Semi-Dorky Poll: Low-Tech Writing

A couple of sentences = print on paper. Anything longer, or if I care about the formatting = print from the computer. Incidentally, I sign my full middle name in cursive rarely enough that it still looks a little off, relative to my first and last names. I was taught cursive in elementary school in the mid 80s. (P.S. Q is a curly 2)

A couple of sentences only I have to be able to read - cursive; a couple of sentences someone else has to be able to read - print or slow & neat cursive. I was in elementary school in the early-mid 80s. And yes, they do still teach cursive, my 10-yr old sister has bubbly, very neat penmanship (don't know where she got that from). Handwriting was one of the two subjects I got Ds and Fs in in elementary school, thank God they stopped grading it afterward.

If it's any comfort I haven't done the curly 2 'Q' since I was required to. I do 'Z's "right" (curvy version of a printed one).

I take technical notes with a pen, in abbreviated fashion. But anything that won't fit on an index card (my preferred note-leaving format) I prefer to send electronically.

My fine-motor coordination developed late in life, and I remember my whole grade school education coming to a standstill for years when my work was rejected for not being in cursive. My grades, already bad, suffered, not that I am bitter or anything. That was in about 1964.

In junior high, magically there was no more talk of cursive. And no, I cannot figure out why we waste children's time with it.

A couple of sentences or so, and up to a short paragraph: Definitely print. The only thing I ever write in cursive is my signature. My cursive handwriting was so illegible that my teachers encouraged me to switch to printing sometime around junior high, and I never looked back.

My elementary school years were the mid to late 1970s.

I remember some application in grad school that required me to write out a lengthy declaration, and I struggled with it

I remember such a declaration associated with the GREs, with the instructions "Write--DO NOT PRINT--the following statement". I also struggled with it.

My preference would be to type it and print it out, hand printing would be OK. I use post-it notes extensively, and in fact cited them as my primary store management tool on a corporate surveys when I worked for the Wherehouse chain.

My cursive writing is illegible to anyone including me. In high school my writing was so bad my teachers routinely allowed me to take essay portions of tests home or to the computer lab (this was in the mid 80's before PC's were common at all). My 5 year old shows indications of being as bad at cursive as I am. Her printing is already about half as good as mine (not an indication of how good hers is, as it is atrocious).

My handwriting is mostly print but has some backfitted cursive elements to it. It's like printing but the letters slur together.

Then again, I spent a good bit of time in probably junior high (about 1980) developing my handwriting to be fast and vaguely legible. Yeah, I was That Kind Of Geek. I have faint memories of reading that Samuel Clemens or someone had done the same thing, and thinking that it sounded like a good idea.

Same as Eric (#4). I print a fair amount, but only write cursive my signature. I learned D'Nealian in about 1979, and stopped using it by the late 1980s...

My pref is typing. I am zoom fast with typing, but not so much with anything else.

Funny that this came up. I just got a lab report written in cursive. I sent it back because I couldn't read it.

Chad, Eric@4:

Yeah, because you know, how you write the fucking thing is so much more important than the content.

In answer to your question Chad, yes they still teach cursive handwriting. It's still just as tedious and pointless. I have my kid type out everything the teacher allows. I learned it in elementary school, but that's no big surprise, since I'm a year older than you.

I print a lot! Remember those old Radio Shack circuit books that looked like they were printed on graph paper? I have a lot of that going on.
Physics/calc problems that need a lot of diagrams get the graph-paper treatment.

I have a 1991 program, Mathwriter, for the Mac. I never learned LaTex because that program was written to be a scientific word processor without an algebra engine, which is just what I wanted. I am running OS 10.3.9 so I can continue to use the program on a non-Intel Mac. I hope I can hold out until I retire.

We saw that with the GRE also. When we went to take it, my husband and I were told we had to write the "I certify that I'm not cheating . . ." thing in cursive. We weren't in the testing room yet, so we could talk. I remember whispering back and forth to figure out how to write the capital Q. I felt like I was in fifth grade!

My experience is almost exactly the same as yours. When I entered high school, I was able to write fairly quickly but never legibly. I was able to letter at a decent speed, but much more legibly, so I switched to that and never looked back.

I can now letter faster than I was ever able to write, and it's still semi-legible.

Even so, for long communications, unless they're heavily math oriented, I do tend to type because computers are ubiquitous in my work environment and I type even faster than I letter.

