Is Handwriting Irrelevant?
Did you see the article about handwriting in last week’s Toronto Star called Handwriting is Irrelevant?
According to the article, computers have made handwriting obsolete.
Students at the University of Toronto and Ryerson couldn’t remember how to form cursive letters… they couldn’t recall how to place the pen to form the letter “I”. No matter, they argued, handwriting skills are essentially irrelevant because the majority of the time, all student work is done on the computer.
Some schools are even doing away with teaching cursive beyond primary grades, and instead teaching more useful skills like keyboarding.
Even so, proper cursive writing still has its’ place in education. Yes, more and more students use the computer for their assignments, but keyboarding skills can’t help when writing exams or tests, or when taking notes in class (not everybody has a laptop!)
You might argue that printing works just as well during exams and for taking notes in class… if you can print what is the purpose of cursive? The answer is that when time is limited, cursive writing is quicker and more fluid because the pen doesn’t leave the page as much as with printing, and there are fewer stops and starts. This means that you can write more during an exam, or take down more of what the teacher said during class.
But, like everything else, practice makes perfect. You’ve got to practice penmanship daily, or you’ll end up with comments about illegibility on your tests.
Want to read more about handwriting? Read our post about neatness here. Read the Toronto Star article here.
I have worked as a typist, and know that skill on the keyboard is sometimes imitated. Nothing wrong with that, but handwriting has its own style and character. My son was a poor writer, a fact reflective of his mental states. Teachers often promised to help but never did, saying “things have changed…etc”. He is now in college and needs handwriting for his covert notes and notetakening. In his ’past life’ at secondary school I felt he was sometimes marked down because the teachers couldnt read his writing. The evidence is coming out as now his papers must be keyed,and the marks are going better…..(sic)
My son is in Grade 9 and absolutely will not take any notes in cursive writing. After learning the basics in Grade 3 there was no requirement from teachers to persue cursive. So, back to printing he went. In grade 8 he had to actually “pay$$” to get copies of notes as he could not get it all copied down during class time. He now is much slower at cursive than printing (lack of practice) and it’s hard to convince him that cursive is the better way to go. Laptops are the “thing” in colleges/universities but they need the skill in primary school and high school to get them there!
Well, I do think cursive writing is obsolete. I was never good at it, and was never forced to do it after grade 5. Printing, however, will never be obsolete, no matter how effective computers become. Coming from a math teacher’s perspective, I could never do all my math on computer.
I was never very good at cursive writing and once the teacher pressure was off (about Grade 5) I went back to printing and kind of developed my own ’attached printing’ that allowed me to write quickly enough to keep up in University, and my note-taking skills became of more importance than my writing. I think stressing the importance of cursive writing in and of itself is pointless. The Neatness and Fine-motor skill, however, that this almost-dead art naturally demanded are what have been sacrificed and need to be retrieved for this keyboarding generation.
i am still in school and think its easyier and quicker to use a pen and paper to make notes and my school bag is havy enough with out haveing to take a laptop plus we have to learn how to make our hand writing legible for our exams . when were in class we have an hour to copy our homework up if weve done it on the computor!!!
what do most of these students do when the electricity goes out? I am glad I know how to write cursive, it is so pretty. Also, cursive penmanship can delineate between capital and lower case letters. I like to know when a sentence ends and starts.
The late 19th / early 20th century forms of cursive writing ARE obsolete. Much of the focus was on style and correctness of letter forms rather than speed and readability. The fastest handwriters do not use a strictly cursive script. They use a combination of block and connected letters. In Austrailia, they recognise this and teach a new form of cursive where the letter shapes are closer to their printed counterparts. Speed and readability is the focus.
I must say that when taught how to write in cursive writing, I never stopped! It is so much faster then normal writing and it is neat. All I use is cursive writing.
I love my cursive writing it’s so pretty and faster then print. I’d rather use my cursive writing then laptop for notes since it’s much faster. I learned in grade 3 perfectly and it was better then the teachers LOL.
Being a teenager who constantly takes notes, I use cursive writing all the time. I can take many more notes much more effectively than printing or even using a computer. With a little practice, my cursive is legible and a timesaver…it also looks pretty cool compared to my friends sloppy printing. I really do think it is a necessity.
As a college instructor, it is absolutely appalling to note the increasing number of students who are unable to take efficient notes during a lecture – because their handwriting skills are abominable. It has become increasingly obvious that these young people are simply unable to keep up with material being presented to them in class. I’m forced to slow down, even during power point presentations, because some of these kids are scribbling everything out in manuscript, rather than cursive.