Saturday, December 24, 2011

Should Cursive Be Saved?

Should Cursive Be Saved? 

Since my father around 1930 had won the best marks in the State of Washington in both Cursive and Mathematics when I was about 8 years old in 1956 he would sort of torture me to be as good a cursive writer as he was. This only made me cry because I had already been forced to be right handed even though I was naturally either left handed or ambidextrous. So, for whatever the reason my right hand was not ever very good at cursive handwriting. I had the most trouble in keeping my slant the same in all my writing so my slant in my writing would change throughout the page. Then when I tried to minimize slant change I would not be able to keep all the bottom letters in a perfect line across a non-lined page. So, eventually I just gave up unless the teacher (or my Dad) demanded that I write perfectly. So, by age 10 or 11 I started hand printing everything so other people and I could better read my writing. What is interesting to me is that I was always very good with tools and other aspects of building houses and cars and stuff like that regarding dexterity and co-ordination but cursive writing was just never my strong suit, just spelling because I always had sort of a photographic mind and could easily remember long speeches and was able to give them in front of 100 of more people quite easily by age 10 or 12 years of age. When I went to college I got an A in my Speech class. 


Now back to the issue. Should Cursive be saved? I think the answer is sort of "Yes" and also "No". What I mean by this is that Cursive is important if you don't have computers around. What happens when you can't have a computer or an Ipad around? What if you only have paper to communicate through at a distance with others? You know, letters sent by the postal service, UPS, or Fedex or others?


What are you going to do then? So, you either need to learn to print your letters or do cursive. Though I can do both I prefer to write if I'm not on a computer by printing my letters fast when I take notes like in College courses or other courses one tends to take in life. Even at conferences it can be easier to just bring a notebook than to bring an electronic media that just might go down and lose power and all your information and then you might lose all your electronic notes. So, should you learn cursive? It just depends upon how prepared for any kind of situation you want to be?

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