Chad, I am your handwriting soul mate, or doppelganger, or whatever. Same exact experiences.

Only thing I can write quickly in cursive is my signature as long as its my abbreviated first name and last name. Occasionally on legal docs if I need to sign my first, middle and last name I look like an 8 year old as I slowly trace the unfamiliar letters out. A paragraph would be a nightmare.

I can pretty much only write in cursive and it is fairly illegible. I was in elementary school during the 1980s. I'm dysgraphic and dyslexic. Years of cursive only kind of locked me into it. I can print a few short lines, but it takes effort.

I've found that my handwriting has gotten much worse over the years because I rarely do any writing by hand of anything much longer than a thank you note, other than notes in meetings or field work.

If I had my way I wouldn't take handwritten notes during field work, but the federal government won't spring for a tablet PC and typing notes while people talk to you makes them nervous. I don't get could data if people are nervous.

Print in all capitals. I haven't written in cursive since about 1995, in fifth grade.

I take that back, on the AP exams, we were required to write the honor statement in cursive, but I'm pretty sure I completely mucked it up when I tried.

Like practically everyone else here, I learned cursive, and never really buckled down enough to write it both neatly *and* fast - I could write neatly if I had to, but it took forever, and my fast cursive was only legible to me. Finally, after getting a bad grade on a 9th grade English paper because the teacher couldn't read half of it, I said "screw this" and went back to printing, which turned out to be just about as fast as cursive for me anyway.

The thing is, the only way I can see that Cursive really makes sense is if you are writing with a pen that leaves blobs every time you pick it up and put it back down on the paper. Like a quill, or a fountain pen. Cursive strikes me in the same category as Runes, which had an angular shape because it made them easier to chisel into stone or wood. Cursive and Runes are both compromises to the limitations of the medium. The pencil, ball-point pen, and of course the typewriter and computer have, to my mind, made Cursive obsolete.

It makes some small (but steadily decreasing) sense to teach kids to *read* cursive, but I don't see any call for forcing them to *write* it.

I gave up cursive at 12 or 13, like pretty much everybody else - basically the second teachers stopped caring. This would have been 88 or 89.

A couple years back, while visiting a friend who'd just moved, I saw he'd labeled his boxes with a sharpie - in *immaculate* cursive. I thought, wow, that's pretty neat. So I decided to take it up again, for fun. It came back pretty quick. Maybe a couple hours practice, plus some extra time for my signature (which went from a mangled scribble to something that resembles my name). I only print on forms, now.

I don't think cursive is better, per se. It takes more time and effort, and people mock me when I write it on whiteboards ("you write like a girl" and such). But my printing got so bad over the years, it serves as a nice excuse to slow down and write something legible.

They do still teach cursive, to my knowledge. Our 10 year old niece is living with us right now, and hers is just as bubbly and heart-adorned as the girls' cursive I remember when I was her age.

I compose by typing; my fingers get tired if I write for a long time. My notes (glancing at my desk) are in a mixture of printing and cursive.

My son in first grade (and Kindergarten) has learned the D'Nealien method of printing, which is supposed to ease the transition to cursive. It looks odd to me with most of the letters ending in little flourishes.

examples here -- http://www.dnealian.com/samples.html

I can write cursive, and I often do, although I tend to drop back to printing for names, keywords, and anything else that has to have the spelling correct. But, my preferred method of taking notes is by typing. However, I don't do that in meetings, since I insist on using a tactile feedback keyboard, and the clicking would be highly disruptive to other people in the meeting.

I learned to write cursive in, umm, about the 3rd grade, which would have made that about 1969. Of course, the running joke in school was that I was going to end up being a doctor, since my writing was so hard to read (but, I ended up as an engineer/programmer).

One trick that I've found is that it's hard to write cursive with a pencil, since you have to drag the pencil along the paper to abrade off the graphite to make the marks. It seems (to me, at least) to be a lot easier to write cursive with a fountain pen (Yes, I learned to write cursive with a fountain pen! Still use one occasionally.).

Dave

At the 2nd grade 3rd grade border, at Robert Fulton Elementary School, my cousin a year ahead of me warned that I'd have to learn cursive. And write what I heard as "S.A.'s."

My printing was good -- as confirmed in High School when I took Mechanical Drawing. I didn't want to use cursive. They were mean to my younger brother, a lefty, who they had twist his arm into a pretzel.

