Saturday, November 14, 2015

The cursive handwriting

Hubby's family are big in letters, so we still received them from time to time. His grandmothers send us religiously a birthday card for all our birthdays, sometimes including their fête. They send us postcards when they are on holidays.

I love receiving letters and postcards but the problem is, their handwritings are indecipherable, for me. All of them write in cursive and I have hard time understanding them. I learnt cursive writing in art classes, I remember we had to buy a special pen and use it to write connected letters during several art classes.

Here an example of a letter from the family. I never quite understand why my French family chose to write in cursive which makes my head spins each time I read it.

Now that my daughter goes to standard one, I'm seeing her learning to write in cursive everyday. So it is a norm in France! French learn to write in cursive since young age and they continue it into their adulthood. My daughter is learning to write in Uppercase, Lowercase and Cursive (script) in school. And now when she writes a sentence, every alphabet is connected.

 One of her homeworks was to write her name in Uppercase and in script.

She got a letter from a schoolmate, the last sentence was written in cursive.

Hubby was the only in her family that writes in print instead of cursive. He explained that his teachers found that he wrote badly in cursive and advised him to write exclusively in print. No wonder I can understand his writing!

PS: I was checking out why France still implement cursive handwriting in school and realised that it is a tradition back to the quill time. By connecting all the alphabets, it would improve writing speed and it would require less hand lifting. However, this is less practiced in US and UK now, some schools have stopped completely teaching cursive to their students.

5 comments:

  1. And if you ever mention the idea that cursive should not be learnt anymore in french schools, you would see an enormous uproar from everyone from teachers to letter graduates to artists...
    This country is very very attached to its tradition of Culture (with a capital C).

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  2. Yes my hubby and his family write in cursive too! So I totally understand when you said it makes your head spin!! Same for me.. Haha

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  3. my D writes in cursive too, she write it better than me! .. I think it is so beautiful! I think kids should learn cursive. ;)

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  4. I didn't even know that I was writing in cursive (script). I thought that every one writes that way until we switched over to typing with two index fingers on the key board.

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  5. I write in cursive. I don't think I learn it in an art class, but at standard 2 or so during bahasa classes or english classes. Cursive handwriting forces writers to make sure the words are correct and nice, and therefore not so cincai like chicken scratches.

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