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encomiast 6 hours ago

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive

As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

jdshaffer 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question:

The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.

The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.

BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.

WalterBright 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.

__d 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.

For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.

I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?

WalterBright 2 hours ago | parent [-]

If I say "people have two legs", someone is bound to reply "My friend Bob has only one leg."

encomiast 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.

__d 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.

WalterBright 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.

remashedspood 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And I strongly disagree.

The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.

And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.

Different strokes

topgrain2 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)

DangitBobby 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22

throw4847285 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?

I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.

Larrikin 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Do you acknowledge you're a minority?

I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.

But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.

shagie 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

robcohen 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

customguy 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.

tazard 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example.

What is the downside of learning cursive?

encomiast 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...

I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.

Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.

customguy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I just like it, the same way you hate it. If disliking it is valid, surely so is liking it?