I’m glad I’m in Canada, so I didn’t have to take SATs or jump through the other hoops you apparently have to go through in the US to go to university.
Wheelpath
No, but you have to sign this promise that you won’t share what’s on it note in cursive, the essay can be printed.
Random832
That’s not cursive, that’s a signature.
Akemin
No. There’s a four line statement you have to copy, or they’ll void your test.
David
No. They actually make you write that pledge in cursive.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Writing in cursive is a big deal for you lot? Lol, kids at my primary school (fyi I’m English) were taught cursive basically from year 1 (age 5). By the time kids go to secondary school, it’s assumed they can write in cursive reasonably well as standard.
…that’s not taking into account that my handwriting has changed a lot since through secondary school, college, uni, and 12 years of (un)employment, becoming first a lot more loose and loopy and flowing, and then starting to kinda deteriorate as I find it more uncomfortable to hold a pen now. I think I’m starting to get arthritis in my writing hand. 🙁
El Chupacabre
We were taught cursive (in the U.S.) after we were taught print, but it wasn’t new to us in high school. It’s just that after being taught, we’re never expected to use it again as part of curriculum. Some of our primary schools aren’t teaching it to begin with now, and it’s causing a bit of an uproar, at least near me. Some people see it as very important, but given how quickly most people can type, learning a second script designed for speed has always seemed archaic and redundant to me.
Marisa Mockery
Cursive made my handwriting worse…..before cursive I had s nice clean print. After cursive I created this weird half print half cursive writing only I can read. It does make you write HELLA faster though.
Sars
The essay doesn’t have to be incursive, but there’s a written statement that basically says “Don’t cheat or reveal test information”, and you are required to copy that statement in cursive to ensure you know to not cheat and stuff.
Pastafarian
I the ACT test and we were all allowed to just handwrite that statement regualry.
Either that or the SAT.
Silvester Crow
My ACT was all multiple choice, and that was two years ago… I got a 22.
Needfuldoer
What did you do, pump a couple rounds of bird shot into the Scantron page?!
No Name
I’m pretty sure the ACT uses a scale of 24, not 2400, like the SAT.
modulusshift
36, actually.
Raibean
That just means your school didn’t make you take the essay portion.
licoricepencil
You also get to write it in cursive on the LSAT! yayyyyyyy
Bladeglory
Like Wheelpath said, the “I won’t cheat” promise at the start needs (needed?) to be written entirely in cursive. It took us almost half an hour to write the single paragraph and we had to take a break after it. My wrist was tired afterwards and we essentially hadn’t even started the SAT.
ischemgeek
Trufax: I read at a college level at 10. If I weren’t Canadian, might not have gotten into uni. I am 28 and still can’t write cursive (yes dysgraphia, the learning disability nobody’s heard about!)
Vouksh
Holy crap, thank you… I looked up Dysgraphia, and holy crap I match every single one of those symptoms. I can read fine, I have nigh perfect spelling and grammar, and can type faster than the average person, but make me sit down with paper and pencil? Takes me a year to write a paragraph, and you’ll have a hell of a time reading it.
ischemgeek
Literally every time I mention dysgraphia, I get that response from at least one person.
Dunno bout you but for me when physio suggested it, it was a literal break down in tears moment for me because I was finally having someone else affirm that I wasn’t just lazy and that it really was that hard for me.
Didn’t realize how much handwriting baggage I had until then.
Mr Ak
Huh. I’m still pretty sure my writing difficulties have purely motor skill causes, but… huh.
Anyway, regardless of possible difference in causes, I feel your pain.
The bad part is, I legitimately can no longer write in print anymore after being required to write in only cursive for four years.
Needfuldoer
I graduated over a decade ago, and except for a squiggly line that vaguely resembles my name I have completely forgotten how to write in cursive.
Even lower case print letters take effort; for some reason I default to small caps.
begbert2
I had great handwriting as a kid, back when I was printing everything, but when they taught me cursive it and my regular handwriting merged and now everything I handwrite looks terrible, whether I’m trying to write in cursive or not.
Mmm. I remember when my teachers insisted that in college I’d have to write all my papers in cursive.
Get to college, “None of us wants to interpret your handwriting. Print neatly or use a goddamned computer.”
Carriethedragon
I don’t know how long ago that was–or if you’re still in college–but in my current experience, even that doesn’t fly. I can’t remember the last time I was allowed to hand-write ANYthing to turn in except exams and the odd worksheet.
