Comments on: Local small business owner appears on Fox & Friends

By: Jess Planck

Jess Planck — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 19:24:30 +0000

Cursive is not the real problem, the emphasis on cursive is the problem. Basic handwriting should include cursive, but the emphasis on it for me was a horrible experience in those K-12 years.

So first I have the teacher in Phoenix, AZ who admonished me continuously for using the devil’s hand (left handed) then I suffered in Louisiana when my cursive wasn’t “pretty” enough. Luckily for me my parents and ONE concerned elementary teacher recognized the signs of dyslexia and kept me out of “special education”.

Cursive continued to thwart my education. When you get grades on essays based on the subjective quality of hand written letter forms instead of the language structure and content it sucks. Even in freaking college I had to discuss the issue with professors and have grades adjusted by argument.

So first, cursive is designed for a right-handed world and discriminates against the left-handed. Second, creating letter forms is an art, therefore subjective (I think it’s called… oh Typography!)

Teach it, YES! Force cursive, NO! I really think the interview was to vague on the subject.

By: Carole Roys

Carole Roys — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 23:47:04 +0000

I’m one of those defenders of cursive Kate mentions above. I think Brian’s recommendation to eliminate cursive in schools is short sighted. There are those who don’t have computers, and children in those homes need a productive way to express themselves. Cursive seems more productive to me, it allows you to jot things down quicker. Removing cursive from the curriculum would further separate those who have, from those who have not.

By: Kate Gladstone

Kate Gladstone — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 01:26:08 +0000

Defenders of cursive should note that even signatures don’t legally require cursive, and never have required it! (Don’t believe me on this one — ask your lawyer! Anyone telling you that signatures require cursive for legal validity has misrepresented the law of the land.)

An even more important thing that the idolators of cursive don’t want you to know or care about — research shows that the fastest and clearest handwriters avoid cursive. Highest-speed, highest-legibility handwriters tend to join only some letters — making the easiest joins, skipping the rest — and to use print-like shapes of letters whose printed and cursive shapes “disagree.”