“On Friday (10/13/23) California Governor Newsom signed a bill that will require cursive instruction in first through sixth grade.”
https://abc7news.com/cursive-california-schools-governor-new...
The importance of handwriting is now better understood
121–130 of 169 posts
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#122I've direct experience on the power of handwriting to memorise concepts. When at the UNI, I was studying CS (while working part-time) less than 10 ya, and classes where full of laptops. I was take notes during lectures using only pen and paper and similarly I was taking my notes about the main concepts from the courses books. Then I was re-writing them again in a more summarised way, and then underline this notes and…
I spent years trying to find the value others find in handwritten note taking. But it doesn’t work for me.
For me, listening carefully and questioning the speaker internally and focusing intensely on the way they are speaking and visualizing the concepts works better. Handwriting interferes with that as I’m too busy rephrasing to fit into my writing rate. My memory is better than the paper at the nuances of the concepts IFF I am intently focused at a semantic level.
I think, like many of these things, they speak to the average experience. That many people benefit from hand writing. But humanity so very varied, and there one size fits all analysis of learning style does really well at picking out the mode, but statistical analysis cuts off the tails and outliers as noise. But being the noise as an individual makes these sorts of statistical teaching methods painful and distracting.
The day I pushed the paper and pen aside and learned the way I learn best was the day school went from being a chore of tedium, a true struggle, to being a delight. I turned around from a barely capable student to getting highest honors from one of the science and engineering universities in the world. Further by honing my ability to understand deeply with just my ears and mind I can carry that into every day life outside a classroom, such as casual conversations or other formats where note taking would be weird. I’ve never missed my handwritten notes, and I literally never take notes and never will again.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
From that same link: "After six learning sessions, everyone in the video watching and type-writing group had learned the Arabic alphabet and could identify each of its 28 letters. However, people in the handwriting group—who used pen and paper to write each letter during their learning sessions—gained the same level of proficiency after just two learning sessions." Replace handwriting with any other activity. It is p…
No, according to the link the hand-writers learned Arabic much faster than the learners typing on keyboards. Handwriting Arabic facilitated faster learning of the language than typing it out. This comports with my personal language learning experience, for what that's worth. I couldn't say whether it translates to other subjects. Full article is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641140/
This is specific to the act of learning a language, where writing out the characters with intentionality will obviously have more carryover to memorizing the forms of such characters.
When the learning tools are detached from the subject at hand - as is the case in most college classes where basic literacy is a given - it's hard to see how one particular tool could possibly be better than others.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#124If your handwriting looks good and gives satisfaction you will do it more. It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (like flavour in a recipe) of learning and understanding. I was fortunate to be taught Marion Richardson [0] style handwriting aged 8 or so, and decades years later my handwriting is still universally complimented. I hand write letters for pleasure and take not…
My cursive is terrible so I resort to print handwriting, which was never pretty either. And then I get super annoyed at how slow handwriting is, so I try to speed it up. It quickly becomes an illegible mess.
I need the fastest & most legible writing system. Legible. Fast. Can we design a hand writing system that hits 30 wpm? 40wpm? Without resorting to shorthand. I'd rather redesign the alphabet from the ground up instead of bothering with shorthand.
I actually find most cursive is hard to read, and yet I grew up with some exposure to cursive. I imagine many people younger than me would have less exposure to cursive altogether. Cursive is kind of dying off, except in terms of writing speed.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#125I've direct experience on the power of handwriting to memorise concepts. When at the UNI, I was studying CS (while working part-time) less than 10 ya, and classes where full of laptops. I was take notes during lectures using only pen and paper and similarly I was taking my notes about the main concepts from the courses books. Then I was re-writing them again in a more summarised way, and then underline this notes and…
I dislike these kind of statements. I can’t take notes. I learned very explicitly that I will retain information much better if I take no effort to write it down and instead just focus and listen. If I do take notes, I’ll look down at my page at the end and see 20ish words written in different sizes and spaces and then throw it away because it’s clearly useless. That is to say, it’s all just personal preference. Expl…
Yup - I liked taking notes using my laptop because I could copy down what the professor was saying verbatim.
This gave me two advantages; (1) I could focus on the lecture itself and not how to best summarize the lecture, and (2) I could review the notes later as a higher quality product than what I would have invented.
This strategy didn't work for things like math classes which were hard to take computer notes on.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#126Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
This seems very clearly a bot post. This is a non-sequitur to the other comment and the way it redescribes the context seems fishy and too artificial.
I don't see any evidence that this is a bot post. It's the only post in the thread that actually points to scans of the Marion Richardson source materials mentioned in the parent comment. I guess it doesn't matter now, since it's been flagged… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You can vouch for a flagged comment and if enough do it will become legitimzed.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#128I have fucking hated handwriting for 50 years. When personal computers became the thing I was overjoyed. It has always been very difficult physically for me to handle, and I am delighted to abandon it.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's sad that this incredible ability of our brain to learn concepts from the small movement of our hands, probably sculpted by our evolution, is going to get lost in future generations. We haven't been writing that long. And the vast majority of people never did.
But the vast majority of people use their hands. It's not the writing, the assertion it's that it's the movement associated with/occurring at the same time as thinking that reenforces learning. That writing of words using hands (interaction with the environment) can help with learning abstract (non-physical) concepts is an extension of that.
People continue to use their hands.
Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood
#130If your handwriting looks good and gives satisfaction you will do it more. It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (like flavour in a recipe) of learning and understanding. I was fortunate to be taught Marion Richardson [0] style handwriting aged 8 or so, and decades years later my handwriting is still universally complimented. I hand write letters for pleasure and take not…
My cursive is terrible so I resort to print handwriting, which was never pretty either. And then I get super annoyed at how slow handwriting is, so I try to speed it up. It quickly becomes an illegible mess. I need the fastest & most legible writing system. Legible. Fast. Can we design a hand writing system that hits 30 wpm? 40wpm? Without resorting to shorthand. I'd rather redesign the alphabet from the ground up in…
Cursive is nice because it limits the speed at which you can read it; Sometimes “faster” cognitively translates to “careless.”