xkcd #2912: Cursive Letters
Alt text:
๐ ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ท๐ด ๐ฌ๐ช๐น๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ช๐ต ๐ ๐ฒ๐ผ ๐น๐ป๐ธ๐ซ๐ช๐ซ๐ต๐ ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฎ ๐ถ๐ธ๐ผ๐ฝ ๐ฏ๐พ๐ท ๐ฝ๐ธ ๐๐ป๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฎ, ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ธ๐พ๐ฐ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ธ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ฌ๐ช๐ผ๐ฎ ๐บ ๐ฒ๐ผ ๐ช๐ต๐ผ๐ธ ๐ช ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ป๐ธ๐ท๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ธ๐ท๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ท๐ญ๐ฎ๐ป.
Lowercase m, n, u, v, and w are confusing as shit when placed next to or near each other.
Try Cyrillic cursive.
So Donald Trump has been signing his name in Russian this whole time? It all makes sense now!
Good god.
I remember coming across a similar comment chain, and someone brought out cursive Hanzi, and everyone lost their minds.
this feels like a shitpost and i wont fully believe it until - i dunno when.
Can ia solve this problem?
You may be cool, but you'll never be "Capital L" cool...
Today is you ๐ucky day.
nothing in this life feels better than writing a cursive f. i put my whole arm into it. those things are the highlights of anything i write
I am very proud of my F/f, too. I do them beautifully because it is the first letter of my name.
The first letter of my name is R and I agree, my handwriting is crap but my Rs are great. I'm a fan of my Rs.
I am sad that my legal name is made only of boring letters other than a single g
you could always change it to something thatโs more fun to write, like gyzgfblf
Let's be honest. You didn't like learning cursive, you didn't like having to write full-ass papers in cursive because the computer lab was always full as a teenager, and you don't like writing cursive now because it means you probably have to borrow a pen from somebody at work who never washes their hands. Sincerely, a 45 year old.
You guys were forced to actually use it? Outside of when I was taught it, no one demanded it. In fact, most teachers I had discouraged it, or hand written at all. They wanted everything typed in 12 point Times New Roman. Double spaced. Indented. With footers and headers.
I'm 39.
I found cursive to be the most useful thing ever for exams because of its speed compared to writing block letters.
You're just below the curve of home computers becoming ubiquitous. I'm 43, and through most of middle school papers had to be handwritten in cursive.
At home my computer was from Radio Shack, hooked to a TV, and had a Daisy Wheel printer - fonts were hardware. I got my first IBM PC in 8th grade, with a 20mb hard drive & dual 5 1/4" floppies.
I'm 39 as well, and up until 10th grade it was mandatory, only afterwards it was left to us to choose. And that's across all subjects.
We were not allowed to use computers to prepare papers in high school until grade 12 I think.
In my school, we were taught to/made to write in cursive since like 4. And then everyone complained that my handwriting was illegible chicken scratch and yelled at me to write more legibly.
Then I switched to non-cursive (whatever you call writing the same shape as the text in the page here?) and immediately my text became legible. Then everyone switched to complaining that I write too slow.
I just can't win.
I have a thing with my wrist where I don't have great fine motor control and my handwriting is adversely affected. I once handed in a whole essay and my teacher couldn't read any of it. I also couldn't remember what I had written so I essentially had to make it up on the spot again.
After that no one wanted me to write in cursive anymore. But my handwriting was still pretty bad given the whole wrist thing so they decided that I had dyslexia (I didn't but that's apparently an easier excuse than my wrist doesn't work) so I had to scribe. Finally they admitted that maybe a laptop would be a better idea. The whole thing took them about 5 or 6 years to get through though. With them demanding cursive for at least the first two years.
I don't think I've written anything down at all beyond maybe "happy birthday" in about 25 years.
I ended up kind of creating my own cursive "font" because I thought several of the choices for letter shapes were, in graphological parlance, "Just completely fucking retarded." Like the lowercase S being a slightly pointy loop. I devised my own capital T as well, and jettisoned that Q that looks like a 2.
I wrote in completely illegible cursive until about halfway through college when I started using a laptop for all assignments. On a decent keyboard I can peak at 104 wpm. On the very rare occasion I do have to pick up a pen and write with it anymore, I'm usually jotting down measurements or something, or slopping out some squiggles that will just have to suffice as my signature.
