A few weeks ago, Neil DeGrasse Tyson was on the Daily Show telling stories about Pluto, and mentioned getting a letter from a little kid who added the postscript “Please write back, but not in cursive, because I can’t read cursive yet.” We were talking about this in the car yesterday, because Kate’s been reading one of these books, and I realized that I don’t think I could write a letter in cursive, even if I wanted to.
I did learn how to write in cursive, back in the day, but my handwriting was always borderline illegible, and I switched back to printing pretty much as soon as the teachers stopped grading on handwriting (sometime in junior high). It’s probably been fifteen years since I wrote anything longer than my signature in cursive (I remember some application in grad school that required me to write out a lengthy declaration, and I struggled with it). I’m no longer even sure how to make some of the letters (“Q” and “Z” particularly, but I was never good with those).
I’m not sure how typical my experience is, though. So let me throw this out to my readers:
If you had to write a couple of sentences on paper, how would you do it? Printing, cursive, or typing it into a word processor and printing it out?
Also, if you could indicate when you were in school, that might be interesting. Do they even bother to teach cursive these days?