In most of my classes, typing was only required for grad students, and optional for undergrads. It wasn’t expected for high schools to have taught LaTeX, so the profs wanted to give us time to learn it before requiring it, since they knew that without a lot of practice, it can be very slow to type. But grad students were expected to turn in professional-looking work, hence the LaTeX requirement. For time context, this was about half a decade ago.
Random832
And it didn’t even occur to them to make undergrads type in something? I mean, Word/OpenOffice/HTML isn’t necessarily going to be professional/academic quality, but it’s got to be better than a modern teenager’s handwriting.
Argh! I forgot to mention context again, didn’t I? Sorry. 🙁
I majored in math. After the first few classes, our homework was almost entirely writing proofs. I haven’t been keeping up with recent developments in word processors, but at the time, it was new and unusual to have a good “formula mode” and even then, you had to click all the things like in a character picker, and it still might not have some of the symbols we needed. And without that feature, the choices would be a character picker or memorizing a lot of Unicode numbers, and it would look worse than nearly anyone’s handwriting. At least at the time, LaTeX was basically the only computerized method of writing that was up to the task for the type of assignments we had. Even the word processors that did have that new “formula mode”, that mode was basically just a wysiwyg-style gui for a limited subset of LaTeX.
So less “didn’t occur to them” in this case than “other tech wasn’t ready yet”.
Yeah, I remember similar struggles for naught. In elementary school we had these old DOS computers and dot matrix printers that had font settings on the printer, so to get around the cursive requirement I typed it up and printed it in “script” which was a font that resembled cursive.
Do they still require cursive? I can’t remember if I took the ACT or the SAT but as far as I can remember, I didn’t need to write anything in cursive on any part.
The thing about cursive is, it was invented for fountain pens. With a fountain pen, it comes fairly naturally. It’s actually more difficult not to join the letters up with extraneous swooping lines. But just about everyone who’s learned cursive writing for the last several decades has done it with a ballpoint, or worse, a pencil.
Cursive is pretty much all I remmember , I mean mine is still ugly as he’ll but when I try the print blocky ones it ends up with half letters in cursive just with spaces in between
I never learned to write in cursive. My disgraphia was diagnosed around the same time we were supposed to learn to write it due to it being made clear by how badly I was struggling. The school kinda gave up on forcing me after that and let me keep writing everything outside that one set of lessons in print. Eventually they gave up on making me write most things and let me hand in computer typed stuff (For homework) or stuff hand written by the aide they assigned to me.
Sensory-motor type here. I wasn’t diagnosed until college when forcing neat handwriting led to my grip dislocation my wrist ( scaphoid joint to be precise) as an RSI. Seriously wish my parents hadn’t been all “WE don’t have a r-slur in the family” when teachers first brought it up as a possibility.
duckgalrox
Never mind that learning disabilities aren’t a medical diagnosis and have nothing to do with intelligence…
thejeff
“are” a medical diagnosis?
Otherwise, I’m confused.
ischemgeek
Never mind that even if it did, that would not make me less a person. Intelligence not being a good proxy for worth as a person and all.
(I am autistic and have cousins with intellectual disability so I have a problem with framing the issue of learning disability discrimination as being wrong because intelligence because I know a lot of ppl who aren’t particularly intelligent and are still worth as much as me with my gifted status and high-160s IN.
Oh, well, my normal handwriting *is* cursive. We only write in cursive over here in Estonia while in school. It’s fluid and fast and I don’t understand why you guys are taught two different types of handwriting. Makes no sense.
Same here, another European country. We don’t even have a word for it, it’s just called “handwriting”. But I have to admit it’s kinda useless. I wish we adopted the murrican method and taught children to write print-like letters. It’s much more legible, cursive is just a pain to read to anyone else.
KHNO
and another european country, where pupils are taught cursive, because it’s easier to form, then at the age of 11, are allowed to switch to print letters (called stick lettters or detached writing) which make more sense when using abbreviations and writing faster. Soon most adults and teenagers write with these ‘stick” letters. That was such a relief for me to give up cursive. Of course I had to teach to people with difficulties at interpreting letters, so I must go back to cursive and to have a terrible handwriting (I hate my handwriting so much that I stick computer printed texts when I have to write to friends or family!)…
why on them? Most people would not be able type properly on those for ages. What makes those so special or is this just some arbitrary elitism?
Znayx
I seem to recall that Dvorak was created to optimize typing. It’s setup, I’m pretty sure, with the most commonly used keys either on the home row or near the regular resting positions of our fingers. If my assumption is correct, the “arbitrary elitism” is assuming that just because our standard is so common, then that must be because it’s good. And no, I don’t use Dvorak. I’ve used QWERTY all my life.
