The importance of handwriting is now better understood

My parents (and one particular teacher) thought they could improve my handwriting by making me write the alphabet over and over.

It backfired, and my writing got worse. It was painful, not fun, and I didn't care about it. So my sloppy writing got sloppier the more I did it.

Now, I'm realizing that they all failed to teach me to write correctly, probably because they didn't actually know the difference. They all just remembered that their teachers had corrected bad penmanship that way, but without realizing that there was probably additional instruction involved in how to hold the pencil, and how to move the hand and arm properly to get good writing.

I've often thought about working on my handwriting, but there's very little benefit now other than personal pride, and I've got so many other things I want to do.

Two things:

1. I get compliments about how nice my handwriting is.

2. It really does help me to remember details. I don't need to go back through my notes (I rarely do these days) but the mere fact of having written it down seems to lock it more tightly into my memory.

Maybe I'll setup a little, completely un-scaleable online service whereby I'll write a hand written letter and send it to a chosen address on behalf of anyone willing to pay.

No ransom notes.

I think the real problem with handwriting is the way it has been thought in school. Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do. (On the other hand I quickly learned to type fast as I enjoyed playing games + writing personal documents on my computer and wanted to do all of that as quickly as possible.)

The funny thing was that some years later in 2016, I became highly interested in learning other writing systems for fun (and which I talk about on a blog of mine at [1]), which eventually also evolved into a newfound obsession with handwriting that I still practice today. Its really changed the way I see the written word and is a good way to remind oneself how letters on a screen are really the culmination of a few thousand years of scribes iterating through the older sharp, rigid and awkward letters and gradually evolving them into smoother and more fluid forms which can be drawn much faster by hand.

[1]: https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com

I don't really get how moving hands smoothly to write something versus tapping keys poses any large difference in memorization? For the us generations that grew up learning cursive and associating it with school it may be easier to remember that way, but if someone was raised by only typing from an early age it probably makes no difference. We're analog juvenoial dinosaurs living in a digital age we've only partially adapted to.

> this incredible ability of our brain to learn concepts from the small movement of our hands, probably sculpted by our evolution

There's no way that's true, it's only been around for 5000 years and for most of that time it was excluded to a narrow circle of scribes or scholars. Literacy has only been available to the masses for the past 200 years which is absolutely nothing on an evolutionary scale.

Not sure I agree. Most of my classes had recorded lectures and good notes from the TAs, but I still found taking hand written notes to be helpful. I even tried switch to a laptop then switched back after less than a semester.