I still take pride in my penmanship. Remember that word... penmanship?
The c word is repulsive
Geez, of course I know how to write. So does everyone else I know, I'm trying to work out if people are being serious here or if this thread is a wind up.
Antipodean
I'm a middle school teacher and we don't teach it. Some kids have learnt it before they came (not sure if it's at home or elementary school), but many do not seem to know it. Do I care? No, but I may talk to my students about developing their own signature.
My daughter is 10 and last year she was taught to 'flick' her letters and slant them - not actually cursive, kind of like half printing, half writing. It ended up stressing her out and I had to ask her teacher to lay off making that compulsory for all her bookwork. I see it more important that kids can actually print legibly. Because most text will be electronic from now on, what is written by hand just needs to be able to be understood easily, so for me, teaching kids standard printing is more important. I am horrified by the number of kids who come to me forming letters in very unusual ways. And don't start me on pencil grips!
But does a signature actually have to be done in cursive? I think you need to be able to write your name so that the letters are joined in some way, but the point of a signature is that it is unique to you, not that people can necessarily read it. Yes, my signature is happily illegible, but it gets the job done.
Julie
"It's not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves."
~ Sir Edmund Hillary
Growing up in Michigan, we called it writing. The term cursive while used and acknowledged, was not considered proper. I believe printing was called manuscript, but I could be wrong on that.
Elvis Presley was still alive though when I was learning how to write, so there is that.
Having said all of that, I couldn't write a full paragraph right now if my life depended on it, and I am not even sure I could write a sentence. I hated it in school and only did enough to get by.
For those of us who are left handed, writing in English is a contradiction, no different than standardized tests are for people who are AHDH.
We should be writing from right to left, the opposite of right handers, but no one ever thought of that and we have been left to adapt or fail.
Some left handed people turn their hands all weird, others turn their papers sideways. Still others like myself, simply write left to right and usually smear everything they just wrote.
Printing is not much better, and I am not particularly fond of that either.
I can still mostly write in cursive, but would need to review some of the capital letters. If I hand write anything, it's usually with any capital letters printed and the rest of the words in cursive. However, if it needs to be legible, I print it all.
Are we there, yet?
How do people today write birthday cards, grocery lists and love letters?
And Christmas cards....I add a personalized, hand-written note on each card. Printed form letters would be more efficient, I suppose, but then everyone gets the same note instead of what may specifically interest them or redundant comments because they already know about what I would write.
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Legible cursive handwriting is not an option for the computer so no I don't remember how to but i could pick it back up if i had to. I prefer to print or use the keyboard anymore. And my printing tends to be all caps but like you would for sentence structure; first letter of a new sentence or titles that I use a taller capitol letter.
Hip Redux
I do a smatter of cursive and printing. Nothing my 4th grade teacher would be proud of.
The problem is that my brain farts when I sit down to physically write something. Like my fingers want to TYPE the words, not WRITE them with a pen! So not so much a penmanship issue but the physical act of writing is awkward, which is sort of sad. But I can type like a mofo!
delicate flower
I've always had decent handwriting but that is getting harder as time passes since everything is electronic now. If I sit down to write something, I really have to concentrate and take my time so I don't make any errors. I suppose having a lot of meetings at work forces me to keep writing, though since they are my notes I tend to not care about being legible. My penmanship is looking more and more like chicken scratch.
I could not sit down and write a letter in cursive if I had to. I've thought about that and decided it's probably something I don't need to know since I'll most likely never need to use that skill for the rest of my life.
<3
I can still write but will get hand cramps in a hurry.
Can you read cursive? Find and try to read a few old letters written in cursive by folks back in the 40's and 50's when everyone wrote letters. It's tough, I have to study some of the words to figure out what they wrote.
Unfortunately, they (we are serious). I know recently here in Indiana schools have removed the requirement to teach cursive. It caused a big stink. I'm only 28 and I remember cursive, and could probably still do it, to an extent. Seems that handwriting has been and is being replaced by typing. It's all about the all mighty computer now-a-days.
They'll tell you that failure is not an option. That's ridiculous. Failure is always an option. It is the easiest and most readily available option. It's your choice though.
YAYpril - B-Plus
Me too.
My handwriting is a hybrid of print/cursive. I type MUCH faster than I write, though, so that's my preference. Plus, like Gatoreye, my hand cramps up if I have to write too much at a time. I suck at taking notes in meetings. Usually I just doodle instead.
Jess runs for bacon
Wow, I must be different. I hand write all the time. My handwriting is a mix of cursive and print. I would have a hard time with capital letters though.
My SIL and BIL from Atlanta always send us a Christmas card with a printer printed "Merry Christmas, Peter and Stephanie". That's it. Nothing else in the card. And the return address is on a sticker label, of course. I HATE that. So cold and impersonal. Save yourself some money and be good to the environment and stop sending me meaningless cards...
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18 marathons, 18 BQs since 2010
Super B****
This post is making me feel very, very old.
(And yes, I do remember how to write in cursive; I use it more than print. It's faster.)
chasing the impossible
because i never shut up ... i blog