I recently got a tablet for use as a home entertainment controller and newspaper and the first thing I wanted was a pen or a stylus with the tactile feedback of a pen. My cursive is far from Declaration of Independence level but as a personal project I've been practicing and it's remarkable how fast writing anything becomes. I'd go so far as the argue children should be taught cursive first and then learn to recognize block letters later. Watch your waitress sometime if she takes notes on a pad and you'll see what I mean. I'd love to see an app that can be trained on my own handwriting and used to fill in fields and create custom gestures to execute complicated commands. I don't know if I'd like to program on something like that, but as far as my day to day living it would be incredibly convenient.
Is Handwriting History?
41–50 of 68 posts
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#42I always carry a pocket sized notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. It's still the fastest method to write something down, it always works and it's socially acceptable to use in all situations. Most people whom I meet, even in private, will see me take out my notebook at the beging of the meeting, taking notes occasionally while we interact. I don't think you could do that with a computer or phone and it allows m…
>Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.
I think this is the killer advantage of handwriting over typing text in a computer/phone/similar. You have much more expressiveness: you can underline, highlight, cross out, circle, draw, make arrows, organize in lists, different indentation levels, different sizes and fonts lay things out along the page as best represents your mental pictures. And it's all simple and frictionless. I'm very very skeptical any computer program can ever be as natural as jotting stuff down with pen and paper.
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#43My brother (43yo) had to take a full day writing test for a new job last week.
He, as most people, have not wrote long text for years.
He told me that his hand was really painful at the end of the day. I can understand that !
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#44I find that the more time I spend around computers, the more I actually want to hand write things. I've recently gotten into the habit of keeping notebooks for various things, I even wrote a letter by hand to someone (something I haven't done since I was a child). There's something so permanent about handwriting, compared to an ephemeral computer file. There's also the fact that notebooks don't run out of battery, or…
I've been using handwriting more often as well.
One great benefit is that, unlike when typing, your writing speed is usually slow enough to where your brain can go over it a couple times for sanity checks.
There's also the free form advantage (especially if you're just writing notes, it's fine to just draw little diagrams in the corner, scratch things out).
Even writing out pseudo-code ends up being very useful. Thinking while staring at an IDE is usually very difficult, I've found. IDEs are great for looking up and reading code (jump to definition, extra metadata) though
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#45If only... I recently had to take a standardized business knowledge test and I had to write a disclaimer (eg: "I hereby certify that...") in CURSIVE. When I asked if we really had to write in 19th century writing, she replied that this was the "writing of the business world". No words.
Historically, block letters were taught to young children first because they were seen as less difficult to form, and therefore writing by someone with little fine motor control would be somewhat legible. Cursive was how adults wrote. In that sense, she was correct. That said, "the writing of the business world" today is Times New Roman (or maybe Helvetica Neue). It replaced the Palmer Method of Business Writing[1],…
As someone who was forced to learn Palmer style in school, I must say I always hated the capital Q. I don't know if I just couldn't get it right, or I never really saw it as legible, but it annoyed me that it looked too much like a 2. I went back to block letters in college and never thought much of penmanship.
Until college, when I learned a bit of LaTeX and became fascinated with fonts. Still hate that Q though. Thank goodness for computers.
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#46Taking note is still faster in with a pen and paper. Thinking as well. And I'm on the very upper scale of computer skills. Lately I even removed some part of my project management tooling to replace it with paper. Very short term actionable data is more productive on paper for me.
In agreement with TeMPOraL, I think there is at least two different kind of ‘note taking’ or even problems to think about.
For coding problems or algorithms for instance, I honestly find it way easier and faster to type, even pseudo code or sequence diagrams (basically ascii art at that point). It specially helps to be able to move around blocks or ident/deindent, bold or format whole portions.
For more architectural or organizational problems, hand writing on a blank canvas is more efficient. Not faster in my case, but the freedom is unmatched.
Funnily enough, for math with equations and lot of symbols, I’m not proficient enough to have a free flow of ideas that I jolt down on paper mindlessly. There’s so much friction from the start that the burden of formating in a software for instance is negligeable compared to the struggle I’ll have to come to the right exceptions.
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be a very slow typist :). I can write on a keyboard much faster than on paper, and I'll bet I can outpace any regular person in this way. One could try and compete by employing some stenography shenanigans, but at that point I'll just enable abbrev mode in my Emacs and beat them again. Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text. The moment I expect needing to write a l…
let's see you write out complex equations with equal facility.
I explicitly mentioned in my comment that this is where I switch to paper.
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be a very slow typist :). I can write on a keyboard much faster than on paper, and I'll bet I can outpace any regular person in this way. One could try and compete by employing some stenography shenanigans, but at that point I'll just enable abbrev mode in my Emacs and beat them again. Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text. The moment I expect needing to write a l…
You must have a very limited way of expressing your self :) I can express with a pen using symbols, drawing, spacing, diagrams, flow... Too many people confuse taking notes with transcription, or forget to take in consideration the cost of context switching.
Ouch :). I suppose I asked for it, and yeah, you're right. I mentioned doing symbols, drawings and diagrams on paper, but 90% of the time my notes are just plaintext stream of thoughts or outlines.
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
You must be a very slow typist :). I can write on a keyboard much faster than on paper, and I'll bet I can outpace any regular person in this way. One could try and compete by employing some stenography shenanigans, but at that point I'll just enable abbrev mode in my Emacs and beat them again. Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text. The moment I expect needing to write a l…
You must have a very limited way of expressing your self :) I can express with a pen using symbols, drawing, spacing, diagrams, flow... Too many people confuse taking notes with transcription, or forget to take in consideration the cost of context switching.
I think that’s covered by the "Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text" part.
Also we’re not really talking about note taking, more by which mean you put ideas on a written support.
I am under the impression that people who spent the majority of their formative years on pen and paper will in mostly be more comfortable thinking on pen and paper, but increasingly I feel that the lack of practice in hand writing will put a lot more friction in that process, tiping the balance in a different way.
Also there’s a flurry of study floating around about university students who can’t think while typing (and It’s usually about note taking to get back to your point), but it feels counter to my own experience, and I wonder if it’s not an effect of the studies done on students who just came out of a decade of pen and paper learning. Just like how children can have a hard time reading and understanding the meaning at the same time, or how their first years of writing is really taking an input and transforming it to an output.
Re: Is Handwriting History?
#50Taking note is still faster in with a pen and paper. Thinking as well. And I'm on the very upper scale of computer skills. Lately I even removed some part of my project management tooling to replace it with paper. Very short term actionable data is more productive on paper for me.
As others mentioned, that's certainly not my experience, but the tactile nature of taking noted by hand still helps me remember better. I've been half-heartedly considering learning shorthand. I still like taking notes by hand, but I often realllllly wish I had a mostly verbatim record of some meetings.
> but the tactile nature of taking noted by hand still helps me remember better
As a data point, I can confirm that too - for me it also seems that writing something by hand is significantly more helpful to learning/remembering it than typing. Because of that, during my university years, while I often took lecture notes on the computer, I would rewrite key points on paper several time, to make them stick in my head.