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Penmanship

jaredgorski.org

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Re: Penmanship

#31

Post by JackFr »

dfxm12 wrote: post #22

Penmanship and calligraphy, I think, are important to develop manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination & give you a way to express your individuality. The author talks about the standard font in cursive, but I learned many ways to make the letters F, X, M and more, that I felt made my writing unique among others. I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well.…

I make my eights with two circles rather than a 'figure-eight'. I always wonder how prevalent either method is, or rather more bluntly, am I weird?

Re: Penmanship

#32

Post by zeroego »

usrn wrote: post #20
traceroute66 wrote: post #18

One of the most spectacular examples of penmanship I ever saw was sitting in a meeting with a lady who could effortlessly write phrases and paragraphs in italics... cursive italics ! It was perfect in every possible measurement. (And no this wasn't decades ago, this is 21st century). But I digress! I did also want to state that I disagree with the author's statement "Nobody writes it anymore" . Clearly the author has…

They taught millennials to write in cursive. I only stopped because some of my teachers couldn't read it. It took work to write in print as effortlessly.

Just my experience, but as a millennial growing up in the US, when I was in say 3rd grade or so we had a short unit on cursive and then I never used it again. When it came time to start signing things as an adult I had forgotten almost all of it. Years later someone commented that I signed the first letter of my last name in lowercase, oops...

Another tidbit someone may find interesting, going through elementary school in the early 90s I was forced to write right handed, despite being a natural lefty. This was due to the teachers religious leanings. I grew up in a major metro area as well. I can write with both hands now, but prefer right handed writing so the spirals of notebooks don't push up against my hand. Anytime I pick up a new hobby I have a weird decision to make about what hand I want to use. Still haven't figured out if I bowl left or right handed!

Re: Penmanship

#33

Post by slowmovintarget »

dwringer wrote: post #21
NoGravitas wrote: post #17

> In penmanship class, we learned a standard cursive font. I think it’s the standard cursive font, in fact. He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible . They have indistinct letter sha…

A few years ago I made a conscious effort to improve my handwriting and got a few fountain pens, to me transitioning from D'Nealian to a Spencerian variant was pretty easy and I think the latter is faster, more legible, and more comfortable to write. Although the differences are more significant IMHO if using a fountain pen.

I'd toyed with fountain pens on and off for twenty years. In 2019, I dug an old Waterman Expert out of my closet, watched some videos for how to use bottled ink and converters and off I went into the hobby.

I still use traditional late 20th century American cursive (D'Nealian, I think), but all the practice with fountain pens has made my handwriting more legible than it's been in a long time.

Cursive came about because writing with quill and dip pens required you keep the nib on the paper for as long as possible, lest it dry out, or the ink drop to the page. Fountain pens aren't as bad in this regard, but still do better when the ink is flowing than just waving about in the air.

I happily take work notes all day long with fountain pens (today I have a Pilot Custom 74 inked up). I wouldn't want to give them up.

Re: Penmanship

#34

Post by BeFlatXIII »

IceMetalPunk wrote: post #3

Fun (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 i…

Part of the reason I'm so cynical about the teaching profession is that I had a string of two or three elementary teachers who insisted that cursive was the only acceptable method of handwriting in educational settings. Immediately after—and for every single other teacher or professor—no one cared whether the letters were connected or block-printed so long as they were legible.

The other reason was the far-longer string of "you had better shape up now because if you don't get your act together, you'll never pass next year" and then continually passing next year with flying colors.

Re: Penmanship

#35

Post by kayodelycaon »

JackFr wrote: post #31
dfxm12 wrote: post #22

Penmanship and calligraphy, I think, are important to develop manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination & give you a way to express your individuality. The author talks about the standard font in cursive, but I learned many ways to make the letters F, X, M and more, that I felt made my writing unique among others. I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well.…

I make my eights with two circles rather than a 'figure-eight'. I always wonder how prevalent either method is, or rather more bluntly, am I weird?

I do the two circle method of writing 8s

Re: Penmanship

#36

Post by ubermonkey »

NoGravitas wrote: post #17

> In penmanship class, we learned a standard cursive font. I think it’s the standard cursive font, in fact. He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible . They have indistinct letter sha…

In re: different countries: students who study Russian (or, I assume, other languages that use a similar alphabet) typically learn to write Russian in cursive. The letter forms overlap with English/American cursive, but not perfectly, and of course there are OTHER letters, too, that we lack.

(Russian cursive is also notoriously hard to read for non-native speakers owing to a few idiosyncrasies: some letters are entirely different written vs. in print, and the letter forms can lead to ambiguity -- certain letter combinations are effectively identical.)

A near-universal phenomenon among people I've spoken with who took Russian in college is the unconscious blending of the two letter sets. Students, myself included, would routinely find themselves using Russian letters in English script while writing without realizing it, and sometimes even reading it later without realizing the presence of Russian letters.

I knew it was happening to me, but it wasn't until I loaned my political science notes -- ostensibly in English! -- to a non-Russian-student pal that the prevalence of the swaps were really clear. "Uh, I absolutely cannot read this."

Ooops.

Anyway, it's tangential to this topic, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.

This is the first link I found with illustrations of the Russian cursive alphabet:

https://golearnrussian.com/russian-cursive/

Re: Penmanship

#37

Post by ubermonkey »

I have essentially abandoned normalized cursive in writing. My letters often connect but it's nothing a elementary martinet would recognize as Palmer or whatever.

That said, I do write by hand (with a fountain pen! it's more fun, and slows me down a little which improves legibility) every day. I plan my day and take notes longhand, and often journal in the evening. I've done this all my working life, because writing seems to connect to my brain in a way that just typing doesn't, and I've increased in the pandemic because the more years I spend at the keyboard (I'm 52) the worse my handwriting seems to get. Doing it more seems like a good way to try and reverse that trend.

Re: Penmanship

#38

Post by [deleted] »

ludwigschubert wrote: post #8
gilleain wrote: post #7

Oddly 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 )

[deleted]

Re: Penmanship

#39

Post by agentultra »

"Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway."

I think the author is mistaking their self for everyone.

I have rows of my bookshelf dedicated to all my journals. Written by hand. In cursive (for the most part, some technical journals I used standard print for diagrams and annotations).

I use a reMarkable2 as well for ephemeral notes, bullet journalling, and reading/sharing documents from my computer. I like being able to hand-write a note and email it as plain text to myself. Process it with a script and boom, new draft post. While I sit at my desk, no computer in sight. Bonus, character recognition of my cursive writing is pretty accurate.

Re: Penmanship

#40

Post by fluctor »

JackFr wrote: post #31
dfxm12 wrote: post #22

Penmanship and calligraphy, I think, are important to develop manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination & give you a way to express your individuality. The author talks about the standard font in cursive, but I learned many ways to make the letters F, X, M and more, that I felt made my writing unique among others. I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well.…

I make my eights with two circles rather than a 'figure-eight'. I always wonder how prevalent either method is, or rather more bluntly, am I weird?

I do this too, but trying to change it. I learned as a figure-eight, then switched to two-circles in grad school (for some reason), but now learning Morse code and copying 8's takes too long if you don't write them as one motion.
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