Europe Pub (PieFed)If you read cursive, the Newberry has a job for you.
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Sternlithub.com/if-you-read-cursive-the-newberry-hasā¦
lithub.com/if-you-read-cursive-the-newberry-hasā¦
You can tell the llm companies arenāt serious about supporting their products long-term because these kinds of projects still rely on volunteers. If Anthropic or OpenAI or Google or whoever was serious about building better LLMs, theyād have paid employees digitizing every written word in every corpus on earth to increase the size of the training set.
I donāt even think itās that: Given that cursive and handwriting as a general mode of commuication is all-but extinct - and for years hasnāt been taught in elementary schools, (thankfully that is changing, albeit slowly) there arenāt enough people that work in IT that grew up having to hand write papers to get traction on these projects.
Hand writing papers was hell. When I was a child I thought I hated writing. It turned out I just hated handwriting. Getting a word processor was a godsend and improved not only my literacy, but also my academic performance. I believe there was a short time I was being considered for special need classes not because of shortcomings in my intellectual abilities but rather the ability to transcribe those ideas to a page. Also having that computer in the early 1980s also lead to my career in IT.
Can I ask what benefit you see in longhand cursive being taught in schools? What subject being taught today would you take time from to put toward cursive education?
At the most basic, itās hand/eye coordination.
Talk to any educator thatās been teaching grade school children for a few decades. Thereās a definite lack of finer motor control in children that havenāt been taught to write in cursive. That is one of the reasons that I keep seeing as an example when itās brought up for consideration to be reinstated. (this is ancillary to the whole skilled craftsman/labor pivot that is finally being addressed!) Hand skills do make a difference.
NGL, my husband canāt write in cursive and his printing and other finer motor skills are shit. He cooks and I fix the cars and the electronics and help him with whatever projects that require nimble dexterity. I also have a bang up easy to read handwriting script AND can print like an engineer or draftsman. Both my parents made sure I could write cursive and print legibly. Mercilessly so..
Thereās plenty of other ways to teach thatā¦Iāll bet kids who worked during the industrial revolution had pretty good coordination, too, but weāre not teaching that in schools
Iām a product of the cursive handwriting system in school. It didnāt do anything to improve my handwriting in script or print.
The benefit to teaching students cursive is that they can read cursive. There is no other benefit to teaching such an unreadable mess of a font.
Iām confident Google could figure out how to hire great aunt Ethel, should they so desire.
The bigger problem than cursive not being taught is the people that bitch about it are often the problem. Cursive isnāt the issueā¦ itās your garbage, chicken scratch penmanship, grandma.
Like the example they provide from that Sherwood diary.
I read that too.. then took a step back and realized it was a journal notation made with a fountain pen (not a ball-point) so the scrawl was understandable. Legible.. well thatās another matter.