>I thought this might interest people here, I ran into the article via
>slashdot.org . The article discusses the recent growing decline in
>the cursive skills of children as they increasing favor keyboarding:
>
>http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/09/national/main557572.shtml
>
>I didn't realize this was even a problem but the trend sounds logical
>enough. One expert notes that children just aren't spending enough
>time practicing to develop the hand muscles required for decent
>writing skills. Cursive is given only "decades" to survive. Could
>this be the final century for hand written text?

Well, it could be the final century for writing 18th Century roundhand with
ballpoint pens, which would be no bad thing.

The joke of the article is the photo of the teacher's hand guiding 'his
students through traditional penmanship', showing the pastiche that passes
for such in North American education. This isn't traditional penmanship:
it's a 20th century fabrication that completely misses the point of the
forms that it teaches, i.e. the split steel nib and the swelling line, both
of which disappeared from schools many, many decades ago.

There was a discussion about the so-called 'cursive' recently in the
Typophile fora:

http://www.typophile.com/forums/messages/30/10808.html

John Hudson, whom you really shouldn't get started on this subject :)


Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com
Vancouver, BC tiro@...

If you browse in the shelves that, in American bookstores,
are labeled New Age, you can find there even Saint Augustine,
who, as far as I know, was not a fascist. But combining Saint
Augustine and Stonehenge -- that is a symptom of Ur-Fascism.
- Umberto Eco