/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.2289244]

You have thirty seconds to rationalize why cursive should exist and is still relevant in any facet of society.

[Anonymous No.2289246]

To.... sign your name?

[Anonymous No.2289248]

>He doesn't know cursive

Underageb& deteced.

[Anonymous No.2289250]

Because calligraphy is a art.

[Anonymous No.2289259]

>>2289250
>>2289250

The content of writing is of far higher value. Cursive when used in letters, poems, etc causes the reader to realize the author's thoughts far less efficiently.

Calligraphy, in the sense of visually expressive written text, is valuable. but we do not require a set system of it to teach in school, as an artist could easily fabricate an aesthetically appealing form of text.

[Anonymous No.2289264]

I wasn't aware 2nd grade busywork and motor skill development was a "facet of society."

[Anonymous No.2289265]

Cursive taught me how to handwrite properly, I don't use it now but if I hadn't learned it I doubt I would be able to write half as well as I can now.

[Anonymous No.2289263]

i can't cursive anymore..

I use to have great handwriting, but four years across two IT degrees made me loose all writing skills. I can barely print neatly now.

[Anonymous No.2289268]

Cursive is faster than print. The less time spent trying to write out letters, the more time spent forming great thoughts.

[Anonymous No.2289294]

>>2289246

That feel when you sign your name in print and you have trouble writing "e" so they look like "o's"

[Anonymous No.2289297]

what the fuck is cursive?

[Anonymous No.2289301]

>>2289268
funny... damn near everyone I know who used cursive spent far more time making their writing look pretty than putting thought into what they were saying

[Anonymous No.2289302]

>>2289297
It's what people do when they want to try and give the reader a really hard time. Seriously, i can't read the majority of people's cursive handwriting - it might as well be written in an enigma machine.

[Sunhawk !M9PhF5nIzs No.2289356]

I've used cursive for most of my life. So has everyone else I know, apart from one guy we used to (politely, cause he was decent) laugh at. I live in Britain. Seriously, America is the only country that doesn't use 'cursive', just like you won't stop using the stupid imperial system. Then you make fun of other more advanced countries.

[Anonymous No.2289359]

>tfw no one agrees with you and you samefag most of the thread
OP knows that feel.

[Anonymous No.2289360]

What is it that the British call cursive?

Joined-up-writing or something?

Why don't they just call it cursive?

[Anonymous No.2289362]

>>2289356

i'm american and was taught cursive in 2nd grade, your generalization is looking mad untenable

also if metric's so great why don't yall use metric time

[Sunhawk !M9PhF5nIzs No.2289363]

>>2289360

Joined-up writing, yes. We call it that for, I would hope, obvious reasons. Cursive doesn't even mean anything much.

[Anonymous No.2289485]

to write with speed by hand?

[Anonymous No.2289490]

fountain pens (google them) work best with cursive

ball points and roller balls have changed the need

pic unrelated: Flannery O'Connor

[Anonymous No.2289513]

Just because you can't write cursive doesn't mean other's don't use it to write faster.

[Anonymous No.2289525]

It's easier, faster and a more efficient way to write. I was taught cursive and use to this day to write just about every thing, a caligraphy is one of the best things in the world.

[Anonymous No.2289528]

it exists to confuse kids into thinking that signiture = cursive. So that they spend 5 minutes on what should take 5 seconds.
cause adults are dicks.
>grade 1-5
>it's important that you learn cursive because that's all you'll be using in middle school.
>grade 6-8
>lol they said wat? write however the fuck you want, I don't give a shit.

[Anonymous No.2289540]

>>2289259
This is one of the most ignorant posts I've seen in my entire life.

[Anonymous No.2289546]

>>2289362
>also if metric's so great why don't yall use metric time

[Anonymous No.2289551]

>>2289546
oh god fuckin laughing my ass off so bad my eyes are watering

[Anonymous No.2289552]

>>2289546
I hadn't read that post. Oh my fucking God, what's wrong with that guy?

[Anonymous No.2289588]

>>2289302
That's probably because most of the people in your country think like OP and you're not used to reading it.

[Anonymous No.2289610]

>Still handwriting anything

It's time to develop.

