Younger friends, can you write or read cursive? I’m curious.

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  • I learned cursive in 3rd grade, and I've written in cursive ever since. I have mixed feelings about it: on the one hand, it's annoying because when a classmate is gone and they ask to see my notes, all it takes is one look at my notes and then they're like "You have nice handwriting, but I can't read that." On the other hand, it makes me feel a bit like I'm writing in a foreign language because even one of my middle school teachers couldn't read cursive. I also find it a bit aggravating because, especially with class assignments or group projects, I have to write in print so everyone can read it. Personally, print takes longer to write, and my spacing gets thrown off while I'm trying to take notes fast. I do have a question though: for people who can't read cursive - what is it like? I'm only asking out of curiosity. Especially for my friends, I have to write cards and notes and such in print. Do you ever find motivation to at least try to read cursive because of close friends or family? Again, I'm only asking out of curiosity because I've know cursive ever since elementary school.

  • I personally prefer to write in cursive and can read it (cursive) perfectly. Unless it is very messy. I learned how to write cursive in a private school in the philippines but found out my classmates have not been taught cursive in the third grade. They have a hard time reading my handwriting which is usually in cursive. Makes it faster and easier to take notes.

  • Although introduced to it in elementary, I conclusively had to learn it myself. I did so on behalf of the fact that writing cursive allowed me to retain more information when writing notes. I learned cursive the summer of my junior year going to senior year of high school (2017). Now im fluent in writing and reading it!

  • Oh, I remember the days when I had to practice cursive in elementary school, I started to learn how to read and write it during second or third grade. Hard to believe it's considered obsolete nowadays since it's only main purpose know is how to write a signature.

  • I just asked Carolyn to read my pictured handwriting. She occasionally had a little trouble, reading my capital "I" as the word "of" several times (understandable, if you notice the run of "I" and "of" at the beginnings of lines) and she read "significance" mockingly as "significamel" (again, understandable).

  • Via snail-mail the other day, I received a very thoughtful thank-you note from a student. I had to take it out and look at it again because I couldn't remember whether it used cursive. Apart from a few joined letters (notably a non-standard "th" with the crossbar of the t blending in to the downstroke of the h, and a "se" with the tail of the s crossing over to form the upstroke of the e), it's mostly block lettering. The capitalization and punctuation are all correct -- the student is an excellent writer.

    • I do the reverse!😊 My cursive has a few printed letters in it, usually in places where the pen may lift from the paper anyway. None are "block letters", though.

    • I’m going to re-learn it because I’m having a child and I want to teach him. I’m not sure they do it in school anymore

    • I think that most of my handwriting is this sort of "pseudo-cursive" - it takes the most time-saving aspects of cursive, but mostly uses block lettering for letters where it doesn't seem to make as much difference.

  • I am age 30 and was still required to learn to read and write cursive (and in fact required to write in cursive on many assignments when I was in elementary school, IIRC). I do not always write in cursive when I take notes by hand, but sometimes.

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Dennis G. Jerz

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