I shared this article in Google Reader, see the original article on Lifehacker here:
Last year I had to take the TOEFL test. Before the test they ask you to copy a long statement where you promise you won’t reveal the content of the test (very American, I must say).
Well, they ask to “write, do not PRINT”.
Now, I don’t know what they mean with “print”, if is actual printing or writing in PRINT. But the test administrator had me rewrite my statement because it was WRITTEN LIKE THIS. It took me like 10 minutes to write 10 lines in cursive. I’m INCAPABLE of doing so. And now I know why they call it CURSE-ive. Damn!!
I do sign in cursive, but it’s more like repeating a drawing for me…
Cursive handwriting, a one-time mainstay of communication and mark of status, has become a rarity on the cusp of extinction. We’re wondering if you think that’s a good thing for all those future thank-you notes and other correspondence.
Photo by procilas.
If you’ve long since abandoned writing in cursive, you’re in the good company of most of the world and the entire Lifehacker editorial staff. According to TIME magazine, cursive has been on a slow decline since the 1920s and practically on life support since the 1980s:
People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that’s not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven’t learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. “Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore,” he says.
Write everything in cursive? Only your signature? Plan never to write another word in cursive, thanks to the non-tender ministrations of Sister Angelina?
Do You Write in Cursive?(polls)
Log your vote in the poll above and then sound off in the comments with your tales of dapper penmanship or handwriting woes.
