter. For example, both legibility and speed suggests that in "gh", there should be no connection, since the tail of the "g" requires a stroke in a backwards direction and a loop motion, and a high stroke at the beginning of the "h". Best to "air pen" and start the "h" separate from the "g".

The letters that are most prone to illegibility are "unread notes" (great acronym).

Another interesting point, at least to me. I found a discussion on how to stroke letters for printing. One set of stroke recommendations are based on how to print while you were on a month-long journey by stagecoach. In this case, one makes each letter with multiple small strokes so that one could build up each letter between bumps and jars, and the clip and clops of the horses' hooves.

Posted by: Larry Winkler at December 5, 2011 5:27 PM