ION, I totally just blew off some coworkers who wanted to have lunch together, by accident! I just forgot. Ah well.

Cursive writing rapidly becoming passé

WASHINGTON - The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand.

When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.

And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less. As a result, more and more students struggle to read and write cursive.

Many educators shrug. Stacked up against teaching technology, foreign languages and the material on standardized tests, penmanship instruction seems a relic, teachers across the region say. But academics who specialize in writing acquisition argue that it's important cognitively, pointing to research that shows children without proficient handwriting skills produce simpler, shorter compositions, from the earliest grades.

Scholars who study original documents say the demise of handwriting will diminish the power and accuracy of future historical research. And others simply lament the loss of handwritten communication for its beauty, individualism and intimacy.

This just seems weird to me. Only 15% of the next batch of college freshmen use cursive? Wow.

Huh. I'm not sure using SAT essays is the best way to measure what percentage of college freshman can write in script -- I always did essay tests in block letters because I didn't want to risk the teacher not being able to read my writing, not because I didn't know cursive.

I'm not at my most alert and focused today.

HA! Coffee not workin' for ya, lady?

My brother is pretty hardcore dyslexic, and had trouble writing until he learned cursive. Something about connecting the letters helped.

Oh, oh, and to brag, I have excellent handwriting.

I am hardcore cursive. By block letters you just mean lowercase but not joined up?

I used to have bad enough handwriting that teachers mocked me for it. Then I had good enough handwriting that strangers complimented me on it.

But, boy, when it was bad it was horrid.

I'm a cursive writer since before I was officially taught to do it, and I find it almost impossible not to use cursive (as I keep rediscovering every time I have to fill out forms by hand). On the other hand, based on my totally unscientific looking-over-people's-shoulders impressions, I'm not too surprised at the death of cursive. And it's always seemed to me that people tend to be strongly one or the other.

(Other random handwriting observation: it's common in a lot of places not that are not here to teach kids to write in cursive from the start. I'm not sure what effect that would have on the claims of cognitive development blah blah, but it was one of those little "I never thought of *not* doing it this way!" shocks.)

I have been told I write "calligraphically". Interestingly, my handwriting is MUCH better when I write with an ink pen than when I write with a ballpoint. MUCH. My normal handwriting is a mix of cursive and printing - some letters connect and some don't.

Also, to me "block letters" would imply ASSCAPS.

By block letters you just mean lowercase but not joined up?

I think of block letters as being basically small caps.

I have a ridiculous semi-cursive way of writing, like I'm really printing, but too lazy to pick up the pen. Although I write by hand less and less anymore.

This just seems weird to me. Only 15% of the next batch of college freshmen use cursive?

I was taught cursive from the beginning and discarded it just as soon as I was allowed to. I could never write in cursive as prettily as I could when printing.