I told the teacher: "I'm going to be a famous scientists and author, and I'll have secretaries type everything for me anyway."

That didn't work.

I gave the same excuse when I took (and failed) typing in 7th or 9th grade. I could type 50-70 wpm out of my own head, but under 40 when copying from a pre-existing text. I could not slow my eye movements down enough to keep from losing my place.

Then in High School, 1966, I started typing on punch cards and handing in the printout. My life changed forever. Once you've used a computer, you can never go back to quill pens and cuneiform on clay tablets.

And now Social Networking software has passed e-mail among netizens.

My experience is like those of many here -- gave up cursive and went to printing everything my freshman year in high school. I only use cursive for my signature, which is pretty much illegible, but distinctive enough for recognition.

I went to elementary school so long ago that they were still filling the inkwells in student desks. In my public elementary school, all students were required to own (and use) an Esterbrook fountain pen with the #3556 nib.

I remember some application in grad school that required me to write out a lengthy declaration, and I struggled with it

Yup, that was probably the GRE. I remember getting about halfway through the statement and thinking "this isn't so bad!". Then I got to a "Z" and was forced to just scribble illegibly.

I think I am fairly atypically here. I learned both systems of writing. I've switched back and forth from printing and cursive over time -- by my latter years of high school I wrote almost exclusively in print. But I switched back to cursive in my second year of university. It looks nice, and I like writing it out fluidly; although I am not sure how legible it actually is it. Also, I kinda suck at typing -- I never masted it. And I just distracted by the computer when actually typing a long form essay, so I just write it on paper, transcribe on the computer and edit it there.

My handwriting is an incoherent mixture of cursive and printing. I am occasionally frustrated at how hard it is for me to write legibly, because (unlike most here, I guess) I actually think I compose better with pen-and-paper than at a computer. Even the early drafts of my dissertation were done in longhand, then typed-in. And I also do all my editing with hardcopies and red pens.

Like Harlan, I was taught D'Nealian in elementary school, then cursive, after which (in the late 1980s) I thought computers were the future and typed everything I could. A few years ago I even bought Getty and Dubay's Write Now, and if I really put my mind to it I can write legible italic letters. But I'm too slow to use it for note-taking, and don't have enough self-discipline to practice enough for it to become second nature.

Short things, I print on paper; a degraded by time and haste version of 1/8"high gothic taught in mechanical drawing/drafting classes in pre-CAD Engineering classes (early 80's BS). Signature is the only real cursive I still do. Longer things get typed and spell checked at least twice. My spelling, it wobbles worse than by penmanship does. :)

I print exclusively, even for my signature. I think that cursive is outmoded, and shouldn't be taught to students. I had the same experience taking the GRE general test. I had to copy a statement in cursive (does that actually make it more legally official?), which I found demoralizing. Made me feel like I was in third grade again. Still got a perfect score on the quantitative section, though.

I avoid writing by hand as much as possible, but when I do write, it's an barely legible to me combination of cursive and printing. If I have to write a short note for someone else to read, I'll print; a longer one, I'll use cursive. I learned cursive in the 70s, and they still teach it, but my 8th grade daughter generally prints everything she can't type on the computer, and always has, unless cursive was a requirement.

I print, never use cursive. I generally prefer typing when feasible, but sometimes I like to write since the change of medium can be just enough of a change to get things to come out more readily.
I'm moderately legible, particularly if I'm writing slowly.
I can actually do fantastic calligraphy- I've got the hand-eye coordination aspect and I love (broad tip!) fountain pens. But that's almost a totally discrete part of my brain than the "note taking" function.

I primarily print, these days, despite having beautiful handwriting in second grade. It's a shame that the need for increased technology education in schools is pushing penmanship training to the wayside. This could have some negative consequences on development, as handwriting acquisition and fluency have been shown to improve writing and composition skills. http://tinyurl.com/afx5wk

I print - when I need to use a pen/pencil. Most notes are very short. Otherwise I type on my laptop or scribble on my PDA.

My last encounter with cursive was in the mid 90's - when we were signing for our green cards, the agent required me to sign my name. When I presented my normal signature (looks like a doctor's scribble - but it's mine) - she made me "write it properly so I can read it"! So I wrote a bogus, cursive-like transcription of my name in place of a signature.

