Pluggers by Rick McKee for November 04, 2023

Watch out Granny there is an app to translate to text !

Makes the grandkids CURSE IF they find it, huh?

My older sister wrote with beautiful script. Like art work.

Graduating from a National School of Excellence without being able to read or write cursive says to me that the school has been given too much credit.

My cursive writing is decent, but the words I write don’t form a nice flat straight line. They bob up and down, like the notes on a piece of sheet music.

In the upper grades of my Elementary School, we had to fill lined-page after page with cursive alphabets — the Palmer Method. After a few minutes of each session, the teacher would then announce, “Pencils Up” and we’d shake our hands at our sides to relieve writer’s cramp.

We were actually graded for “Penmanship.” Girls in the class usually had the best cursive writing. The boys in the class usually didn’t care. (The teacher said my cursive was like chicken scratching.) My mother had a beautiful style of cursive.

I haven’t thought about this in years!

Cursive writing is good for many things . Hand and eye control comes to mind . Time for folks to learn that life is not just about pushing buttons ;-)

Heck, my wife’s adult children can’t read cursive.

I was taught cursive writing until I entered high school (USA). Then the teachers didn’t care as long as they could read it, so my writing became more of a blend of printing and cursive because my cursive sucked. My daughter, age 40, cannot read cursive. It was never taught in any of her schools.

As a military officer, my handwriting went to heck in a hand basket, especially my signature. It has taken years to get it back to a legible level but I still print a lot. I also use the keyboard ‘a’ because a former secretary kept reading it as an ‘o’.

Ha ha! Plugger’s have discovered MEMES! Tune in next week for “Walmart hasn’t sent me my W2 for my cashier duties” and “If you want to prevent auto theft, get a standard transmission!”

Cursive is really just another font….

I have always been fascinated by the ability of the human brain to decipher words/text irregardless of how they are written [speaking only of American English, although I assume it is similar in other languages and cultures]. Even in simple printing we have many ways to form individual letters and in typing we can choose from among hundreds of different fonts [granted, some fonts seem to be designed for aesthetics and not communication]. We abbreviate and acronymise, use puns, innuendos, metaphors, hyperbole, etc. at will and somehow we still seem to figure out much of what we read. Unfortunately, not always.

A LONG time ago, there was special lined paper to teach cursive – keeping the letters between the lines and at the correct height.

I can write cursive pretty well but I hate signing on those little digital boards, it always looks like the board was attacked by a chicken on drugs

My cursive can only be read by my bride. She’s had 49 years to decipher it.

I learned last week that California is apparently mandating the teaching of cursive again. Good. It’s our defense against the AIs. Seriously: with AIs able to write credibly high-school term papers, we will probably be moving to essay tests written in a closed room from which all computers are excluded. Cursive is much faster than printing.

There is also research indicating that writing in cursive (vs. typing on a keyboard) develops and maintains brain wiring that helps delay dementia. Important for a guy my age, which is one of the reasons I write one or two pages in cursive in a journal every morning.

How are we expecting our youth to have a decent signature to use when they are adults? Are they going to print their name on official documents?

A lost art, eh? Sad.

These days you could print it in complete sentences. It would be considered too boring to read by young people.

Funny. I can still do shorthand, but cursive, forget it! :)

I would not hire anyone for a position of responsibility unless they could write a 100 word short essay as to why they deserved the job,,,Written in cursive plain English, and show that they were properly potty trained also.

Cursive was the secret code used in the dreaded “note home from the teacher” – you’d never know exactly how much trouble you were in until the note got translated by the parent. Fortunately I grew up when it was still being taught – we learned cursive in third grade. We started out with just a part of the school day dedicated to “handwriting” – and then once our handwriting was good enough, our names were added to a list on the blackboard of students who were then allowed to use cursive for ALL of their classwork. It felt like the first and proudest major milestone toward adulthood the day I finally made that list.

or Shorthand. 3 yrs of Gregg Shorthand. Writing in secret is about all i can do with it.

When I went to school in the later 1950s and the 1960s I learned both printing and cursive (Palmer method as mentioned). My handwriting was so bad in either that the teachers went crazy. (At the time the pejorative “You write like a doctor” was used.) One teacher had me type any work as I did at home – and I failed typing when I finally took it one summer during junior high.

While I sign my name in cursive I tend to use a combination of same and printing when I have to hand write something. I am an accountant (since I was 12 years old) and my numbers always look nice and easy to read despite the problem writing letters/words which are easily readable.