As a person who grew up being yelled at by teachers because I didn’t slant my written letters in the correct direction, I feel justified in commenting on how little the children of today are being taught about cursive writing.
Just because we have computers that doesn’t mean we don’t have to know how to write properly. Our written signatures are always something that is needed and should be legible. I have a friend whose handwriting was so bad she had her signature changed legally to a printed one. Before that time I had no clue one could do such a thing.
Yes, we have technology today that excuses us from most hand writing but that does not mean we don’t have to know how to write or how to write correctly. I realize there is a limit to what can be taught in schools with so much to learn and so little time in a day but from day one of school children can start being taught to print as they learn their letters. Once this is done then they should forge ahead and learn not only how to write cursive letters but also to make them legible.
During the school years and for entrance exams of most colleges a person has to write an essay with pen and paper. Most tests for licensure of almost all occupations require some sort of essay as well. To be able to pass or get a decent grade on these papers they must be readable. While we could require them all to be done via computer nowadays we shouldn’t.
Look at how much we learned from the letters written back and forth between Nancy and Ronald Reagan, between world leaders and other important people in history that have been preserved for posterity. They not only tell us about the people but also about the times they lived in, the triumphs and troubles they suffered through. Thank God, so many people saved those all important letters.
Today we get an e-mail and immediately delete it after reading it. Where are the letters for our future generations? There will be none.
Children need also to be taught it is proper to hand write a note of thanks for gifts or nice gestures by a stranger, etc. Dashing off an email is so impersonal. That little "thank you" note arriving in the mail is so much more meaningful, don’t you think? I don’t give a child a gift with the idea in mind that they will acknowledge it with a written note, but am always disappointed when the note does not arrive because I know their parents do not require them to this. In my opinion, later in life this will come back to haunt them.
I was head of a department once and as such had to receive resumes and interview people for jobs. Many people came through my door but of them all I received two thank you notes from applicants after their interviews. Needless to say these people stood out when I was making my decision about who to hire.
All during our school years we need to take notes and they should not be tape recordings or on laptops; they should be hand written. I found that hand writing them made me decipher the important points from the whole since I could not write every word. This gave me better insight to the subject as I went along. It makes you have to pay attention to the lecture instead of listening to it later over and over to try to get the point. You can’t ask a tape recorder or a computer a question but you can ask a teacher.
I will admit that my handwriting never did slant all my letters in the same direction no matter how hard my teachers and I tried and as I get older and arthritis gets worse so does my legibility, but I am still so very glad that they took the time to teach me and that my Mother taught me my manners about thank you notes, too. I cherish letters and handwritten notes in cards from friends and relatives who have passed on but who I can call up easily as I reread their written thoughts. I want our children and their descendants to have this experience, too. I just don’t see that happening, do you?