Today in the local newspaper was an article titled "Is Technology Erasing Cursive Penmanship?". I found it interesting. With modern technology like texting and computers, a lot of people are not writing anymore. It further mentioned that most schools do not teach cursive penmanship beyond grade three. How many of you remember the hours of drawing loops? And that the writing is most legible by grade four and degrades after that.
I always had poor penmanship. I remember being called to Mrs Hoffman's desk in front of the class in Grade five and embarressed because my penmanship was poor. By junior high, nobody seemed to care anymore. In high school, I always had a full load of science, math, history, etc. classes and never had time to take a typing class. But, I did take mechanical drawing and we had to learn to "letter". That could be considered printing, but we used guide lines and the strokes for each letter were precise(you always "pulled" the pencil). So, when I got my first job at Boeings and later at the Shipyard, all of us drafters, techs and engineers prepared drawings by hand. Usually the first sheet of a large drawing contained the notes, LOTS of notes. It sometimes could take a couple days to letter in the notes. My lettering became very "readable". Fortunatly we had secrataries who could type letters and other documents.
After many years of hand drafting, I started forgetting how to write and anything I wrote became a combination of writing and lettering. The newspaper article also mentioned this. Part way thru my career, we started preparing our drawings using computer systems. Since I had not learned to type, I struggled with any of the computer applications that required much typing. I was definatly a two finger "hunt and peck" person. As my career progressed, we employed fewer secrataries and the techs and engineers had to prepare their own letters and documents. Fortunataly my typing had improved, but I was not particulary fast. But the ability to edit what you type is invaluable!
And my cursive penmanship has gotten worse. I can hardly read anything I write. Is this a case of "use it or lose it"? How many of you can still write?
The article from the newspaper:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CURSIVE_ANGST?SITE=MALOW&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
Only my name is a sure thing these days; I have on occasion used my penmanship (or lack there of) to disguise my spelling limitations. Dave
ReplyDeleteI guess many of our generation (I think I am about the same age as Dan) had much the same experience.
ReplyDeleteI too was harried at school by teachers who were trying to correct my untidy unreadable cursive style. I somehow struggled through school and college with it.
In my first job (as a research scientist) I used to write my papers in cursive and send them to the "typing pool". I don't know how they read them. I remember sending the papers back to the typists multiple times to correct errors mainly caused by my own bad writing.
Then I went into information technology, learned to use a keyboard, and hardly ever had to write with a pen again.
As we migrated into using computers at work, courses in "keyboarding" were being offered. The term "typing" seems to be defunct as well. Who owns a typewriter anymore? Kind of like the slide rules I used to keep around to scare the new engineers.
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