Hmm. I learnt to write cursive in the second grade, in Long Beach Mississippi. That means I only wrote in print for one year. I don't print at all now. I write cursive, and if a form says to print, I will write in cursive using an as legible hand as possible.

Printing dulls the mind. I fully agree with that article. Writing in cursive is as much of an art and other forms of art, and should be taught as such.

If cursive writing is abandonned, then I think everyone in school should learn to write using calligraphy. It's so much better than block letters.

Cursive writing may be 17th century and all that, but it still has a place in education in the 21st century.

Elia

Interesting, thoughts thru fingers to paper back to memory. It works. I write a shopping list, forget it at home and still bring home all or most items. I type the shopping list, forget it and forget it. Never fails.
DD Linda is left-handed, in second grade her teacher remarked: "Oh, that is too bad, you will always have horrible hand-writing." She didn't know how stubborn Linda was. She practiced cursive writing whenever she had a chance, drove me crazy. she wrote on paper, on the wall, on her lamp-shade. I took pencils away from her unless she had paper to use for practice, and she discovered that her toy-cutlery from the doll-house left marks, so she practiced. She has beautiful handwriting! Even now, at 54.
PS she doesn't write on walls any more ;)

I remember that cheap paper we learned to write cursive on. It was greenish & had a deep green line for you to writer on with a dotted line halfway up the line as a guide for where the small letters were supposed to hit. I may have learned the Palmer method, but I really don't remember if that's what it was caused.

One thing I will always be grateful to my second grade teacher for is that she taught me the proper way to turn the paper because I'm left-handed. It's the opposite way a righty turns the page & keeps me from having to drag my hand over what I've written, or alternatively, to have to crunch up my hand to write like DH (another lefty) does.

I'm sorry to hear that kids aren't being taught to write properly. There are times when a typed message just isn't proper - like when you're writing a thank-you note.

I am glad I am the age I am, most of the time. I got the opportunity to sit at a sleigh desk, with a proper inkwell. Once a week we put aside the fat pencils and out came the bottles of ink and a lot of admonitions about the punishments we would have bestowed upon us should we be messy, careless, or bratty with ink. I wonder now if the parents had any advance warning we would be armed with ink on a specific day, because back then the little girls wore dresses to school........not jeans and tees.

The pens were orange, and had slits on the nibs to hold the ink......no bladders to fill and certainly no cartridges. I cannot remember one mishap that year with the ink, save some purple fingers.

No more sleigh desks. No more inkwells. No more dip pens. Now,no more cursive? The best of the best were then tacked above the chalkboards to set examples for the rest of the class, and for proud parents to see during the parent visiting days.

By the time we'd outgrown penmanship classes, and were turned loose in the adolescent population, all the careful training was ignored for little girls who dotted the i with a circle, pink ink, slanted their letters backward and the omnipresent pencils. Teachers often specified that compositions be done in ink to teach us to think things through before we scribed them down. I threw many papers away because I tried to get through without a rough draft and then couldn't erase. Yes all the papers were graded for writing and messy ones, no matter how correct, had points deducted for bad spelling and messiness. Oh Good grief, can't you imagine if that happened today? There'd be parents up in arms.

My grandson learned cursive just a few years ago on the same lined paper I used to use. All the schools here teach it and we are in a very progressive school district.It's hard to believe that they've stopped teaching handwriting in some places. Jan....are they teaching down there in Maryland?

Last I did was 2 practice and review classes a week. Not nearly enough time to train the eyes and muscles for a new skill. In the upper grades 4 and 5 the purpose is to get the size of the letters small enough to fit on the filler paper. Cursive is started mid year second grade then continued in 3rd grade, and I think that is too soon. Nothing is done in middle school, but the teachers complain that the writing is horrible and wonder why 'we' don't do a better job of teaching it.

Handwriting is an art just like constructing a great sentence, but the curriculum is so packed the only art practised is 'the art of getting done'.

I don't miss it, but I do miss the daily interaction with the kids.

Jan, who is enjoying being on the other side of the desk and found out she still has test anxiety but got 91% on the first big Anatomy and Physiology test... GAK!!!!

An officemate says that her son graduated high school 7 years ago and did not know how to sign his name (as in signing a check!). He couldn't write in cursive, and couldn't read it. She worked with him for a couple weeks so that he could read it, write it (barely) and sign his name for legal purposes. She was apalled that he had gotten that far and didn't do anything but print. It would never have occurred to me that cursive was something that should be checked up on. Apparently it is.