I went to school in Scotland, in the late 60's/70's. Cursive was required. I frequently got downgraded for poor handwriting. (enough to drop from 95 to 85 average!)

I'm not sure I can even read cursive. (My 13 year old son writes cursive - but he learned his in Switzerland from an old-school frenchwoman - so his is even stranger!)

When I write fast, it's a strange mix of cursive and print - though it depends on my mood how much of either. I would say, generally, it's more print-y, but the faster I go the more cursive it gets. If I'm trying to write nicely, I'll do it in either - and I have pretty nice handwriting, not that you'd know it from my fast-writing.

I don't know if they still teach cursive... I'm 23, so they taught it in elementary school all of 10-15 years ago at least. I remember doing special pages of cursive and print back in 3rd grade at least... Though that's all a haze. I know, however, that by 5th grade a majority of the handed-in papers were typed not printed, and kids are doing even more typing and less hand writing now.

Becca, I taught myself calligraphy a few years ago and while I'm not great at it, it did improve my handwriting a little. Now when I print I essentially use italic. I, too, love my fountain pens. One (regular tip) is here on my desk now, my preferred note taking pen; the ink flows so smoothly.

I print most things, although if I do send a note by snail mail, I will write it in cursive. Most everything else is printed. I won't use the computer unless it's really long and is something I need an electronic copy for - I won't type it just to print it.

My experience mirrors yours: I pretty much gave up "proper" cursive handwriting as soon as I could (sometime in junior high, like, 8th grade maybe?). I was never any good at it, anyways.

My preference is for typing, especially if it's anything anybody besides me is going to read. For note-taking in the absence of a keyboard, I use a scrawl which is about 75% printing & 25% cursive.

I print. Never did learn cursive.

On the other hand, Jenny has *gorgeous* cursive writing, and uses it by default.

Nothing gets typed unless >1 page, roughly.

I was supposed to be learning cursive in 4th/5th grade (back in about '67-68), but I usually ditched Handwriting to do Safety Patrol, which a lot more fun, so my cursive was never more than barely acceptable.

My handwriting settled into a sort of mutant printed/cursive form, liberally seasoned with sciency abbreviations picked up throughout my education, and written really small (the idea being to get as much note-taking as possible per page). This works well for things written for my own benefit, not so much if I have to write instructions or a list or something for someone else.

I have always hated cursive. I was never particularly bad at it, but whenever we weren't required to use script I would print. It was faster, more legible, and more attractive. I have always had good print handwriting because I grew up before computers became entirely ubiquitous (80's/90's) and kept journals. However these days I try to keep things to the computer because I'm a faster typist, and I'm less likely to lose files than paper scraps.

I don't even sign my name in cursive. I sign it in a sort of flowy, semi-legible print. For my first and last initials I use mathematical symbols that resemble the letters and correspond to each other; I stylize them enough that nobody who isn't a geek ever notices.

I would print a few lines. I rarely type anything to print out, or print anything at all unless I have to. I just came from college where I couldn't afford to waste printer paper. If it's something I want to remember, I will just type it and save it on my computer, and not have a paper copy of it.

I learned cursive in about third grade, 1993-94, and I have no problem reading it. When I try to write it, I remember most of the letters, but forget some of the capitals. My handwriting is illegible, but my printing isn't any better. I had to use cursive for a few years in elementary school, but then stopped in middle school. My mom uses cursive exclusively.

Then again, I spent a good bit of time in probably junior high (about 1980) developing my handwriting to be fast and vaguely legible. Yeah, I was That Kind Of Geek

I did something geekier. I taught myself to write legibly with my left hand, because I wanted to be ambidextrous. I guess I had some talent for it to begin with though, because it's easy for me to learn to do new things with my left hand, including using tools and my computer mouse.

I was in junior high school in the mid 70s and I had the opportunity to take an English class for smart kids. After one week in the class the principal pulled me out of the class to go to a remedial handwriting class. For an entire semester I sat with the dopers and street thugs tracing out our cursive Qs and Zs. It didn't stick. Since then the only thing I can right in cursive is my signature. My name is William, so I can make all those letters, but most people call me Bill and I have no idea how to make a cursive B, so I never sign that name.

Slow news day.

fizzchick (#1) nailed my experience exactly, down to the awkward-looking middle name. Does anyone know why they bother teaching cursive these days?

