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this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2023
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Harder to do? The whole point of cursive is for easier writing. Writing print by hand is what makes no sense. It's more legible, but print is called print for a reason.
On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be a standard for cursive in the US. When I learned to write in 1st grade in my country, there was an official cursive alphabet and everybody learned the same one. But my daughter started learning cursive now in the US (3rd grade) and because the letters she's learning are very different from the ones I learned, I looked up what American cursive looks like. Every single source I found on the subject had a different alphabet.
Whichever cursive my (US) schools taught all those ages ago was cumbersome and nonsensical. Nothing about it was easy.
Going by the feedback from Americans in this thread, cursive is "fancy-pants writing" so yeah, if your teachers were of the same mind they probably prioritized teaching whatever they thought would pair well with a powdered wig (basically calligraphy) rather than whatever would be quick to write and easy to read.
As someone who lives in a country where cursive still dominates handwriting styles, I find all these discussions... curious. As a country you managed to lose the ability to handwrite efficiently, and as far as I can tell it's because of conservatism missing the point of cursive.
Well, it's also not like we have to hand-write anything these days.
We don't hand-write more than Americans, yet we use cursive. And today's young adults still spent their entire childhood/teenage years hand-writing at school (and even though kids today have more computers in classrooms, they don't use a keyboard for everything, nor do I think they necessarily should).
So at least for that phase of life, writing quickly and efficiently is still a worthy goal. You can write however you want of course, but so many people choosing to let go of cursive tells me that it wasn't taught properly.
But yeah once you're out of the school system you might as well write everything in capital letters (that's definitely my go-to on paper forms to spare others the chicken scratches I use on personal notes).
From 7th grade onward I believe we were able to ensure that the school had to legally accept typed assignments. It was the only way I could complete them on time.
I was fine with handwriting math since no sadist had yet invented cursive numerals.
Good for you that your school was willing to adapt to your needs, but surely that was not the norm for millennials when they were in school. I never went to school in the US but I don't believe that classroom activities (tests, note taking, exercises, etc) were normally done on computers in the 90s/00s/early '10s...
So why did those kids stop using cursive, at a time when hand-writing was frequently needed? My point is that it can only have been taught wrong if it was not legible or fast enough for most kids to see a point in using it.
Or perhaps it's not actually needed.
I think it's the same reason that not everybody learns horse riding or basket weaving.
That was my experience too