Why would kids have *more* trouble learning Dvorak? I’d have thought it would be easier to learn than either qwerty or writing of any style. Or did I misunderstand?
I’ll second that. Because of computers, cursive is just antiquated. As stated somewhere above, cursive was created because of the old ink well pens. Cursive is useless in todays world.
Panel three is such a wonderful Dorothy moment. “what does he… why would anyone not write… Oh my poor lost innocence, now when I have seen how deep the corruption of the world goes, it is my responsibility to fix it, starting with YOU, WALKY!!!!!”
Do NOT mess with your terrifyingly assertive girlfriend, Walky. From now on YOU write thank you notes.
Suddenly, I had a flash of a strip where, after Joyce’s return, Dorothy confides in her about this event and tells her: “Now I have seen The Original Sin!”
338 thoughts on “Personal”
Ana Chronistic
“cursive”?? what’s that, like a fancy way to swear??
Fuckin’ gratitude and encouraging gift-givers to keep giving free shit!
[/sarcasm]
Inkblot
Nobody cares about cursive after elementary school until you have to take the bloody SAT or ACT. After that? Friggin’ useless.
RP
The writing section of the SAT requires that you write in cursive?
Man, I am SO glad I got into college right before that change happened.
Doctor_Who
I took the ACT. No cursive there. Whew!
tim gueguen
I’m glad I’m in Canada, so I didn’t have to take SATs or jump through the other hoops you apparently have to go through in the US to go to university.
Wheelpath
No, but you have to sign this promise that you won’t share what’s on it note in cursive, the essay can be printed.
Random832
That’s not cursive, that’s a signature.
Akemin
No. There’s a four line statement you have to copy, or they’ll void your test.
David
No. They actually make you write that pledge in cursive.
Yet_One_More_Idiot
Writing in cursive is a big deal for you lot? Lol, kids at my primary school (fyi I’m English) were taught cursive basically from year 1 (age 5). By the time kids go to secondary school, it’s assumed they can write in cursive reasonably well as standard.
…that’s not taking into account that my handwriting has changed a lot since through secondary school, college, uni, and 12 years of (un)employment, becoming first a lot more loose and loopy and flowing, and then starting to kinda deteriorate as I find it more uncomfortable to hold a pen now. I think I’m starting to get arthritis in my writing hand. 🙁
El Chupacabre
We were taught cursive (in the U.S.) after we were taught print, but it wasn’t new to us in high school. It’s just that after being taught, we’re never expected to use it again as part of curriculum. Some of our primary schools aren’t teaching it to begin with now, and it’s causing a bit of an uproar, at least near me. Some people see it as very important, but given how quickly most people can type, learning a second script designed for speed has always seemed archaic and redundant to me.
Marisa Mockery
Cursive made my handwriting worse…..before cursive I had s nice clean print. After cursive I created this weird half print half cursive writing only I can read. It does make you write HELLA faster though.
Sars
The essay doesn’t have to be incursive, but there’s a written statement that basically says “Don’t cheat or reveal test information”, and you are required to copy that statement in cursive to ensure you know to not cheat and stuff.
Pastafarian
I the ACT test and we were all allowed to just handwrite that statement regualry.
Either that or the SAT.
Silvester Crow
My ACT was all multiple choice, and that was two years ago… I got a 22.
Needfuldoer
What did you do, pump a couple rounds of bird shot into the Scantron page?!
No Name
I’m pretty sure the ACT uses a scale of 24, not 2400, like the SAT.
modulusshift
36, actually.
Raibean
That just means your school didn’t make you take the essay portion.
licoricepencil
You also get to write it in cursive on the LSAT! yayyyyyyy
Bladeglory
Like Wheelpath said, the “I won’t cheat” promise at the start needs (needed?) to be written entirely in cursive. It took us almost half an hour to write the single paragraph and we had to take a break after it. My wrist was tired afterwards and we essentially hadn’t even started the SAT.
ischemgeek
Trufax: I read at a college level at 10. If I weren’t Canadian, might not have gotten into uni. I am 28 and still can’t write cursive (yes dysgraphia, the learning disability nobody’s heard about!)
Vouksh
Holy crap, thank you… I looked up Dysgraphia, and holy crap I match every single one of those symptoms. I can read fine, I have nigh perfect spelling and grammar, and can type faster than the average person, but make me sit down with paper and pencil? Takes me a year to write a paragraph, and you’ll have a hell of a time reading it.
ischemgeek
Literally every time I mention dysgraphia, I get that response from at least one person.
Dunno bout you but for me when physio suggested it, it was a literal break down in tears moment for me because I was finally having someone else affirm that I wasn’t just lazy and that it really was that hard for me.
