Cursive Handwriting
| Field | What field the skill applies to |
| Went Obsolete | When keyboarding became commonplace |
| Made Obsolete By | Typing |
| Knowledge Assumed | How to hold a pen, how to spell in chosen language |
| When useful | Writing quickly |
This is just silly. Cursive handwriting is a skill that will never go away. One of the major reasons why, but not the only one, is signatures. This is yet another one that needs to be removed.
"Why must a signature be in cursive? It has nothing to do with signatures. Regardless, the issue here is time spent in a classroom - is it more important for our children to learn cursive (given they have already learned print) or should that precious time be spent learning keyboarding? Its easy to argue that keyboarding is more relevant it our world"
That is absolutely untrue. Cursive handwriting wastes ink and was ruled obsolete by the paper act.
All entries prevailing upon us to accept that handwriting is obsolete are simply untrue. The joy and pleasure of a slowly written, thoughtful and (hopefully) multipage hand written love letter remains timeless. Is learning to type on a keyboard versus the cretin's complaints of rote handwriting lessons the more practical? Certainly. So what?
The joy or enjoyment to be had in the act is completely incidental and has no bearing in a discussion of the skill's relevence. Handwriting has not been made obsolete because of the relatively limited availablity of personal computers among the public; but cursive, which was intended as a time saving mechanism, has been left by the wayside in favour of the more practical typing lessons. This is the reason that it is (potentially) obsolete, and the experience of writing a love letter has nothing to do with the skill's usefulness. There are many things on this site that are enjoyable and have a rustic charm, but they are obsolete nonetheless.
Certainly some people still can and do practice cursive handwriting. The difference is it was once a core life skill, widely taught as central part of school curriculum, and is now an anachronism. I remember 5th grade instruction in how to turn the page at a slight angle, and the particular ligatures necessary for each combination of vowels. Five years later I turned in my last handwritten textual assignment.
For all succeeding generations, cursive handwriting is a stylistic pleasure practiced by few. When I need to write by hand, which is often enough, I print, or use a ad hoc mixture of printing and invented cursive style. This was a major, highly specific, universally practiced skill which went obsolete in a split second, and unremarked upon.
The purpose of cursive is not to write "fancily" or indulge in stylistic pleasure. It is a method of writing which, when properly performed, takes less time that printing, and at its core it exists for that purpose.
In fact, though, pure cursive writing (if legible) doesn't outspeed pure printing ... and research shows that the fastest legible handwriters avoid pure cursive and pure printing too. Highest-speed, highest-legibility handwriters join some (not all!) letters — using the easiest joins, and ignoring the rest — and tend to use print-like shapes for those letters whose printed and cursive shapes "disagree." Cursive, at best, comes in second-best for purposes of rapidly written, rapidly readable handwriting.