Are people losing the ability to write by hand? [POLL]

[Josh (Josh Cohen)]

Article: are we losing the ability to write by hand?

We are far more likely to use our hands to type or swipe than pick up a pen. But in the process we are in danger of losing cognitive skills, sensory experience – and a connection to history

…handwriting is disappearing. A high-school student who took the preliminary SAT used for college admittance in the US confessed to the Wall Street Journal that “audible gasps broke out in the room” when students learned they would have to write a one-sentence statement that all the work is the student’s own, in cursive, or joined-up handwriting.

Polls

Do you know how to write in cursive? (choose one)

• Yes
• No
• What is cursive?

How do you take notes? (check all that apply)

• I use a computer, phone, or other electronic device to take notes
• I take notes by hand on paper
• I don’t take notes

Related

• Are young people losing the ability to read books?
• "How to avoid losing your memory in the digital age"
• Digital Minimalism: "Why We'll Look Back at Our Smartphones Like Cigarettes"
• note-taking
• More polls: polls

[metivier (Anthony Metivier)]

Although the short-term implications for memory are distressing when looked at from certain perspectives…

We would do well to think through how long it must have taken for the brain to turn writing into something that built the mind.

As skeptical and vocal as I am about the single-screen issues for learning and memory, I don’t think we know enough about the development of literacy in the first place.

And what we do know illuminates just how new writing is in the grand scheme of things, not to mention silent reading as opposed to oratory and auditory learning.

So as concerning as “losing” these skills may be, there’s much to be observed about new forms of learning and literacy that are emerging before our eyes.

And much to be learned from what’s happening.

Deprecation of certain skills does not necessarily equate to a “loss.”

And we lose the plot if we try to crystallize the definition of “human” as needing to be some fixed and particular thing.

We never were and likely never will be. Like everything else in the observable universe, we appear to be becoming that which we will become. Pure immanence for the win!

[Goldfish (John L)]

I feel like this piece struggles in the same way many similar articles do. It does a good job of outlining how penmanship and handwriting are disappearing skills among young people (they are!) but then attempts to make some value judgment about how society is better or worse off because of it and really struggles to justify that.

A child who has mastered the keyboard but grows into an adult who still struggles to sign his own name is not an example of progress.

really? a child who has mastered the keyboard, a piece of technology alien to anyone more than 2-3 generations back is not an example of progress? Because they can’t draw a ‘Q’ with the appropriate number of squiggles according to some guy centuries ago?

The love letter written throughout the article to the physical act of putting pen to paper is nice, but i’m not convinced.

Our mixed feelings about machine-made signatures make plain our broader relationship to handwriting: it offers a glimpse of individuality. Any time spent doing archival research is a humbling lesson in the challenges and rewards of deciphering the handwritten word. You come to know your long-dead subjects through the quirks of their handwriting; one man’s script becomes spidery and small when he writes something emotionally charged, while another’s pristine pages suggest the diligence of a medieval monk."

Right, but this is backward-looking almost the point of being intentionally obtuse. for four decades now you could connect to the internet and read forum posts that carry the same type of meaning in the spacing and the capitalization and the formatting and the typos or whatever.

Ten fingers can fly across a keyboard, but the experience of writing with a pen or pencil in one hand requires more patience. The average American can type 40 words a minute but can only write 13 words a minute by hand. As the calligraphist Paul Antonio notes, when he teaches children to write, he is really teaching them to slow down.

All of a sudden being slow is good, because it builds patience or whatever? feels very puritan-work-ethic to me, and a convenient way to move the goalposts away from anything objective. The disappearance of handwriting and cursive and all that is just what it is. The shift from handwriting to typing doesn’t strike me as meaningfully different than going from stone tablets to papyrus or whatever; i’m sure there were plenty of folks at that time thinking that it was the end of all knowledge.

I don’t think anyone is “losing” the ability to do anything, and I think any child today could probably learn cursive at the same rate as someone the same age in 1940 if it were important. And if they struggle with it, they can go to youtube or something and watch an infinite number of tutorials, thanks to the magic of typing! and computers! They can take a picture of their writing with their phone and ask AI how to improve it!

Technology has made it easier to avoid learning things, but a lot of those things are useless now. Anyone who wants to learn cursive (or anything) can do it easier than they ever could before.

I’ve seen a lot of these articles and I’m just not convinced that anything bad is going to happen if everybody who wants to use technology just uses it. and if something bad is going to happen (as everybody thinks), I need to see some argument beyond “there’s a Dickens book where a twist is based on handwriting, so everyone today should do cursive all the time.”

Good cursive handwriting is an impressive skill, but so is like… dunking a basketball. It’s just that for a long time the former was really important, and now they’re much closer to equal. And a lot of people who put value in the loops on their lower-case Js are mad about it and want it to portend Idiocracy (2006) but it doesn’t. people aren’t getting dumber because they’re typing 10 hours a day, and i think a lot of the nostalgia for ye olden days is misplaced into things like this.

The headline on that quoted WSJ op-ed about the PSAT is “Cursive Joins the Ranks of Latin and Sanskrit” (also, it’s from 2013.) I haven’t seen many thinkpieces about how the ‘disappearance’ of those languages is a signal that we’re all going to forget how to spell our own names. They’re still around in the contexts where they make sense and people have chosen to use them, and I think cursive will follow a similar path. Writing longhand is a joy for some people and I hope they get as much pleasure out of it as possible. But none of these arguments compel me to worry about QWERTY leading us into a new dark age.

[Noan]

Of course I know how to write in cursive. Wait… mental check actually there are several letters I forget. Other than my signature, I haven’t written anything in cursive in decades… By the time highschool rolled around, we were expected to print everything. I remember some teachers would just refuse to grade if you wrote in cursive.

I’d argue most people that think they can write in cursive really can’t. It’s indecipherable scribbling with a few real letters mixed in.

[Memory_Crab]

Two questions:
1.I have never learned to write in cursive in English, does that count? Or is the question “Have you lost a skill you were previously taught?” rather than “Can you do something you have never learned to do?”

2. Is the question about some standard systems (like Kurrent for example), or just the ability to write a word without taking your pen of the paper?

[metivier (Anthony Metivier)]

Although I haven’t practiced it in a very long while, at one point I got something like cursive going with both hands.

And I used to write on the chalkboard during my lectures with both hands, which always got a laugh the first time I did it.

Thinking of chalkboards raises the interesting point that regardless of the tech, it might for a long time yet be useful to be able to write by hand, especially if you are an instructor.

[Josh (Josh Cohen)]

Any kind of cursive counts. The letters don’t have to strictly touch. (In some languages, “cursive” letters don’t touch, but it might be a gray area.)

I would consider Kurrent to be cursive.

I’m mainly wondering how much handwriting skills are declining. It was required for homework when I was in school (pre-Internet).

Here are some example of cursive in various languages: Cursive - Wikipedia

[Nikolina]

This is something that broke my heart the other day, but about myself. As I harp on so much, I am mostly blind. Calligraphy was a favourite of mine for years, and now I can’t see my writing in big bold markers. Yet, while it is a loss of mine it doesn’t really affect my life that much - learning Braille doesn’t either. I know many blind people who have never touched Braille before. What really gives them independence is learning to use a screen reader on a smart phone, and in the groups I’m in that’s the general consensus. I love Braille, it’s something I use, but scarily it’s not that useful