Because of the Laws of Magic. Schools are filled with rituals.

There are one-dimensional Spells -- a sequence of alphanumeric characters on a page correctly read aloud.

There are two-dimensional Spells -- think Pentagram and associated cabalistic writing. Think Mandala. And cursive (associated with Curses in Black Magic) is a format for two-dimensional Spells.

There are three-dimensional Spells -- idols, for instance.

There are four-dimensional Spells -- the proper sequence of 3-D motions, as made by hands, or hand holding a wand.

After the success of QEM (quantum electromagicodynamics,
Thaumaturge/Professor Richard Feynman turned to quantum gravity.

By analogy with the photon, which has spin 1, he investigated the consequences of a free massless spin 2 field, and was able to derive the Einstein field equation of General Relativity. However, a calculational technique that Feynman developed for gravity in 1962 â "ghosts" â later proved invaluable. Besides shedding light on previously unsolved mysteries of thanaton-photon interaction in hauntings, this led, in 1967, to Fadeev and Popov quantizing the particle behavior of the spin 1 theories of Yang-Mills-Shaw-Pauli, that are now seen to describe the Weak, Strong, and Psionic interactions, using Feynman's Warpath Integral technique.

At this time he exhausted himself by working on multiple major projects at the same time, including his Lectures in Physical Spells, and his famous self-activated bongo drums. He also became interested in forensic magic, much to the annoyance of the Paradena Police Department...

[from "Axiomatic Magic", J. Post, forthcoming]

Thank-you notes and the like, I write in cursive.

Anything semi-official that I actually have to write, I write in print.

(Graduated High School in 1978. Do not recall whether I was taught cursive in school. Presumably if it was taught it would have been sometime in the early grades of elementary school.

Something of a throwback here: the ONLY things I write with a computer are things like this, lecture notes, handouts, presentations - and Latex is used for 99% of those.

But, I still write letters, notes, etc., with pen - a fountain pen (don't ask). It's a mix of my own lousy cursive and printing.

I find writing relaxing, and if little single-malt spills while I'm doing it, I don't have a keyboard to ruin.

In school, we were only supposed to write in cursive and as a result, if I have to write something, I default to cursive. Though extensive use of computers had made it actually harder for me to write, and I find typing more comfortable. I cringe when I actually have to put down more than a couple of sentences on paper manually.

For hand-written material, I always print, with either a fine point pen or mechanical pencil. For anything over a paragraph, I use the computer. I have recently started using Evernote instead of a paper notebook.

I stopped writing in cursive by middle school. Back when I was in college, I took Russian and the professor insisted on our learning Cyrillic script. Since this was the only cursive I ever wrote, after a while I started automatically writing my signature in Russian - I became more used to it than English!

what writing i use depends on where i'm sitting.

if it's in front of a keyboard, i text-edit and print out. this is highly likely to happen, since i earn my living in front of a keyboard and am an inveterate geek at home as well.

if for some reason i'm AFK, it'll have to be my standard uppercase-only butt-ugly block printing. i share a story with most folks here, it seems; gave up attempting cursive as soon as i was out of primary school, never having acquired penmanship. i'm 36 now, and don't think i've even seen my own cursive in twenty years. i do believe we're all better off that way, too. my signature is more in the nature of a logo --- a scribble i make to mean "me", not something anybody could actually read.

if i ever have to write any more than a few paragraphs, or a pageful of scribbled notes, i go looking for a keyboard. no point wasting time and effort doing things any harder a way than absolutely necessary, after all. and if i want some writing of mine to look good, i break out LaTeX.

what makes no sense at all is why i nevertheless pine for a decent fountain pen. it's not like i write by hand enough to justify carrying a pen, much less spending any real money on one. but then, i also carry a Zippo even though i don't smoke...

Writing in a mix of print and cursive, whatever's fastest. Unless someone else has to read it, then printing. Unless it's a gift inscription in a book, then very careful cursive.

For longer, unless I'm going to want to keep it, I don't mind writing by hand.

I'm the rare exception, apparently, who writes almost exclusively in cursive. The only time I print is when filling out forms or writing signs for the lab. It's been that way since 3rd grade (1984).

(Oddly enough though, I don't make the proper capital Q. It looked two much like a numeral two for me.)

For cursive, I am down to formal notes of thanks, congratulations or condolence, especially the latter. There is something pleasant about cursive writing. You have to slow down and get into the rhythm.