Didn’t realize how much handwriting baggage I had until then.
Mr Ak
Huh. I’m still pretty sure my writing difficulties have purely motor skill causes, but… huh.
Anyway, regardless of possible difference in causes, I feel your pain.
Rukduk
The bad part is, I legitimately can no longer write in print anymore after being required to write in only cursive for four years.
Needfuldoer
I graduated over a decade ago, and except for a squiggly line that vaguely resembles my name I have completely forgotten how to write in cursive.
Even lower case print letters take effort; for some reason I default to small caps.
begbert2
I had great handwriting as a kid, back when I was printing everything, but when they taught me cursive it and my regular handwriting merged and now everything I handwrite looks terrible, whether I’m trying to write in cursive or not.
Truly a boon to the species, cursive is.
Mandy
I didn’t use cursive on my SAT/ACT. I stopped using it as soon as I was allowed to. So.. 5th grade?
JetstreamGW
Mmm. I remember when my teachers insisted that in college I’d have to write all my papers in cursive.
Get to college, “None of us wants to interpret your handwriting. Print neatly or use a goddamned computer.”
Carriethedragon
I don’t know how long ago that was–or if you’re still in college–but in my current experience, even that doesn’t fly. I can’t remember the last time I was allowed to hand-write ANYthing to turn in except exams and the odd worksheet.
skaryzgik
In most of my classes, typing was only required for grad students, and optional for undergrads. It wasn’t expected for high schools to have taught LaTeX, so the profs wanted to give us time to learn it before requiring it, since they knew that without a lot of practice, it can be very slow to type. But grad students were expected to turn in professional-looking work, hence the LaTeX requirement. For time context, this was about half a decade ago.
Random832
And it didn’t even occur to them to make undergrads type in something? I mean, Word/OpenOffice/HTML isn’t necessarily going to be professional/academic quality, but it’s got to be better than a modern teenager’s handwriting.
skaryzgik
Argh! I forgot to mention context again, didn’t I? Sorry. 🙁
I majored in math. After the first few classes, our homework was almost entirely writing proofs. I haven’t been keeping up with recent developments in word processors, but at the time, it was new and unusual to have a good “formula mode” and even then, you had to click all the things like in a character picker, and it still might not have some of the symbols we needed. And without that feature, the choices would be a character picker or memorizing a lot of Unicode numbers, and it would look worse than nearly anyone’s handwriting. At least at the time, LaTeX was basically the only computerized method of writing that was up to the task for the type of assignments we had. Even the word processors that did have that new “formula mode”, that mode was basically just a wysiwyg-style gui for a limited subset of LaTeX.
So less “didn’t occur to them” in this case than “other tech wasn’t ready yet”.
qman
Yeah, I remember similar struggles for naught. In elementary school we had these old DOS computers and dot matrix printers that had font settings on the printer, so to get around the cursive requirement I typed it up and printed it in “script” which was a font that resembled cursive.
Tacos
Do they still require cursive? I can’t remember if I took the ACT or the SAT but as far as I can remember, I didn’t need to write anything in cursive on any part.
Baf
The thing about cursive is, it was invented for fountain pens. With a fountain pen, it comes fairly naturally. It’s actually more difficult not to join the letters up with extraneous swooping lines. But just about everyone who’s learned cursive writing for the last several decades has done it with a ballpoint, or worse, a pencil.
Vicmaze
Cursive is pretty much all I remmember , I mean mine is still ugly as he’ll but when I try the print blocky ones it ends up with half letters in cursive just with spaces in between
SmilingNid
Haven’t used cursive since 5th grade. my life is better for it.
Time Sage
I never learned to write in cursive. My disgraphia was diagnosed around the same time we were supposed to learn to write it due to it being made clear by how badly I was struggling. The school kinda gave up on forcing me after that and let me keep writing everything outside that one set of lessons in print. Eventually they gave up on making me write most things and let me hand in computer typed stuff (For homework) or stuff hand written by the aide they assigned to me.
ischemgeek
Sensory-motor type here. I wasn’t diagnosed until college when forcing neat handwriting led to my grip dislocation my wrist ( scaphoid joint to be precise) as an RSI. Seriously wish my parents hadn’t been all “WE don’t have a r-slur in the family” when teachers first brought it up as a possibility.
duckgalrox
Never mind that learning disabilities aren’t a medical diagnosis and have nothing to do with intelligence…
thejeff
“are” a medical diagnosis?
Otherwise, I’m confused.
ischemgeek
Never mind that even if it did, that would not make me less a person. Intelligence not being a good proxy for worth as a person and all.
