In what grade did you learn to....

Well to each his own - I find handwriting really interesting to look at. Some people, in my opinion, have handwriting that is art in and of itself.

There's nothing at all wrong with run on sentences, Linkat. We speak in run on sentences and when we write, save for those infrequent times when you have to pound out an academic paper, .. have you finished yours yet?, we write as we speak. It's perfectly natural, that's why, with the advent of the internet, the shortcuts that we don't normally use in academic/formal writing, are proliferating.

Children should initially write as they damn well please, in the sense that they should write just to become comfortable with writing. Then after they have written and written and written some more, we can take one piece of their writing and show and tell them that though this is perfectly fine for the vast majority of instances, the odd time, we have to make some changes to meet writing for academic purposes.

Then we can show/tell them that we also have writing that is similar, but not as formal in nature as academic writing and that is, we'll call it newspaper writing.

Kids have to learn that there isn't just one kind of writing. They have to learn that writing as we speak isn't bad, it isn't wrong. If it was, then how could anyone ever write a novel? Should all direct speech within a novel be edited to meet the strictures of formal writing? Of course that's nonsensical.

The reason that kids have to/should learn all this is so that they don't grow up thinking that they have a problem with run on sentences.



That's true. I was referring to other aspects of language teaching. But because it's taught with these other phony aspects of language, it becomes, ... , ... what's the word I want, tainted by the nonsense.

That isn't a good reason to continue a bad idea though is it, Aidan? It's interesting, what you described for the UK;

I find it very interesting that the majority of British males do not write in cursive, but they have extremely neat and legible printing, while a lot of males in the US (school age) have almost illegible handwriting - printing or otherwise.

Do they not teach/have writing in their schools?

We teach or at least are taught this extensively. As I recall, for my time, it was quite lengthy, in the sense of time, and yet, for most, many??, we write like hens scratching in the barnyard. Why is that?

I also recall that after the knuckle rapping years for any attempts to change the "taught" style, it was never ever again mentioned by any teacher, nor did those upper grade teachers write as we were taught.

Does that mean that only the lower grade teachers had memorized the in vogue cursive style? Was their own everyday handwriting only this cursive style or did they have their unique style?

I don't know - I'll have to ask them. Most of them are between the ages of 21-40, so they went to school from the seventies and eighties onward. It is really amazing though, the huge majority of them, although they must have been not very good students (to be doing the remedial work they're doing at this point in their lives) have BEAUTIFULLY neat and legible handwriting.
And their numbers are beautiful too.

But they don't do cursive at all - ever. In fact, I had one guy ask me to teach him 'joined-up' writing. He didn't even know the name for it, but he liked the way it looked-'fluid' he called it.

I never got hit in school and actually, I don't remember anyone getting hit because of their handwriting. By the time I was in school, it seemed that everyone's unique style was acceptable as long as it was legible.

I guess that's what I'm advocating: individualism and legibility instead of uniformity either way - through the palmer method (which I was never exposed to) or typeface as the only legible option.

I just remembered an interesting counter example.

In college one of our professors wrote notes on the board in cursive. One of the students couldn't understand him-- she had never learned to read cursive. So the professor actually made a conscious effort to only use print on the board for our class. Once in a while he would forget and then apologize.

I liked that professor.

The knuckle rapping was a euphemism. You were never "forced" to write the letters as they written on the big alphabet banner that went across the top of the blackboard?



I thought you said that it wasn't writing, it was printing.

i got the strap about 5 times in my school career, never for my handwriting, for that they would have executed me

Maybe we all don't have as firm a handle on what cursive is as we all think we do.

It's writing, letters joined, as opposed to printing, letters separate.

What do you use when you write a note to someone, write a shopping list, Brown?

i print it, in lowercase letters exclusively

or

i cut the individual letters from magazines and newspapers and glue them onto a sheet of paper

Write a note to someone.... you mean on paper?... I almost always send email these days. The only example I can think of in recent history is school notes (please excuse Mija 'cause she was sick). These are quickly written (but legible) print.

I write a lot of notes to myself, thoughts, ideas, plans... etc. These are all pretty illegible to anyone but me. But, they are useful to me.

Okay, so you do write as in writing, letters joined.

I'm still puzzled by the mentioned by Aidan Brits thing. I would have thought that writing would be something highly thought of, there in the UK.

McTag, Spendius, Izzie, Pentacle, ... what's the scoop for the UK?

I'll ask one of my students if I can take a picture of his writing and post it here so you can have an idea of what I mean, and see what the difference is.

Some of their written work - though not 'joined-up 'writing is beautiful. I really like watching them produce maths sheets - like I said- their numbers are beautiful.
I DO think it can be an art.

Thanks, Aidan.

You've probably illustrated an even better reason to get rid of cursive. We all end up combining the two anyway. No one, [few?] follows that which is taught. Did you, did anyone ever write a capital zed/zee like you were instructed to, and 'Q', give me a break.

Both of your examples are pretty damn close to how I write/print too.

[Is there supposed to be a comma after 'print', before 'too'? if there is I'll include it in my next academic paper, if and when I have occasion to write that line.]

I wanted to say [_____] about how close your writing/printing is to mine, but I've just drawn a blank on how to spell [phonetically] 'earri'.

Isn't that weird? I can do that sometimes with a name I know exceedingly well when I feel under the gun, or a word, that just hangs there, slightly out of reach.

Is that 'cause you never made it to the fourth grade, dj?

nope, i just think capitalization is redundant for the most part, i will use it on occasion but not often

How so? The letter is not repeated.

alright then, a waste of time, none of that shift ****

i'm not gonna get on osd's phonetic insanity kick, but really, why capitalize

You babe, you!

I graduated in '59.

I remember being sort of annoyed with diagramming sentences, since I pretty much got all that already, but it helped with learning to draw straight lines with chalk. I won't say they were useless, as I can see they could be helpful, maybe even very helpful, to someone else.