Penmanship

Mine used to be better, but I've been told I can't be a journalist or a doctor. Usually comments about the text being small.

Well 1) YOU get the stuff you need in a baseball scorebook without compacting and 2) I don't want to keep flipping notebook pages. The less pages, the better to track any notes I might have taken.

It killed me in school, though. Teachers would put a page requirement, and it was no trick for me to write 300 words to a notebook page. And back then, I didn't have the journalistic gift of filling and basic B.S.

 

Ah, yes. Sister Mary Discipline with the steel ruler.
**WHACK**
Aaaaaaugh! My hand!
He's two weeks behind in penmanship, Mrs. Carlin, I don't know why.
He's crippled, he's trying to write with his left hand....

 

Moddy --
My father was crueler.
he made me copy a chapter from Wuthering Heights out longhand.
To this day, I hate all the Brontes.

 

Absolutely -- my handwriting is just atrocious. I've even had other reporters look at my notes and ask, "How the hell can you read that?"

I figure as long as I can tell what it's supposed to mean, that's what counts.

 

I have horrible handwriting.

I blame being left-handed for this.

 

Mine is now so bad that it often takes me two or three tries to write a simple Thank You note to someone -- the others are just too illegible for me to use. My penmanship was never good, but now it's just dreadful.

I'm considering starting over as a left-hander. I can't be any worse.

 

I hardly ever hand-write anything anymore. Quicker, easier and readable by typing a quick note on the laptop and hitting "print."

When I do hand-write, I always print. My cursive looks like a 3-year old drawing ocean waves. Only cursive I use now is to sign my name, which is legible.

 

Why are we taught to write cursive?

As a child, we're told that's what grown-ups do. Now that I'm grown up, I NEVER write cursive, just a bastardized version while taking notes. When I actualy write for it to be read, I always print.

In light of technology and the fact few write by hand anymore, should cursive go the way of the dodo?

 

Signing your name.

That's about all I can think of.

 

Good call. The only person I can think of that writes regularly in cursive is my mom. And if I had handwriting that good, I'd write in cursive too.

Alas, I look like my mom but write like my dad, who has some of the worst chicken scratch I've ever seen. I mentioned this on another thread a few days ago, but I've always had bad handwriting, My mom and I saw my second grade teacher during my visit home a few weeks ago and we had a laugh about how the teacher could never read my writing. My mom said "Well, I guess he was just thinking too fast to write it neatly," which made me feel pretty good.

Reading about Fenian and Moddy's punishments reminded me of the "green pages" we had to write when we got in trouble in junior high. If you raised hell in the lunch line or horsed around with a friend during class, you'd get sent to the principal's office with the directive to fill five green pages--you know, the ones with big spaces on which we learned to write cursive--front and back and every little line, with "I will not disrupt the lunch line" or "I will not disrupt Mrs. Jones during class." Now THAT was fun.

 

I've been told I have really nice penmanship.

Though I'm glad I wore out of the habit of making o's over my i's ... that or little hearts over every single freakin i and j

 

It's just something that's becoming obsolete.
Actually, it might already be obsolete.