Ell,

I find that astonishing! Didn't we all go through a "what is out signature going to look like" phase? Trying out different ways to write it?

DD likes to try writing her name in cursive and the printing they teach the children here appears halfway to cursive, called Denelian.

I had lettering and calligraphy classes throughout college and enjoy using ink and nibs, but my everyday writing is in block caps. I think I was infuenced by my dad who was a draftsman and always wrote that way.

I'm in school administration, but my office is no longer in an actual school building. The article was a surprise to me! While talking about it with acquaintances, one mentioned that her 7th grader had been taught cursive in third grade, but her younger child went though 3rd last year, and was *not* taught cursive.

I can't help but wonder what these kids will do about writing grocery lists, signing credit card slips, or general life should there be no electricity for an extended period of time! Do kids still take notes in class? What happens when the battery dies - do they tell the instructor ooops- I don't have notes for that class?

lilod- is our memory connection to handwritten information due to having had to *write* class notes? Is there a slight chance that if one learns from typed notes, then one's memory will adjust to that form of information input? I foresee some interesting social studies in another decade :)

Marda, It's nice to know that the paper with the dotted line in-between the straight lines still exists somewhere.

And Suzy, LOL! I remember the girls who started dotting their "i's" with big circles, or worse yet, little hearts!! We also had a trend toward colored ink - purple, green, etc. Was that our attempt to express ourselves?

And try to find a fountain pen today! With the exception of the incredibly expensive brands like Mont Blanc or Waterman, they seem to have totally disappeared.

...in our parochial school we were taught cursive while balancing a penny on our wrists. If the penny fell off the nun was there to give you a swift crack on the knuckles with the ever handy ruler. Fountain pens ... haven't used one since the debut of the Bic ! Does anyone write letters to friends anymore or is it all by email ?

Peace

I do. Write honest-to-G letters with pen and paper; not a fountain pen, rollerpoints are so much better.

I have a good many friends who are not on-line; a letter can be written in stages, and they tell me they look forward to getting the missives. I suspect any mail that isn't advertising, gimmees, or bills is a pleasant surprise.

My Jr. High fountain pen was pink...the color I now like like least. I always had a wide tip on it and used turquose ink....sigh. Pink pen and Elvis...what more could anyone want?

Followingup on Lilod's point re handwriting vs typewriting for remembering, I completely agree. I redo my address book every few years. One year I typed it all neatly and it took me twice as long to locate a number. The old book had names/numbers crossed out and rewritten, info added up side of page, several colors of ink, arrows and underlinings. I could instantly locate what I was lookng for, though. Sometimes just visualizing the messy page jogged my memory and didn't even have to use the book.

Fortunately the newly typed pages soon had handwritten additions/corrections...LOL I've since gone back to handriting my new addressbook. josh

There is something really special these days about geting an honest-to-God handwritten letter. I still have one or two friends who communicate in this manner and while our correspondence isn't nearly as frequent as those I maintain via email, it just seems more special.

I too cherish a hand written letter or postcard. I save them as I do photographs.
This topic sure has a sense of the generation gap. It reminds me when I went to Office Depot asking if they had any sealing wax. The young person helping me asked me if I wasn't mistaken and should be in Home Depot. She thought I wanted some product for ceilings. Poor thing looked at me as if I had three heads when I explained what sealing wax was and how it was used on envelopes!
~di

Did any of you learn the art of Spencerian handwriting? It was beautiful. Had to do our bookkeeping practice sets with the dip pens (fine point nib) and only allowed to use the red pencil to draw the single and double lines under the columns when you totaled them. (Sigh) I miss the beautiful penmanship we had before computers took over.

Mary

I believe the computer has taken the place of handwritten letters. During the winter months when I want to write one of those long journals I take up lined (yes, lined) paper and one of those fine tipped Pilot pens and scribble away. It is so nice to sit out in the nice warm kitchen and listen to the scratching of the pen across the paper. My wife and I have been married 54 years. I have never seen her write a letter. Different strokes for different folks. Steve in Baltimore

I learned Spencerian in the graphics portion of one of my art classes. I can remember thinking that it was lovely, but time-consuming - which gave one plenty of time to consider just what was being written. I often wondered if the elaborateness was a result of the time taken to actually think about what you wrote.

Here is a link that might be useful:

My mother had beautiful handwriting and even now when I read something of hers I can see her right here with me. As for my own; Hardly anyone can read it. In high school I had a left-handed boyfriend and I used to copy his style of writing and made pretty good marks on written compostions. In 5th grade I could have skipped an entire grade but my handwriting was so bad it held me to my own.