Talk:Cursive

Picture

I added the first picture, an example of a cursive alphabet, if you don't like it please comment here.— Preceding unsigned comment added by November 17, 2005 (talk) User:Sotakite (UTC)

"Decline of English cursive in the United States" -- Not Neutral

The tone of this section is negative and generally seems meant to reinforce the notion that American society is being degraded. Even the highlights about some states preferring keyboard proficiency is drowned out by bias and negativity. The same for "Conservation efforts and cognitive benefits." Could someone please rewrite these sections? They should be focused not just on the US, but on worldwide English cursive usage -- which is obviously not limited to "Western Europe." The majority of the information in these sections is from the WaPo article. We can do a lot better.

These sections are filled with negative phrasing, and here are a few examples: Decline of English cursive (decline is negative), new technology that caused the decline (a moral theme about the evils of technology), a cheap price (a moral judgement), perceived lack of necessity (implies lack of knowledge), school teachers lacking formal training (implies teachers lack valuable training), only 12 percent of teachers (implies 12 percent is too low), despite the decline (implies the decline is bad), being reintroduced (implies movement in a positive direction while nothing probably changed in reality), already mandated cursive (why already? implies this is naturally expected), researchers set out (implies researchers collectively had this as a goal), etc.

Other Points:
Who cares about "the largest teachers' union in Fairfax County"?
The "Pam Mueller study" is about writing notes on paper, not about cursive writing. This is misleading.
The "Laura Dinehart study" is about neater handwriting, but the WaPo source doesn't say it was cursive handwriting. Also misleading.
The dyslexia PBS article is hardly scientific, but it seems like there may be benefits for dyslexic students. However, the article is inconsistent, and some of the references are to handwriting ("when the hands are involved, it’s a stronger association") or "sky writing." So they may be talking less about cursive and more about a therapy similar to writing, and it's unlikely that these dyslexic students would write anything of length since they are in therapy for such basic issues with reading and writing letters. After therapy, I expect they would follow the same trends as everyone else.

For those not aware of US politics, it's not surprising that some states would be against federal education guidelines (Common Core), which is why they would try to mandate outdated educational practices. This is purely political posturing, and it's very unlikely to set a trend.

188.239.0.177 (talk) 13:11, 18 November 2018 (UTC)

Everyone, I'm inviting comment here before making changes. If there are any objections to the points above, please state them now.

188.239.0.177 (talk) 21:54, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

Cursive Faster

I've added a citation needed tag to the claim that cursive is faster than printing. While I understand that this is a very common belief, and that it may well be the main reason that people learn to write in cursive, there is no evidence presented here for its truth. Many internet sources (which are not reliable enough to cite here) claim that mixture of printing and cursive is the fastest. It would be good if we could have some citations at least, if not a discussion about the issue. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.56.236.111 (talk) 03:55, 7 February 2019 (UTC)

The French Alphabet is just a language that utilises the latin alphabet with some exceptions. It would be much more relevant and understood just to refer to it as the Latin alphabet. 203.24.137.4 (talk) 04:57, 15 September 2020 (UTC) https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/French/Alphabet#:~:text=French%20is%20based%20on%20the,%2Dsix%20(26)%20letters. It even states in the wikiversity article that the French alphabet uses the Latin Alphabet. https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/French/Lessons/Alphabet

Monospaced

When written on a grid, the standard school writing teaching system makes for a monospaced font. But also, all non-cursive forms influenced by any font but based on the same metrics are also monospaced and metric-compatible.
2A01:119F:21E:4D00:D86C:FDEE:591E:3AC (talk) 19:11, 25 May 2019No,no,ya olde fool, it was around November of '05. (UTC)Sorry, that seemed like the perfect remedy, on the spur of the momen, but on reflection, it's an unforgivable offense against clarity; see *below.
--JerzyA (talk) 07:29, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

   Perhaps my aged brain betrays me here, but please give us the punchline, the payoff: what you say seems an eminently plausible assertion, I grant, but I cannot conceive what value you see in pointing it out; please elucidate for me, and those who like me spend far too much time confused, even when not ... the expression escapes me, it's a metaphor about being prevented from running by damage to one or both Achilles tendons.
--JerzyA (talk) 19:43, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

   Beset by loss of mental dexterity, and an iPad ii, I <sarcasm>inexplicably</sarcasm> needed some 20 minutes for formatting that contrib properly, which then permitted me relaxation sufficient for dredging up what completes that metaphor: hamstrung). ... Oh, and isn't it ... ah, ... poignant, that it's .... complemented by that other biomechanical metaphor, "kneecapped"?
--JerzyA (talk) 22:34, 16 September 2019 (UTC)

*Apologies! In trying to correct a colleague's long-neglected failure to sign nor date, I repeated the date part (after succeeding in copying and pasting the interminable ip-address, and rote-typed the date I thot I had succeeded in memorizing. Santa Claus only knows what happened on the date I keyed, but it was not the edit date, and rather than leave behind a baffling (rather than simply irritating) or perhaps even paranoia-inducing ) edit-history, I resort to an ugly, but relatively straight-forward date in the right (but previously hidden, decade and season of the year. (The edit history is reliable, but verifying it in the history is onerous if you don't know, in this case, roughly the year --- as i had had to determine by guesswork and cold sweat. (I really gotta buy another real computer!)Mea maxima culpa.
--JerzyA (talk) 07:29, 17 September 2019 (UTC)

Removing dubious claim

I'm removing the section

During the Middle Ages, the flowing, connected cursive script of the Arabic language inspired Western Christian scholars to develop similar cursive scripts for Latin. These scripts then became the basis for all of the Latin-based cursive scripts used in Europe.

Medieval cursive styles evolved from Roman Cursive via Merovingian script, to unical, and from there onward. See https://sites.dartmouth.edu/ancientbooks/2016/05/25/ancient-fonts-rustic-capitals-old-and-new-roman-cursive/ which says

The New Roman Cursive (also called the minuscule cursive) seem to have been used from the 3rd - 10th century, and influenced the development of the uncial script (used widely from the 4th century onward).

It cites several sources, and https://books.google.com/books?id=eEmsSZ054L8C&printsec=frontcover&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false especially looks promising as a source if someone wants to give a proper introduction to its development. Jhanschoo (talk) 09:09, 9 May 2020 (UTC)

Anne Frank

I noticed that Anne Frank (who was largely educated in the Netherlands but immigrated there from Germany) had a cursive script much like our own (suggesting that the Netherlands, Germany, and Anglophone countries were in close correspondence with one another). True, this is a sample size of 1, but whatever. — Rickyrab. ^{Yada yada yada} 16:33, 17 November 2020 (UTC)