[Anonymous No.2289617]

I had to teach myself penmanship in my early 20's. The way I held a pen or pencil, the direction and starting points of pen strokes, etc. American public school really dropped the ball as far as my case is concerned.

Try writing someone a letter in an attractive and legible cursive print, people love that shit.

Here's a cool book for anyone who's interested, the method described in it was the de facto standard for American business communication before the typewriter-era

Actually, I can't find that link, so here's the "Palmer System" that followed and was taught in American schools during the 1920's

[Anonymous No.2289619]

>>2289617
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=gdc3&fileName=scd0001_20060809007papage.db

derp

[Anonymous No.2289623]

>>2289617

>The American Public School even existing in 2 years.

They dropped the ball on everything.

[Anonymous No.2289625]

Compare handwriting back when cursive was still taught regularly to today, print or non-.
It's better.
Cursive taught in schools teaches kids to sit down and try to make their writing fucking legible, and now that that's not done, everyone has the "doctor's handwriting" of 70 years ago. Which shouldn't really be a problem, since we have computers and writing things down isn't really required all that much in everyday situations, but there's an odd day when you're away from a computer or phone, and if you wanna write me a note then, it better be legible or fuck I don't know.

[Anonymous No.2289630]

>>2289623
Counting on the election of Ron Paul or something?

[Anonymous No.2289642]

The western written language is in slow decay. People focus on the content, but the package is completely dismissed. Industrial age transformed the letters into small pieces, simplistic but precise. "A" means "A", it doesn't matter if you can do the strokes well or not. There is much more to language than plain types, a man with knowledge of calligraphy is able to convey meaning within each letter, while a typical writer has to combine them to achieve similar effects.

To say that you can't reach deep into the hearts and mind with calligraphy is just showing how alienated we are from the pictoric aspect of our words. There is no wrong or right, but we chose a path and we need to understand that we made that choice by aknowledging the other routes, not by ignoring them.

http://butdoesitfloat.com/1171/Letters-are-free-entities-They-are-clear-and-cunning-Together-they

http://butdoesitfloat.com/717298/Writing-is-not-a-series-of-strokes-but-space-divided-into

http://butdoesitfloat.com/1842190/Echo-of-the-Word

Worth notice that calligraphy for the arab culture is very important. There are hundreds of books on the subject and how they can convey meaning through complex visual signs that go beyond the type.

[Anonymous No.2289653]

>mfw I learned cursive in fucking pre-k4
>mfw I was best in class and was used as an example for other students
>mfw for the next 6 years I never used it and then in 6th grade teacher demands research report in cursive and I'm the only one who knows what it is.

[Anonymous No.2289705]

Because it's quicker than writing any other way.

It's quicker than typing when you're combining notes with sketched diagrams or mathematical formulas and equations.

When taking notes by hand I can switch between a descriptive paragraph and a formatted centered equation effortlessly.

Still don't understand why people take laptops into lecture halls.

[Anonymous No.2289717]

In the UK joined handwriting is the norm.

Only retards need to stop and process each letter individually.

I'm not joking either, the only people that don't write cursive are the... 'special' people. Just like only mentally retarded and disabled people drive Automatic cars but in America everyone does.

It's no secret that Americans are lazy. Then they try and rationalise it by convincing themselves their way is better.

[Anonymous No.2289723]

>>2289717

"cor blimey guv we're less lazy, we is, since we don't bother to lift the pen between letters" -- a british guy, 2011

[Anonymous No.2289732]

>>2289723
>this new method of ridiculing British people with "guv"

[Anonymous No.2289739]

>>2289732
where can i read about foucaults bdsm kinky lifestyle? i heard it mentioned in lectures on him but whats the source? i wanna hear what kinda shit he was into

[Anonymous No.2289745]

Children should be taught to speed print caps rather than learn cursive or even lower case letters.
All those years of doing cursive f and s exercises, what the fucking shit.
We don't need two sets of letters just so we can put caps on the start of a sentence. They make us do shit like this instead of learning times tables as a class or doing actual physical exercises and wonder why the shadow of the red dragon casts a chill wind on the west.

