None of my students can read cursive

[ergative]

I have heard that there are worries that the decline in cursive, while not inherently bad, is coupled with a decline in eye-hand coordination, with possible problems for jobs that require this, such as surgeons. I am not in medicine so I cannot comment.

I seem to recall seeing a study in the news some years ago arguing that, since so much surgery involves laproscopic stuff with remote tools and teeny tiny gadgets controlled by controllers, good preparation is to play lots of videogames.

Right--here's the article.

[AvidReader]

I did know cursive and struggled with secretary hand in grad school.  One reason why it's probably just as well in hindsight that I washed out of the PhD program. 

Like cursive, though, it depends so much on the individual hand! Some are a breeze. Others take a lot of effort.

AR.

[Caracal]

As a historian, I do think there is a problem with a decline in reading cursive. I cannot see doing archival work without being able to at least read cursive. Most of the documents that I used in my dissertation were typed, but there were various marginalia and annotations in script, plus hand written documents interspersed. Not being able to read these would have been a big handicap. (And being able to identify one person's script from another is also important.) I don't think that everybody should learn to write and read cursive just so historians can do so, but I do think that reading cursive will have to be taught in graduate school, as a specialized talent such as Spanish paleography: http://spanishpaleographytool.org/

Whenever I go back to the archives after some time away, I spend the first half day in despair because I can barely read anything. After that, it gets better. Some of the handwriting remains pretty brutal. I suspect that I might have an easier time if I ever actually read cursive. I never really could write it despite being taught. I suppose it probably would have been more difficult initially if I'd never been taught? 19th century handwriting has some weird letter formations.

(Especially J's Ps, G's Fs and Zs which all basically look the same depending on the handwriting. Then there's the normal problem of distinguishing between Ls, Es, Ws and Ms when they come in close succession. Once I had somebody named Llewellen and I never figured out that was the name till I saw it in a census.)

I wonder how much someone who had never learned cursive at all would need a class. They might just take a bit longer to get used to it?

[Anselm]

The artistic use of letters is being preserved by street gangs and tattoo artists who are adept in calligraphy.

[mamselle]

You guys should see the liturgical abbreviations that are piled on top of the usual scribal abbreviations in medieval Latin.

Those are enough to make even a grown, trained person weep.

(I did, in fact, the first time I had to deal with them all alone...!)

M.

[onthefringe]

As a historian, I do think there is a problem with a decline in reading cursive. I cannot see doing archival work without being able to at least read cursive. Most of the documents that I used in my dissertation were typed, but there were various marginalia and annotations in script, plus hand written documents interspersed. Not being able to read these would have been a big handicap. (And being able to identify one person's script from another is also important.) I don't think that everybody should learn to write and read cursive just so historians can do so, but I do think that reading cursive will have to be taught in graduate school, as a specialized talent such as Spanish paleography: http://spanishpaleographytool.org/

Whenever I go back to the archives after some time away, I spend the first half day in despair because I can barely read anything. After that, it gets better. Some of the handwriting remains pretty brutal. I suspect that I might have an easier time if I ever actually read cursive. I never really could write it despite being taught. I suppose it probably would have been more difficult initially if I'd never been taught? 19th century handwriting has some weird letter formations.

(Especially J's Ps, G's Fs and Zs which all basically look the same depending on the handwriting. Then there's the normal problem of distinguishing between Ls, Es, Ws and Ms when they come in close succession. Once I had somebody named Llewellen and I never figured out that was the name till I saw it in a census.)

I wonder how much someone who had never learned cursive at all would need a class. They might just take a bit longer to get used to it?

Somehow, this reminds me of Tom Lehrer writing "minimum" on the chalkboard during "The Professor's Song" (about 5:40 in this video)

[Hegemony]

When I was about ten I found an instructive book on handwriting from around 1900 and modelled my handwriting after that. So my cursive still looks very late-Victorian, and I have no problem at all reading 19th-century cursive. Unfortunately I seem to have found myself in a position to need to read 16th-century cursive, especially the hastily written informal type, and that is a headache all right.

[mamselle]

There's a reason it's called "Batard," all right...

M.