(I am autistic and have cousins with intellectual disability so I have a problem with framing the issue of learning disability discrimination as being wrong because intelligence because I know a lot of ppl who aren’t particularly intelligent and are still worth as much as me with my gifted status and high-160s IN.
Walky_Talky
Man, she’s asking a lot. Cursive? Hell, she’s lucky he’s not writing in purple crayon.
No Name
But if he uses the purple crayon, his drawings will come to life!
Slartibeast Button, BIA
That might be a bad thing.
John
Dina would love it, except for the dinosaurs not being awesome giant chickens.
thejeff
Purple crayon is fine, as long it’s cursive written in purple crayon.
Gamaran Sepudomyn
Green ink on mauve paper or vise-versa would also be a possibility.
moxie
Oh, well, my normal handwriting *is* cursive. We only write in cursive over here in Estonia while in school. It’s fluid and fast and I don’t understand why you guys are taught two different types of handwriting. Makes no sense.
Dara
I didn’t ditch cursive, because I didn’t have it. I had italics to ditch instead. I print everything.
Dara
To wit: italics.
(I know! Let’s teach a handwriting that’s both slow and requires special pens! BRILLIANT!)
Ardin
Same here, another European country. We don’t even have a word for it, it’s just called “handwriting”. But I have to admit it’s kinda useless. I wish we adopted the murrican method and taught children to write print-like letters. It’s much more legible, cursive is just a pain to read to anyone else.
KHNO
and another european country, where pupils are taught cursive, because it’s easier to form, then at the age of 11, are allowed to switch to print letters (called stick lettters or detached writing) which make more sense when using abbreviations and writing faster. Soon most adults and teenagers write with these ‘stick” letters. That was such a relief for me to give up cursive. Of course I had to teach to people with difficulties at interpreting letters, so I must go back to cursive and to have a terrible handwriting (I hate my handwriting so much that I stick computer printed texts when I have to write to friends or family!)…
Charlie Spencer
Every moment wasted teaching cursive today should be spent teaching typing / keyboarding instead. And on DVORAK keyboards, not QWERTY.
patricklukcy13
why on them? Most people would not be able type properly on those for ages. What makes those so special or is this just some arbitrary elitism?
Znayx
I seem to recall that Dvorak was created to optimize typing. It’s setup, I’m pretty sure, with the most commonly used keys either on the home row or near the regular resting positions of our fingers. If my assumption is correct, the “arbitrary elitism” is assuming that just because our standard is so common, then that must be because it’s good. And no, I don’t use Dvorak. I’ve used QWERTY all my life.
Znayx
Guh, its setup
Dott
Nah, ‘It is’ set up. So it’s.
skaryzgik
Why would kids have *more* trouble learning Dvorak? I’d have thought it would be easier to learn than either qwerty or writing of any style. Or did I misunderstand?
figureaddict
I’ll second that. Because of computers, cursive is just antiquated. As stated somewhere above, cursive was created because of the old ink well pens. Cursive is useless in todays world.
Jhon
I was learning cursive when Sputnik was in orbit. No wonder I can’t understand you kids. Get offa my lawn!
Bagge
Panel three is such a wonderful Dorothy moment. “what does he… why would anyone not write… Oh my poor lost innocence, now when I have seen how deep the corruption of the world goes, it is my responsibility to fix it, starting with YOU, WALKY!!!!!”
Do NOT mess with your terrifyingly assertive girlfriend, Walky. From now on YOU write thank you notes.
Doctor_Who
In some strange ways, Dorothy may be as innocent and unsullied as Joyce.
Bagge
“It’s cute that you think I know more than you”
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2011/comic/book-1/06-yesterday-was-thursday/predrunk/
Silvester Crow
Can we just take a moment to appreciate the difference in art quality between that strip and this one? Off topic I know, it just makes me happy.
maxyai
Their heads were so huge in the past! They’re like bobbleheads. Can we make that a thing? DoA bobbleheads? Pwetty pwease?
rectilinearpropagation
Like the POP bobble heads? That would be so cute!
DO IIIIIIIIT!
BenRG
Suddenly, I had a flash of a strip where, after Joyce’s return, Dorothy confides in her about this event and tells her: “Now I have seen The Original Sin!”
Willoughby Chase
Is this one of the reasons why Walkie is afraid to tell Dorothy about his test scores?
Mr. Mendo
Two words that will make your life so much easier, Walky: “Yes, dear…”
Bagge
You mean… not smartassing? I don’t think that’s physically possible for him.
Also, Dotty would miss his blabbing, and Walky doesn’t want to disappoint.
Mr. Mendo