[Anonymous No.2289746]

>>2289745
i'm p sure that "lower case letters" have fairly little to do with the reason china is increasingly threatening western dominance, dogg

think it has a lot more to do with "they have a shit-ton of people and resources"

[Anonymous No.2289751]

In my experience cursive looks like illegible shit, as if someone has written everything in signature mode. If people were taught a proper standard way of forming capital letters handwriting would look more like actual printed text.

[Anonymous No.2289753]

faster handwriting

/thread

[Anonymous No.2289763]

>>2289746

It's an example of how western education is a waste of time. You seem to have missed the point.

[Anonymous No.2289766]

>>2289763
i'm kind of skeptical that any kind of "western weakness" is behind that in general, for one thing, i think it has more to do with demographics and resources than anything else. that said, while there are problems in the educational system, "spending time teaching handwriting" is so god-damn minor and fucking irrelevant that i don't even know how you can bring it up. if you really believe that the biggest problem w american education is 'spending time on learning handwriting', i don't even know what the fuck

i had plenty of time to memorize time-tables and do physical activity when i was in gradeschool, and they also taught us dang ol cursive. of course i was shit at cursive, but still, there are way more significant problems with the american education system than "teaching cursive". like, you know, how the entire thing is fucking broken.

[Anonymous No.2289772]

>>2289642

Using handwriting to convey meaning is for people who can't draw. If letters are so inefficient, go paint a fucking picture.

[Anonymous No.2289775]

There is so much American education system in this thread.

I learned and left cursive behind in elementary school, but decided to take up cursive again simply to see if I could write lecture notes faster. My notes became easier to read and more quickly taken once I had retrained myself in cursive.

And why don't I just bring a laptop and type? I enjoy writing my notes by hand, I can 'format' quickly, and I've found I can remember course content better when my brain concentrates on the forming of each word. Overall, handwriting is a more involved experience.

[Anonymous No.2289777]

>>2289766
uh, i'm pretty sure that dude was trolling since caps and lowercase only totals what like 52 plus ten characters for arabic numerals and kids have to memorize a whole total of 62 characters! woah! compared to chinese kids who just to finish high school have to memorize 2000 characters minimum with graduate students approaching 10,000 characters...

[Anonymous No.2289778]

>>2289766

>you really believe that the biggest problem w american education is 'spending time on learning handwriting'
>biggest problem
>implying
>impliconds
>implanderising
>I implode

Missing the point.

[Anonymous No.2289779]

>>2289777
i don't know he seems to treat it pretty seriously

fuckin whatever. its a bizarre position, even if he thinks that there's something fundamentally misguided with american educational priorities (examples of which he has provided exactly none, except "they teach lower case letters") its a strange thing to care about.

whatever, my commitment to lower case letters is pretty fucking obvious so

[Anonymous No.2289781]

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

[Anonymous No.2289783]

>>2289777

It's not about the number of characters, it's about learning two versions of something for no reason and the fact that the cursive characters are so tight and unnatural it takes intense training for small children to be able to form them.

You don't forget thousands of words so why would learning thousands of characters be any harder?
At least the chinese kids don't learn characters and then learn different characters for the exact same thing for no reason.
Also with one entire word per symbol I very much doubt the chinese kids are struggling to write or anything. One word per symbol allows for entire sentences to fit in the space of a couple of words.

[Anonymous No.2289787]

>>2289783
dude in chinese most words are not only one character, also it's one thing to recongnize a character and remember what it is but it's another to be able to draw it from memory, also the phonetic hints in chinese characters are minimal at best and frequently non-existent so they have to memorize the sounds and can't just "sound out" words they don't know. it's a much more difficult language and requires much more discipline to master.

[Anonymous No.2289795]

>>2289783
>thinks that the difficulty of learning English is on par with Chinese

No.

[Anonymous No.2289802]

>>2289795
irrelevant to point, any human can learn chinese if they're taught it from birth

[Anonymous No.2289806]

>>2289802
if you're talking about pedagogy, though, in terms of the effort and time required for teaching, i feel pretty comfortable saying that chinese is at least as difficult as english

even english w two cases

[Anonymous No.2289821]

>>2289802
Learning something from birth is far from being an argument. If you had a complete ignorant person, that has never written or made any sound only a faggot would make him learn chinese.

They would probably teach the guy english because it is an easy-mode language in its basics.

