Penmanship
jaredgorski.org
Penmanship
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Re: Penmanship
#2> Practicing penmanship unlocks neat handwriting.
Practicing speed-writing unlocks fast handwriting....
Re: Penmanship
#3Fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact: my 15-year-old nephew recently had to sign a document for some volunteer work, and he didn't know how. Apparently, schools no longer teach cursive, not even enough for kids to learn how to sign their own names for legal documents. The secretary was just like, "Yeah, we get that a lot; he can just print his name instead, that's fine."
I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.
Re: Penmanship
#4> Practicing penmanship unlocks neat handwriting. Practicing speed-writing unlocks fast handwriting....
Maybe you should write a web blog post nobody will read about it
Re: Penmanship
#5Re: Penmanship
#6Covid 19 is going to have introduced a generation with the worst handwriting we've seen so far. By worst I mean both incorrect and illegible, and I'm basing this observations of my daughters who were in 1st and 4th grade during the first lockdown. Admittedly, they already had what I would call "poor" handwriting.
I have no problem with the idea that legible is the primary criterium for handwriting. Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Correctness was already on the way out by the time I came along anyway. There was a uniformity to my mother's and grandmothers' handwritings that was not present among my peers and me in school.
The only experience that I have that says someone must continue to learn cursive is that there are lots of historically important (or at least interesting) documents that are difficult to read even for me, and my kids would have a harder time still. Reading is not the same as writing of course, so merely practice reading these types of things is probably enough. I guess it's similar to Fraktur, which is difficult to read if you've never seen it, but not that bad with just a little practice.
Re: Penmanship
#7Oddly enough I used to write my '0' like an 'O', until I started writing down a lot of chemical structures with numbered atoms. I had to distinguish between the 0 label and the 'O' of an oxygen. I've now adopted the 0 as the way to do it :)
edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...
Re: Penmanship
#8Oddly enough I used to write my '0' like an 'O', until I started writing down a lot of chemical structures with numbered atoms. I had to distinguish between the 0 label and the 'O' of an oxygen. I've now adopted the 0 as the way to do it :) edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...
I’m not sure how good rendering support is, but you can try explicitly specifying in Unicode that you want a zero with a "combining long solidus overlay":
0̸
(May render as 0 ̸, but should look like a single slashed zero. Wikipedia seems to think this is the way to get a slashed zero in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)
Re: Penmanship
#9I've been really leaning into handwriting - and good penmanship in general as a fun creative activity. I started writing all my notes/journal entries/etc in cursive during covid just for something to do and I've become very enamored of the process. Often I find myself wanting to write just to do it (I imagine if I was in to needlepoint, this is the time I'd do needlepoint). I end up writing a lot of journal entries and letters to friends (it usually starts with "I want to write" and my own thoughts and doings are an easy subject) which has a nice personal and social effect. I acquired some fancy pens and sewed myself a fancy leather journal that are a pleasure to write with and that have really accelerated and sustained the habit.
I wouldn't make any claims that writing has somehow made me magically smarter or better at anything else, I just find it fun to do (and I believe that pleasure is vastly more important than "productivity" so that's a win for me). It seems probable that my composition skills are better (or at least different in some hard-to-define way) due to the slower speed and non-editability of handwritten text. I rarely find myself at a loss for what sentence to write next when I'm handwriting because my thoughts are already buffered up since it takes them a bit longer to get onto the page.
Another angle for me is that I recently picked up a chronic disease which has changed my energy levels a lot and many old hobbies are no longer feasible as often as they used to be. I can write even when I feel like there's a mountain of tires on fire inside my head.
Re: Penmanship
#10Every couple years, I'll adjust my doodling habits to a set of patterns based on a simplification of the Palmer method. This simple doodling practice has given me the best handwriting at just about every place I've worked in the past ten years.
Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of:
+ continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a slinky)
+ continuous counterclockwise version of the above
+ continuous line mountains/valleys (draw an N that becomes an M that keeps going and has tons of peaks)
Repeat.
The first time trying it, most people will find it freakishly difficult to do smoothly and consistently. That's because your fine-motor eye/hand control circuits aren't tuned for these motions which are are the basis functions for all western language penmanship. If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve, not because you learned penmanship but because you enabled your fingers to do what your brain is telling them to do.
This will also help you have better penmanship on a whiteboard, but in-office whiteboard writing involves more large muscles as well, so it doesn't hurt to also doodle on a whiteboard this way once you have the fine-motor controls tuned up (the fine-motor remains the most important, even on a whiteboard, so starting with pen and paper doodling will get you where you want to go fastest for either format).