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I will insist that my daughter learns to handwrite as soon as she's old enough. I find that important even if you don't get to use it much in your life. It shows your inteligence (as compared to a person who scribbles in capital print letters). It's not just for the sake of writing beautifuly it's also an important hand-eye coordination excercise.

I do. Plus you need a signature for legal documents. I write holiday cards and letters to my closest friends. My script is crap but I agonized over it something fierce as a kid. It takes tremendous concentration for me to write neatly.

My handwriting (like my drawing ability) is atrocious, so I pretty much print everything. If I'm writing something very quickly it becomes sort of an amalgam of both and is virtually indecipherable to everyone, sometimes myself included. I will insist that my son learns cursive, but if he's as bad at it as I am I won't stress about it because I do think that its usefulness / need is waning. However, no matter if he's writing by hand or typing, my son WILL learn (and use!) correct spelling, grammar and punctuation!

Thank you, caitlen315! Although I think that everyone needs to know the basics of cursive handwriting, I don't think it needs to fit a particular style, and its use IS waning. Bad spelling or grammar, otoh, make me wince!

My daughter's school (an international school) teaches cursive in kindergarten. The children quickly develop lovely handwriting, which they use in all school projects outside of IT/computer class. Cursive is much, much faster than printing, after all, and since the children have to complete their work using *some* kind of writing---unless the elementary school miraculously has a computer for every child in every classroom---it makes sense to equip them with a method of writing that can actually keep pace with their thoughts.

I'm in my mid-thirties, I have a gradaute degree.

I have not written in cursive since middle school.

I don't even remember how to make a capital 'Q' anymore. I find this is even less important than the relatively unimportant field of calculus for 95% of us.

I have nothing against anyone who wants to write in cursive, more power to you, but it's really not a reflection of one's intelligence or ability.

Learning to write legibly is a useful skill. Teaching that skill when you are a child (and cementing lots of motor skills) is the right time for it. But teaching cursive specifically? No, I don't think it's useful. Especially for boys, whose fine motor skills develop later, this can be an exercise in pure frustration. Better they learn to print neatly!

Grammar, on the other hand, is very useful, even if all one does is type - and the grammatical errors, punctuation errors, and typos in the above post make me cringe. Perhaps we should skip the cursive, and spend more time teaching our children proper English writing skills....

1. Penmanship is not a sign of anyone's intelligence. If it were, doctors and lawyers would be close to cavemen.
2. If traditional cursive is too hard to learn, there are alternative scripts like D'Nealian; it looks great and is easy to learn.
3. A person's poor penmanship does not bother me very much. However, poor spelling and grammar do. Just look at this article. "Weather?" "As a child penmanship was a big deal."

Hahaha! "Weather" Good catch, genxmom. I missed my coffee when I wrote this. Or is it rote this?

- Alex

I get a chuckle at the strong opinions on this site, especially those regarding handwriting. So much of school is spent waiting around and doing nothing. I would much rather my daughter spend her time learning something useful than practicing for hours to master a skill that our modern society renders obsolete.

And the idea that cursive writing is a sign of intelligence is completely riduculous.

Genxmom –

don’t pick on the AT writers for their grammar and punctuation. Obviously, if someone writes “weather” and they’re not talking about the temperature, then it was just an unfortunate typo. No need to be mean about it, that’s just distasteful.

ok, why can this blog not pick up quotation marks and dashes?!?!?!? i hate how it shows weird symbols.

I'm not the old-fashioned type at all, but I still like to send and receive a handwritten note now and then (especially thank-you notes). Cursive of some sort is still a useful skill, though many adults I know can't even print legibly enough to fill out a form, much less write a personal note that someone can read.

"Typos happen," Genxmom. Sheesh.

AmberM - I'm with you. My heart pitter patters when I spy something handwritten in the mailbox. The letter, and possibly handwriting, seem to be a dying art sadly.

bbt - The problem with the punctuation may be if you're cutting and pasting your comment? I know that happens sometimes, but it could also be a separate issue.

bbt,

'hte' in place of 'the' is a typo

'weather' in place of 'whether' is not a typo. In most cases it is an indication of a lack of understanding of the use of words. Similar to their/there/they're and its/it's or grate/ great.
Confusing forms of words is either ignorance or laziness - not a typo.

Wow, people are getting touchy!

I don't think confusing two words is a sign of laziness. It's a mistake. Let's be a little more forgiving.

As a seventh grade English teacher, I am always amazed that there are teachers who become totally obsessed with forcing their students to write in cursive. I'd rather students spend their time focusing on the content--not the appearance-- of their writing.

I'm a grad student and a teaching assistant for chem labs. Part of the student's grade is keeping a lab notebook and which among other things must be legible. In general sloppy printing is more legible than sloppy cursive, but I have the most problems with students who never seemed to master either well and shift back and forth at random. One of my friends who was planning on grad school taught herself to write all caps because her handwriting was so bad. She may never get asked to address someone's wedding invitations, but she's also never going to have to retract a scientific paper because the data in her notebook are unclear.

I am a first grade teacher in a school where cursive is taught in first grade. I have serious problems with this because as a former Kindergarten teacher we were just beginning to teach the children how to print and read and suddenly the children were thrown into a new style of writing. A couple of the teachers were actually connecting the cursive to their reading lessons! In truth, these teachers were redoing what was already done in Kindergarten just to teach cursive! I have to teach it because it is part of the district adopted curriculum -- but I have chosen to wait until second semester when I know that they are more comfortable writing words and sentences. Then, cursive is taught as a handwriting skill and is not connected to their reading skills.