[Anonymous No.2289857]

>>2289772
Nothing gets in the way of anything here. There is no reason why not type something up, work on your calligraphy in something else and paint a picture.

Writing is for those who can't draw.
Drawing is for those who can't write.
Both are for those who can't into music.
Derp is for hurp durr niggers niggers.

As said, there is nothing wrong with one media or the other, the point is to realize our place in this and choose the things we want to control when doing our art.

[Anonymous No.2289890]

On the topic of Chinese vs English:

First of all, languages and writing systems are two different things. This is basic linguistics.


Bearing that in mind; Chinese script (which is ideographic) is way the fuck more complex than any phonetic script; the sheer number and complexity of characters should clear any doubts on that regard.

As far as language itself is concerned: no human language is inherently more difficulty than any other (children learn to speak at about the same age all over the world). Speakers of Indo-European language will obviously have more difficulty in learning Sinitic languages, but by the same token, speakers of Sinitic and related languages will find it way easier than learning Indo-European languages.

[Anonymous No.2289894]

European languages are actually far more abstract than anything else; the number of characters has nothing to do with it.
Your memory for pictures and sounds is nearly infinite and the speed at which you remember these things is nearly instant. Chinese children don’t take longer to learn their language.
The characters don't require training child hands to be able to form them - you can lose cursive faster than you can learn it but do your hands forget how to make horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines or simple curves?
Chinese basically has one word per symbol or a small amount of symbols. European languages are closer to word maths with a number-letter for each mouth movement and are much more unnatural for the brain when it comes to writing. Once you get over the hump as a child then it’s fine but you can lose your cursive skills faster than you can train them. This is why cursive should be deserted and a proper fast method of writing pure caps should be adopted, it's suits the mechanical nature of European lettering.
Both languages are very different and make different things easier. Without European languages with 26 or so symbols then the modern world would never have happened because our history is shaped by the success of 26 character printing press use in the medieval times. It’s at this point that Europe first beat the Chinese in any form of technology and our time since has been governed by our speed of communication. The Chinese had the press 100’s of years before but they would either have to fiddle with 1000’s of characters or carve each message into a block of wood.
I think it’s safe to say that thinking in nothing but numbers and number-letters is far worse for your mind.

[Anonymous No.2289900]

>>2289890
well the original debate was about if making kids learn an extra set up lowercase characters was making them lag the chinese so it was about written language. the funny thing is a lot of chinese people learn two sets of characters anyways because mainland china uses "simplified" characters that were reformed to make them faster to write and increase literacy while places like hong kong, taiwan and many overseas communities use tradiational characters. (singapore did adopt the simplified tho i believe) which means they do have to remember two forms of about 500 characters if they want to travel or communicate with other chinese communities. so any way you slice it chinese kids are learning more characters than english, i don't know how this can even be in doubt.

[Anonymous No.2289906]

>>2289894
except capital letters are slower to read than lowercase so if you;re going to jettison one of the sets it should be uppercase

[Anonymous No.2289909]

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS
with cursive and not block-letters

[Anonymous No.2289910]

>>2289906
XD XD Yeah, punctuation wasn't invented for any sort of reason. It's all just a hindrance. It doesn't clarify meaning of the text at all. XD XD

[Anonymous No.2289914]

>>2289894

>so any way you slice it chinese kids are learning more characters than english, i don't know how this can even be in doubt.

Don't get me wrong now, no arguments on that count here.

But I don't really see how relevant the number of characters kids have to learn is, to be honest.

[Anonymous No.2289924]

>>2289914
me either, it was kind of a stupid topic to begin with.

[Anonymous No.2290083]

I'm really quite apathetic both ways. Of course language evolves; it should only be natural that the methods with which we project this language (i.e. words, writing styles) should change. Is it necessary? No, but it's not unnecessary. Is it more efficient? No, but it's not less efficient either. I, for one, can read both cursive and print, so... yeah. I don't even know what I'm trying to get at; make of this post what you want.

[Anonymous No.2290095]

OP is butthurt he can't write, and I can, so I laugh at him.

[Anonymous No.2290420]

Because why the fuck not, there's nothing funnier than watching troglodytes labor for over twenty minutes trying to sign their name in something almost passing for cursive on the disclaimer for the SATs.