I don't see teaching cursive to children as a particularly valuable usage of time, at this point it might be worth teaching them to read it, but proficiency in writing it is not valuable.
I think kids should be introduced to it, so they recognize what it is if they find one of great grandma's letters, for instance (my grandmother wrote the grocery lists in cursive so I became proficient in reading it), and it's a good way of helping kids practice fine motor skills without doing as many of those godawful penmanship exercises. But I think we need to expand art education for kids and I think cursive and calligraphy should be taught in art classes moreso than in their regular classrooms.
Hard disagree. I am an ecologist and paper notes are very common just for reasons of practicality, taking notes on a tablet or field computer can be really difficult with glare, managing power, overheating, rain. The faster and more legibley you can write, the better you'll be on the job. I doubt that ecology is the only field where this is true. Not everyone has a dang office job.
I just modified v to be pointy because otherwise I couldn't make it distinguishable from u.
In my experience everyone has their own brand of cursive anyway. And there's already a lot of variation in the "official" ones depending where you're from, so it doesn't really matter as long as it's close enough to be understandable.
I recently found an old letter from my grandpa to my grandma during the war in Old German handwriting. A lot of spikes. Decided to learn to read it. Nice journey, I recommend. (Not necessarily old GERMAN handwriting, but, you now, old handwriting in your mother tongue).
German Kurrent is almost an entire alphabet on its own. Like how the hell can you read this https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/65/LessingKleist-Brief.jpg/800px-LessingKleist-Brief.jpg
And then they also have Sรผtterlin which is almost alien https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1b/S%C3%BCtterlinschrift.png
Omitted is the capital Q that looks like a 2.
Go ahead and tell me that whole thing wasn't a direct result of early 20th century lead emissions.
the bane of Ramona Quimby
Teacher took that poor catโs head right off
I wonder how much the placement of the uppercase L stems from Randall Munroe's own memories of Far Side comics with the "Larson" signature.
I was thinking the same thing.
Serious question for people younger than me: How did you come up with a signature if you didn't learn cursive?
just write your name really fast without lifting the pen
I just do a lil scribble and call it a day. Signatures are kind of stupid anyway.
They are not especially useful now, but back before everything was computerized, signing your name on a check or a credit card receipt was a way you could help stop people from committing fraud if they stole your card or your checkbook.
Wait your signature is supposed to just be your name in cursive? But then wouldn't that defeat the point? I thought in the olden days it was supposed to be like a proof that you were the right person since you knew how your signature was written.
Anyways, for my signature I just kinda designed it. It was ages ago so I forgot my process, but it was deliberate and I remember making a whole bunch of sketches before finding one I liked. And since then I've incrementally improved it.
Although cursive has a unified design, everyone writes cursive a little differently. The idea is that cursive is designed to write whole words in a single stroke. The concept of a secure signature in cursive is that the more work a single stroke is, the more uniquely a person writes it.
That is to say, even though you may have the same name as someone else, it's extremely unlikely that a person can copy your nuances precisely enough to forge your signature on the fly. It isn't a perfect system, but it's easy enough to verify a signature that people could do it before technology was around to aid that process.
That concept is also why they say the actual design of your signature is less important than the consistency of doing it the same every time.
Everyone I know my age and older signs their name in an approximation of cursive, but in a unique way.
I put an unreasonable amount of effort into a cool signature. But I so rarely have to sign anything these days! Disappointing.
I guess it's because I have a lot of health issues, but I have to sign my name all the time. Occasionally when I pay with a card too.
I'm almost 50 and I've always had a signature that looks like I just wrote my name like normal. I've had a few people try to tell me it's not a "real" signature. WTFever, it's mine, and if someone tries to fake it, you'll still be able to tell the difference, isn't that the whole point?
I just scrawl my name in comic sans
In Germany, we did learn cursive (and its still being taught). Although barely anyone uses it anymore, I find it very useful for exams
Looking at this, while there is some overlap, it's very apparent that US cursive is not the same as Swedish cursive. E.g. lower case x starting from the top? O_O
That's interesting I've just realized that when I write x I start at the bottom left if I'm writing it normal but in the top left if doing cursive.
