Now this is something that we should eradicate from the public schooling system. Actually I'm not sure if it's even taught anymore (I went to Catholic school), but all it did was make my handwriting more flowy and sloppy. We could teach something in place of this.

My handwriting is shit. But I like that there is a level of decoding required.

No, handwriting should be taught much more stringently, and kids with horrible handwriting should be penalized. Good handwriting encourages kids to get into the habit of actually writing coherent, sustained thoughts. Otherwise in 100 years the English language will consist solely of the words recognized by T9.

This.

I agreed wholeheartedly with Merryl Streep in Doubt when she talked about handwriting.

Cursive ftw.

bad handwriting should be penalized? in what way? we got penmanship grades back in third grade i think, but i didn't really care about these. or at least i shouldn't have; i think i did ok with them. sort of like playing recorder (although i tried at this and i practiced and i still got B's in the class because i wasn't any good at it; now that was BS but I got revenge in a way). i'm not saying illegible handwriting should be endorsed, but the cursive aspects of my handwriting are what makes it sloppy and hard to read when i'm just writing quickly. i have to make the effort to not write part of my handwriting in cursive; when i do this it's ok. although reading all caps writing seems to be most legible in my experience.

I thought the whole point of cursive writing was so that you could write quicker, not necessarily neater. Personally, my handwriting got a lot neater once I dropped the cursive and all of the ridiculous tails and such that D'Nealian mandates. I'm all for better penmanship, but I'm not convinced that cursive is the ultimate path towards it.

We learned cursive in 3rd grade. I had incredible handwriting back then, for some reason. I think I picked up cursive faster than any of the other boys in my class. Then by the time I was in high school my handwriting was terrible. It's only slightly better now.

I don't think it really matters.

But that's the thing, they don't keep up with it. They teach you in elementary school and then just forget about it come middle school.

@GH - writing quicker is essential to writing more, which is the ultimate goal. Penmanship is about legibility, yes, but also about economy. Printing involves a whole lot of wasted motion that takes a toll after a while.

Btw, I have fucking awful handwriting, and I'm in the process of trying to reteach myself how to write legibly.

I have schizophrenic handwriting that ranges from completely illegible to top notch.

my dad solved the legibility issue by switching to all caps.

Writing everything as you would a ransom note isn't usually a feasible option.

By this rationale, typing would be quicker than any form of writing. But, you also said that "[g]ood handwriting encourages kids to get into the habit of actually writing coherent, sustained thoughts." That would suggest that taking time to write would lead to more (higher quality) writing, so I'm a bit confused.

By the way, my most hated cursive letter of all time is below. That's a fucking two, damnit.

My "Q" looks way better than the way they teach you.

yea, he's noted this as the flaw in his style. but it usually is feasible, surprisingly.

Typing also encourages you to rely on spellcheck, grammar check (the worst invention ever, btw), auto-complete, etc. So many people actually have no idea how to spell completely common words. Maybe a typewriter would be ok, but no one uses them anymore.

THIS

I was never taught to do this.

haha, same as my old man. Except that even his all caps printing is virtually illegible.