I suppose they still teach cursive so that people will recognize it. If you've never written it, anything written pre-Biro is unreadable. Think of it as a firmware upgrade so we can still read seven track tapes, although with some difficulty.

I'm old enough so that my mechanical drawing teachers always emphasized the distinction between printing and lettering. Machines printed; humans lettered. If you specified that something should be printed, that meant firing up the old printing press. Even now, I don't always have an ink jet handy, so I still do some lettering.

I'm amazed at how few people responding use cursive. I learned it in the early sixties and use it almost exclusively when I don't use a computer to write. It isn't great, but it's as legible to others as I choose to make it. My recollection is that almost everyone I knew in college wrote in cursive and printing was the exception. Printing took so much longer for me and cursive is so much more flowing. And yes, they still teach cursive to children, though by the time they get to my community college classroom my students have abandoned it. I used to think that was weird, but I guess I may be the weird one.

It just occur to me that there are some parallels between concerns of the decline of handwriting and a similar decline in mental (and pen & paper) arithmetic (i.e. addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), with the blame put on the advent of word processors and calculators. We could all agree that society has greatly benefited from their invention, and nobody would get rid of them (being 21, I've never learnt the arcane arts of log tables and slide rules). The big concern is that we are becoming too dependent on them for even simple things like writing short notes or calculating change.

Of course, the analogy isn't perfect -- there is some subjectivity when determining legibility of someone's handwriting, while if you make a calculations, it either right or wrong, no if or but and that calculators can reduce (but not eliminate!) these errors. More importantly, a decline in handwriting is probably not as worrying as a decline in simple mathematical abilities, the former being just a mere technique (I've could have write this on paper, but then none of you would have been able to see it!) and the latter being a more basic skill.

re #53 Christopher

I think cursive is more like a slide rule. I never learned to use one and I can't say it would have ever come in handy.

In my everyday life, I rarely need to hand write anything other than the occasional post-it, birthday card, or scribbled meeting notes.

I do however need to do arithmetic in my head all the time. Not so much for work, but to figure out a tip, my share of a check, estimate a sale price, double or half a recipe and so on. I don't really see that ever going away.

Interestingly enough my grandfather, a retired physicist can use a slide rule pretty easily, but seems to be baffled by a Mac.

I our school, we learned joined up writing as soon as we were taught to write. I don't really remember that big a deal being made of it. You learned to form letters in what I suppose could be called a cursive script (although no-one really thinks of it that way) and then just keep going with it. We never really bothered making it particularly formal, but the same was true of grammar (you just absorb it). Not saying that my school was great, but it seemed to work.

My handwriting is fairly horrific, but I don't mind writing in 'cursive' and default to it. Most of my notes are in some combination of cursive and shorthand - mostly I aim for making a word recognisable, but I can slow down to make it more legible if need be. I can't stand printing, and default to a very strange form that tends to slip into semi-cursive at times.

For the last year or so I've started using drawing pens for taking notes. Much smoother and easier to write with while giving really nice lines. Plus different sizes force me into writing different ways - a thin pen lets me take quick notes while a thicker size makes me slow down and form letters (and particularly equations) in a more deliberate manner.

I hardly ever print things out unless I'm handing them over to someone. I do keep notes on the computer, normally jotted in Notepad++ then left open (files left open load when you re-open the editor) or just dumped on the desktop to catch my eye when I go to clear the clutter. And these days I prefer LaTeX to word processors.

I have several different styles of handwriting -- some cursive and some not. Most of them are sort of semi-cursive: some letters joined and not others. For a few hastily-jotted sentences I would probably use mostly-cursive, as I find it quicker but less attractive than mostly-printed.

I finished high school (in the UK) just last year. We were taught cursive between Years 2 and 6 (ages about 6 to 11) and "graded" on it at the end of Year 6 (I'm pretty sure they've stopped doing that now). After that -- i.e. after moving to high school -- I could write however I wanted. Actually, long before that I wrote however I wanted too, unless it was an actual handwriting assignment.

My experience is consonant with that of Chad and a lot of the other commenters: I learned cursive, I always hated it and sucked at it, and I dumped it in junior high when the teachers stopped caring.

