Posted on 08/04/2009 3:17:55 PM PDT by Borges
I can't remember how to write a capital Z in cursive. The rest of my letters are shaky and stiff, my words slanted in all directions. It's not for lack of trying. In grade school I was one of those insufferable girls who used pink pencils and dotted their i's with little circles. I experimented with different scripts, and for a brief period I even took the time to make two-story a's, with the fancy overhang used in most fonts (including this magazine's). But everything I wrote, I wrote in print. I am a member of Gen Y, the generation that shunned cursive. And now there is a group coming after me, a boom of tech-savvy children who don't remember life before the Internet and who text-message nearly as much as they talk. They have even less need for good penmanship. We are witnessing the death of handwriting.
People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that's not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven't learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. "Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore," he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at time.com ...
Finally, TIME has met its level of competence.
I gave up on writing... been typing since 1960.... :-)
So do I. lol
The other day I went to write a check, and had to think about it for a second. It was the first check I’d written in years.
http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/cursive/animation/uppercase.htm
a refresher for everyone!
Alexander McCarter sounds insufferable.
Our kids hunt-and-peck on tiny keyboards, and, instead of actually playing the guitar, hit large colored buttons on a plastic simulacrum of a guitar. Meanwhile, Japanese and Korean and Chinese students study extremely intricate calligraphic techniques, training their hands, their eyes and their minds to deal with complexity.
Kiss it all bye-bye, America.
Yeah... who carZe?
The last major amount of writing I did was in college in a russian language course. The vast majority of everything I did in english was typed. That cyrillic messed up my english cursive for many years.
My 3rd grade teacher mourned the death of handwriting!
My 5th grade teacher had to go to the 4th grade teacher to get my papers graded
A cursive capital Z is quite forgettable. So it the cursive capital Q.
I still write in cursive but every once in a while a lapse into printing.
The capital letter “Q” has always vexed me.
Been printing since 5th grade. Maaaaaannnny moons ago.
My cursive is block letters tied together with squiggles.
You ever actually tried to load up Guitar Hero or send text messages? There’s a lot of complexity in our little toys. and I don’t think most of the Japanese, Korean and Chinese kids are really spending a lot of time doing intricate calligraphy. They get computers too.
What a terribly inane and silly article.
I have the same problem with long division. Using a calc for so long, I just forgot how to do the division quickly.
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