rob was here.

I had an interesting conversation with an acquaintance of a family member, who happens to be an elementary school teacher who's starting off. She mentioned a funny story which happened to her recently where a child was struggling with learning cursive writing, and would rather print. The parent of this particular child then questioned, why does my child even have to learn cursive writing in today's world?

I strongly believe that a question worth looking into. I don't believe cursive writing should be eliminated all together, but I think it is certainly stressed too much in the school system, and gradually replaced with proper typing skills.

I print. I always have. There are two places where I write down characters using a tangable writing instrument: white boards and in my log book.

I'm flicking through my log book here now, and it seems that about 80% of my words consist purely block-letter printing, while the rest consists of hybrid print and run on printing. On whiteboards (where ideas are trying to be conveyed to other poeple), I exclusively use capital block-letter printing for clarity reasons, and it's grown into second nature to do so.

To me, it seems like we spend our early years learning the aphabet, and how to spell words using simple non-serif printed characters. Then they teach how to write in italicized serif victorian style lettering to write a few essays in our mid-schooling years. Then we try to recapture the simplicity of basic print as adults. We have even taken it to the next level: even Serif based fonts are frowned upon in the new Web 2.0 elite culture. People want plain-jane kindegarten-era fonts, and rightly so, they are plain and easy to read with little variation across how different people write them (comparted to cursive writing).

Another fork of this conversation is regarding phonetics. People laugh when I say this, but I don't see any reason why we spell phone, knife, know, and walk the way we do, and I would much rather see them written as fone, nife, no, and wok. Silient letters are a waste of characters, and the only reason we write and spell this way is the belief that traditional mechanisms for conveying information are the only correct way of doing so. I would like to see the english language revamped, and the focus placed on phonetics. People laugh at the AOL-kiddie way of saying "how r u doin?", but really, they are getting the same message across as with traditional spelling. They are even using less characters, key strokes and effort to do so. So who are really the suckers. We r.