When I write anything other than my (totally and completely illegible) signature, I print. I print at length in my lab notebook, which I hate doing but cannot figure out how to aviod, but anything else goes on the computer. At this point, I may be faster with the little QWERTY thumboard on my Android G1 than I am printing.

I write cursive with occasional short-cuts, such as making an inverted triangle to cross a lower-case "t". Two men that I know, including my brother, were given passes in typing because their handâeye co-ordination had not matured. Others simply print everything because their handwriting is not legible. Again it seems to be males who have the problem. My SO, LotStreetWiz, re-invented his hand-writing to be a graceful and legible compromise between printing and writing, and uses only the one style.

The more mechanical ways we have to take down words, the less we need clear, standardized handwriting. Remember Spencerian script and copperplate? To our grandparents, our handwriting, even the best of us, would be a "schoolboy scrawl." It's a casualty of progress.

Similarly, we don't have to learn elaborate schemes to memorize everything we want to know, now that we can keep it in books. It frees us up to learn the 240 types of Pokemon, instead.

I should add that I take notes by hand in meetings and interviews, but for composing, prefer to type on the computer. Also for letters. If a letter has to wait until I get around to it, it will never be done. I picked a large, cursive-looking font and wrote letters to my family on the computer, just signing at the bottom. For taking notes throughout the day it's something of a toss-up. I use text file for research notes. For a record of activities, I like to have them in the computer but I also keep a log in a notebook, especially if I'm moving around. It also has the advantage of being non-volatile, so I don't lose journals and whatnot when changing computers, companies, or software. I had the unfortunate experience of losing months' worth of journals & contacts when my Palm Pilot refused to sync between the home computer and the work computer without doubling the entries every time.

My penmanship has always (and I mean ALWAYS) been terrible, plus I find I can actually type significantly faster than I can handwrite anything, so for anything that anyone actually has to read that's more complicated than a grocery list, I type it up. Whenever I'm writing something like a grocery list or anything that has to be hand-written for whatever reason, I tend to use block letters.

As it happens I recently wrote a short story on paper, mainly just to see if it helped the process, and discovered that when writing just for myself at that length, I move back and forth between block and cursive almost randomly. I think this is related to the lettering issue that you mention above with Q and Z -- looking over the story now I find that I'd write something like Q-uickly, in which the Q is block-lettered but the rest of the word is script.

Class notes are generally written in block letters for me.

I was born in 1980, which should tell you approximately when I went to school, etc.

I take notes in my cursive/print scrawl that borders on secret writing. My lowest grade in school was penmanship, which applied to printing as well as writing.

I switched to printing when I took a drafting class and, for a short time, had really clear writing. This is also true for several relatives, so it might be genetic. That degraded over time, but it is how I write on the board.

I'm not sure what they teach today, but I recall one kid who was concerned about "signing" a release form. 'You mean cursive?' 'No, just however you write your name.' I suspect he has never used a checkbook, and might use a debit card rather than a credit card.

I'm in my late 50s, so take a pinch of salt.

I either type or use cursive, except on government forms, where I print in caps, on the assumption that somewhere someone semi-literate will be processing it.

I have never hand printed anything since kindergarten. If I got a job application with anything hand printed on it, it would go in the bin unread. It looks totally unprofessional to me.

Cursive, always. Learnt it in high school/college (prior classes were in the local language, Kannada.) Never heard of the word "print" used in relation to writing until I came to this country. I recall being confused by the applications and other forms where they ask you to "print" the name/address etc.

I am still not entirely sure what "print" entails. Write using capital letters? Or using small letters but not joined together as in cursive? Mysterious.

I have been writing a page-a-day diary since 1987 (since year 11 of school) and this has kept my cursive writing from going rusty. I don't write much otherwise. I do it with a fountain pen and agree that this is a good combination for getting the words to flow onto the page. The ink-splots and tediousness associated with 19th century technology can occasionally be annoying though...

Cursive. All of the little notes and to do-lists on my desk are written in cursive. I was in grade school in the 80s, and my handwriting is sort of a print-like, simplified style but with the letters joined and slanted. Most comfortable to write!

Ever since I learned to write Cyrillic in cursive while studying Russian in college, I've stuck to printing when using the Roman alphabet, as I tend to mix-n-match the two if I attempt to write Roman in cursive.

Though I never used cursive much unless I had to for school.

I write in a combination of print and cursive, although mostly in cursive. For example, I usually write capital letters in print while writing most other things in cursive.