I know that varies by region, but schoolchildren are generally taught cursive as a faster way to write. It already requires some memorisation with some glyphs being different from block letters. Why not make an additional step and completely replace it with shorthand, making writing an order of magnitude faster?
Hell yeah! Let’s take one unreadable form of handwriting and replace it with another even more unreadable form!!
Its almost like the goal is to teach people to read and write it
Totally agree. I started learning shorthand a while back but never finished the self study. Eventually I forgot everything but later in life though how awesome it would have been to literally write down everything said in some of my meetings at work or my classes in college.
That said, I think we don’t have to decide between them. Teach both.
Forget cursive, just teach block letters.
what about the opposite? cursive only
No, it’s a pain to read.
For what? Who uses/needs cursive outside school?
I only write in cursive, most people write cursove where I live, I don’t even know how to write the “normal” way
- People who make props for a film, set in the early to mid 1900s, that includes a handwritten letter that is briefly held up in front of the camera whilst the main character reads it, with a single tear dropping down their cheek
- Doctors and pharmacists
Upvoted, because I think it’s unknown, so unpopular. Though it sound like a good idea to me.
I’m curious to hear any drawbacks others find.
What is short hand?
Short hand is “journalist writing”, where a series of kind-of-scribbles sort of refer to real words, so you can take down someone’s speech in real time in an abbreviated form, then rebuild it “back at the office” and horribly misquote them.
What actually is cursive? I only know it as a “thing that makes some Internet people angry on Facebook”.
cursive is something americans dont understand
jokes aside is style of writting that actually comes “normal” writting, after centuries of attemptinf to write faster people started to write whole words in one stroke and letter began to change their forms to be easy to write in this style, it naturally evolved and somewhat standardized
I googled it… and it’s just the American word for “joined-up writing”, like you do in primary school.
It’s literally just that. All those whingeing posts on social media… they were crying about joined-up writing. Hahahahaha. What an insane bunch of babies.
[Edit] when I say “googled”, I of course mean I googled it with duckduckgo, or duckduckgoed it or whatever.
At least with cursive you have a chance at deciphering it. Shorthand looks like gibberish.
we learned something called personal shorthand in school (1980s). it was a unit in a required class in high school. i wish they would’ve done it in junior high instead, though. no glyphs, just regular letters. i still use bits and pieces of it decades later.
The argument that I’ve heard put forward about learning cursive is that it improves fine motor control and writing across the board; I’m not sure that the resulting messy combination of two glyph styles is “improved”. Why not teach calligraphy then? Shorthand is at least practical.
This makes sense, but I don’t know shorthand at all. Is it as legible as printing if you know it?
The other argument for learning cursive is A LOT of historical documents have been written in cursive. Not teaching someone cursive means their literacy becomes handicapped.
I guess the same could be said for shorthand.
Id love for you to find an example of a single historical document that is relevant to someone today and hasn’t already been transcribed hundred of times on the internet.
https://www.loc.gov/item/mss351210535/
This is labeled # Frederick Law Olmsted Papers: Speeches and Writings File, 1839-1903; Undated; On religion, fragments
According to wikipedia:
Frederick Law Olmsted (April 26, 1822 – August 28, 1903) was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is considered to be the father of landscape architecture in the United States. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his partner Calvert Vaux, beginning with Central Park in New York City, which led to numerous other urban park designs including Prospect Park in Brooklyn, Cadwalader Park in Trenton, New Jersey, and Forest Park in Portland, Oregon.[2]
This is why I specified relevant. Just because something was once written down, doesn’t make it worth reading.
That was just the first result after a search. Its going to depend on who is trying to find historical documents, their goal, what they’re researching, who they’re researching, the time period they’re researching, the types of documents they’re researching.
For example, there are a lot of historical documents during the slavery era written by free african americans. The Library of Congress has a lot of it scanned and available as images, but not transcribed into digital text yet.
“Students must learn latin so they can read the bible”
Its in English, not Latin
That’s the Bible?
No, its a historical document that is written in english cursive.
Who were you quoting?
I was quoting religious cultists
for americans yes, it is their holy bible
Choosing here to reply because I agree with you about the fine motor control, and I also agree with @9tr6gyp3 about being able to read historical documents (roll credits).
One argument I’d bring up in the whole cursive/shorthand debate is whether there are any other languages that have glyph sets that have already been described with Unicode that would be just as fast as shorthand? I’d also want to consider the ease of doing OCR on the documents for digitization. I don’t see how shorthand would be good at either of those things.
I think shorthand typing would be pretty awesome but I don’t even know any public schools that teach proper typing anymore.
How old are you that you know what cursive and shorthand are and think that children are using either? I’m 40 and the only person I know that uses cursive and I learned it from my grandmother when I was homeschooled.
I’m 32 in Australia and still write in cursive.
Learnt in school and unless it says print in block letters that’s all I do
I live in a European country where cursive never fell out of use (in fact, I believe here your exam papers will not be accepted if you write them in anything but cursive). All I know about cursive state in America is that it was phased out, and now seems to be returning.
You live in a country that requires handwritten papers in 2026? I don’t believe you.
Shorthand makes sense, since a lot of public schooling is about teaching you how to pass tests. I don’t mean to sound so cynical; they’re trying to teach you the critical thinking necessary to beat the tests. That’s how it works. They know you’ll never use most of that crap, but it’s also basis for other things, so it’s somewhat useful.
Cursive and its more elegant cousin, calligraphy, can be important, but are mostly useless. A class on both should be an elective at best. They’re nice to know and could be useful in some situations, but there are more jobs where shorthand would be an advantage, and it would be an advantage in note taking as well.
There are studies that show benefits to learning cursive beyond knowinv cursive.
There’s exactly one benefit, hand eye coordination, and it can be trained equally well by a wide variety of activities
Being able to read cursive would be a second thing. Lots of old letters and texts written in cursive, and that can be hard to decipher if you’ve never learned it at least a little.
You can learn to read cursive without writing it at all
It’s certainly easier if you’re taught, especially at a young age though. I feel like when I was young and learned, that it wasn’t more than a week or two on the topic. I personally don’t think that’s a wasted effort.
In the sense that any deliberate sustained effort improves a person in some way I agree, but it’s almost certainly not going to be practical unless you’re going into a field that requires reading cursive for some reason. Making it a standard part of every education just doesn’t make sense anymore.
I think learning to read is just one benefit. As others mentioned, hand eye coordination is another big factor. I’m not opposed to not teaching it, just listing some benefits of doing so.
ill upvote.
Gregg or Teeline?
A few of the early Gregg systems were apparently pretty easy to learn/pretty simple (Greghand/Notehand)
I actually agree.
I’ve always thought both should’ve been taught, first cursive, then by grade 6 start shorthand.
