Comment by cyocum

The shape of the letters is largely irrelevant, the source of motion is the important part. In regular cursive it is the fingers that move the pen. In business penmanship it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.

Here is a video that gets most of the basics right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TWpFsv9Ib0

Here is one that gets it wrong: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vCPPcweLKWQ

The reason why the letters have the shape they do in business penmanship is for legibility and ease of motion. There are several variants of most letters you can choose from. The standard alphabet as given in that book is a very good compromise. The reason why newer cursive hands that use finger movement have a lot of the same shapes as business penmanship is cargo-culting.

I attended French school (I'm not French) and up until high school I was forced to use fountain pens too.

No one is stopping you from using muscular movement to speed up your shorthand even more.

If you use finger movement for shorthand you still have a 30 minute writing limit before you start getting hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome after a few years.

Here's a nice article on some shorthands: https://blog.zdsmith.com/series/shorthands.html

Cursive is essentially just a shorthand. It is just a standardized way of writing fast while sacrificing some readability.

So, yes, now that the world no longer uses crusive that much you might as well pick another standard.

The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.

As one would hope, for a system vaunted to allow hours-long recordings. I mean: if it's a book on shorthand, only legible to court recorders, that's one thing, but this is not that.

I'm starting to appreciate not having digitised notes.

When you can sit down and write out 1,000 words in 30 minites making indexes which you update weekly becomes just another form of revision. This works well for both study and business planning. Less so for emails and instant messages, but each medium for its intended purpose.

It is amazing how much of our education system requires being able to write text by the wheelbarrow when no one today can write more than a thimbleful without hand cramps and wrist pain. Imagine how much people would want to use Facebook or reddit if every like and upvote came with an electric shock. Our education system does that to everyone from age 8 and up when it comes to writing anything down.

My children go to a charter school in AZ and they are only allowed to write in cursive (3rd grade and on). Public school families I have talked to are also learning cursive.

I've seen a suggestion that a signature is now nothing but a signal. An agreed-upon way of communicating "this is serious and binding". Being able to point out that a signature was faked in some cases is a rare side benefit at best.

If papers were signed, then something was agreed upon. A trade performed, a commitment made. If no papers were signed, then it's just idle talk.

What state? His signature style? His illiteracy?

Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Children are tortured in school through forced and constant rote memorisation and this makes most of them hate learning anything in later life.

I feel that your viewpoint on this is that of a naive beta bucks provider’s view of school. Childrens spirit is actually broken , school is a training program in as much so that they accept a life as cogs in the machine. The hours are unnecessarily long , they are forcefully socialised and manipulated to care about what people think of them with praise and shaming tactics (gold stars , 30 sets of eyes on them all day etc.).

In this hellish environment which they will be arrested if they do not submit to and attend - they must submit to authority all day and work. Wear a work uniform. Follow work hours. Do work that could easily be compressed to 1-3 hours per day if it was necessary. But the work they do is about conditioning and breaking them so it is not compressed it is stretched out as far as possible with all sorts of justifications (the parents can’t mind them during these hours because they themselves are trapped in this situation too). The children must also hope that whatever older cog is paid to abuse and manipulate them wont punish them with more home work. This squanders and contaminates the best years of their lives.

I love computer programming and working hard. However it’s undeniable to me that school as it currently exists is not anything close to what your post makes it out to be. I would be extremely hesitant about having children in the future - if they are going to be forced to suffer as I did in school.

How old are you? The rare teachers I remember writing in cursive were very readable.

For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW. If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive styles: https://www.schulschriften.de/html/schreibschrift.html

I find the discussion very weird. I'm from Germany, cursive is taught in class two. There were people in class who never got it, but mostly one or two. I don't get how people can stand writing in printing letters, doesn't it take too much time to essentially stop writing after each letter?

Belgium: the only handwriting i can do properly is cursive (each word is a connected string of curly letters). I often cheated on the capitals because they are a bit grandose curly in cursive. We wrote notebooks full with cursive in different languages, that's how most languages were thought. My 12yo kid was thought exactly the same hand writing but he has to write less because the usage of fill-in books in stead of empty notebooks.

UK: I find all this fascination with "cursive" very odd. I was taught to write indivdual block letters before and in the first year of school, and then like every other pupil, was excited to move on to "joined up" writing, which was (is) very similar, with the letters having small extensions to link them to the adjoining letters in a word, thereby making writing much faster. The way I was taught to write block letters was cleary designed to lead to this - there really wasn't much difference. Reading and writing joined up letters seems pretty normal to me and to my kids.

My handwriting was, and still is, pretty awful but I soon learned to argue that the legibility of one's handwriting is in inverse proportion to one's intelligence, citing doctors as evidence and positing that higher intelligence leads to faster thinking leads to faster writing leads to decreased legibility. Never really had any problems in school (or since) and I will note that when I left secondary education my school still did not have a computer, even in the admin offices. My kids' experience has been very different but with similar outcomes in this regard.

Writing in cursive is common in Italy, and signatures are important, must be legible, and will be scrutinized.

The point is that you almost never see text written in cursive anymore.

For me, I encounter things written in Chinese way more often than I see cursive. I don't know how to read Chinese, but I don't really worry about not being able to.

I could imagine a web page saying "you must be over 50." to enter this page. A capture saying Please read this cursive script and type in what it says...

You said it in a more challenging way than I would but yeah I thought as i read that comment ‘it sure felt like punishment to me’ as I had similar public ‘chiding’ over my inability to improve my handwriting like it was some moral failure.

This was in the 1990s so calculators were common. I was born at the worst time for math education, when calculators and Computer Algebra Systems were becoming common but math education hadn't adapted yet.