Huh.
We were taught to start all capital letters at the top and all lowercase letters (as they need to be connected) in the bottom left (or just left for some like v, that don't really have a bottom left).
Particularly for x, they said we might as well learn to start x from bottom left when printing as well, because then it'll be consistent with the cursive, but I find that when given the choice, I'm more naturally drawn to go top left to bottom right and then top right to bottom left, so that's what I do when not writing cursive.
Edit: See my other comment for the cursive we were taught.
Idk about "very" apparent, though.
I'm Finnish and we have much the same alphabet, and our cursive is derived from the same as the Swedish one, which is Neo-Gothic cursive, which does do the X from top down, as do we Finns.
I did check the Swedish one and it is weird you do it differently.
But how do you you even write it when starting top left? Do you just write it as a backslash and then go back and add the second stroke once the word is finished? Or do you do some convoluted thing where you go in every direction while perfectly retracing your old strokes, to draw the whole thing in one go?
Lowercase b should be lower on y axis
Honorable shoutout to words that have "br"
what the hell is cursive?!
It is the way of typing in the pic
I always was taught to call it joined up but it's the same thing. Basically where all of the letters just flow from one to the next so it looks like you're writing in Arabic. The key is to make it as illegible as possible.
"Rirruto?"
"Those are Z's"
"Well they look like R's to me."
"That's not fair! Rizzuto's not even a word, he's a baseball player! I hate school! I'm never coming back!"
Would you like to try the word "buzz"?
They're all easy to read when you know cursive.
insert language is easy to read when you know insert language
I think part of the problem lies in how cursive directly derived from print letters so shit like S, Z, and r makes you wonder who came up with this.
When you know the right cursive. We used slightly clearer letter shapes in Australia in the 80s
Though knowing any cursive makes it easier to decode unfamiliar ones
Machine coding is also easy to read if you know binary
Good thing it is the 21st century where those things aren't needed anymore
Exactly. Randall Munroe turns 40 before the end of this year.
Scraping the bottom of the barrel, I guess?
Edit: In the 80s, children were seriously evaluated for learning disabilty if they could not read cursive, as it was considered a developmental necessity. They didn't joke around with this back then.
Cursive f is actually way to high the whole point of cursive is to learn to write fast and cursive f is slower. I'm sure a large amount of people aren't even aware it's an f ( the middle right two)
It's really no more time consuming than any other letter. It might look a bit bigger, bit it's just two loops, which is a very quick and natural movement that you'll be doing a lot if you write in cursive.
It's more about following the flow of the lines than the size of the letters. Each letter should feed into the next one, so you'll barely need to take your hand off the paper for the same word. Even if you choose to make an especially "high f", that'd still take less than a second of you know what you're doing.
(Also, as has already been pointed out, second one is a J)
Hard disagree on this one, the lowercase k needs to be way more to the right, or at the very least should have h i and l to the left of it. k looks so kool.
I never liked the lower case "r" and "s." They're so awkward to make.
little b should be in the low left corner
My cursive looks like a 10yr old wrote it, which is about the last time I actually wrote in cursive
I hate that they still teach it in schools. It means that for about 3-4 years per child, you get birthday and Christmas cards and you can't read them.
It's not noticeably faster and it's certainly not neater. Just let it die.
Also writing speed doesn't really matter anymore. Most situations where writing speed used to matter now needs typing speed instead.
It is noticabley faster if you write with a fountain pen, or any pen with flowy ink.
My kids got just enough cursive in school to learn how to sign their names. Definitely not 3-4 years of it. Maybe 3-4 weeks at the most.
I'm 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It's all in fucking cursive and I couldn't read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
It's definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson's curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked it up again.
I never recovered, and I don't really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that's simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don't think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it's ok
Heard it's good to master fine motor skills.
It is neater and faster but people cannot read it nor reciprocate. It used to be more or less universal. I like it and use it, but won't if what's being written is for the public.
When I was young my teacher said "If you want to be taken seriously you must use cursive!" She also said I'd never have a calculator in my pocket when I needed it, so there's that.
In my country all the work you do in Spanish class has to be in cursive from your very youth to the year you graduate.