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The importance of handwriting is now better understood

economist.com

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Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#131

Post by wizofaus »

BurningFrog wrote: post #74
maegul wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superficial take IMO. Don’t need a selective pressure for a cognitive process to work in a particular way. You just need a selective pressure for the cognitive skill and for the way that skill works to at least not have a pressure against it, biology being full of engineering compromises. Learning well with handwriting, IMO, has little to do with hands specifically, but memory and understanding in general, where the…

My guess/impression is that the act of writing something down passes the information through different parts of the brain, and then you have two independent memories of the facts.

But why shouldn't the same be true of typing?

(I did mention in my other post I can sort of see why handwriting is a movement more akin to other ways we manipulate the physical environment - but in fact I use the "swipe" style keyboard entry on my phone, which is surely not that dissimilar - using my finger to draw shapes. Touch typing is certainly very different and hard to correlate with other actions we need to perform in the real world, in some ways it's surprising we're able to become so competent at it, though obviously our ability to make finely tuned manipulations with our fingers is a huge part of our evolutionary success).

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#132

Post by wizofaus »

eloisant wrote: post #49
wizofaus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> probably sculpted by our evolution I can't really begin to imagine what selective pressure could realistically have acted on this, certainly given the tiny period of time over which any substantial percentage of the population would have been using their hands to store information in any way. If there's any correlation between use of computers and any loss of ability to memorise concepts (which I'm not convinced we…

There has been studies that proved that handwriting helps memorizing better than using a computer. The studies took a group of students, randomly assigned them handwriting/computers then they had a test to pass. Handwriting students performed better. The reason is that handwriting is slower, so it forces you to summarize and make decisions in your note taking. Selecting what's important. On the other hand typing is f…

Plenty of people I know handwrite faster than they can type! And have they tested those using shorthand?

What I could believe is that our brains might be better at remembering the sorts of movements our hands make while handwriting (essentially using your wrist and elbow) vs those made while typing (fingers only), perhaps because the former are closer to the act of manipulating the physical environment in ways that might needed for survival (gathering food etc.) and because you're physically tracing out a desired path in 2d space, though it seems tenuous at best.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#133

Post by BirAdam »

My handwriting is admired by most who see it. I put a lot of time and energy into learning to write more beautifully as a kid, and I was very much into creative writing, and conlanging. Over a few decades, this has now resulted in some rather painful repetitive stress issues in my right hand and wrist. I am not sure that I’d change my life at all, but I do think that children should be taught posture and instrument handling techniques to avoid damage to themselves.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#134

Post by leobg »

jmkd wrote: post #32

If 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…

PDF: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#135

Post by taffronaut »

jmkd wrote: post #32

If 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…

I learned that style pre 1980 in the UK. My writing still looks pretty childish and I don't get any compliments. I can take longhand notes at speed though.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#136

Post by dbtc »

tines wrote: post #104
TRiG_Ireland wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall my mother writing a personal letter to sooth a family dispute. It was long. She wrote it on the computer, so she could edit it and arrange her words to fit her meaning, printed it, and copied it out longhand for the personal touch.

> to sooth a family dispute I think you want the word "soothe" which means to calm. "Sooth" means "truth" as in "sooth-sayer."

soothe from Old English soðian ... from soð "true" (see sooth).

The sense of "quiet, comfort, restore to tranquility," in reference to a person or animal, is by 1690s, via the notion of "to assuage one by asserting that what he says is true,"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/soothe

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#137

Post by m463 »

RetroTechie wrote: post #60
m463 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder too. I remember doing python the hard way years ago, which encouraged you to type in the example python programs and run them yourself. It made a definite difference to sort of deliberately slow down and absorb during the exercise.

That's nothing. Try handcoding machine code some time! Using only pen, paper & cpu datasheet. ;-) If you feel generous, throw in a calculator for offsets or hex/dec conversions etc. If I grow old & senile some day, I'll forget how to wipe my ass before the last Z80 mnemonic slips from my mind.

I remember doing that in octal for the PDP-11 - and it was really pretty wonderful. Everything was laid out so cleanly.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#138

Post by pests »

Swizec wrote: post #82
pcdandy wrote: post #65

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 m…

> 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 Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me. Yes we learned handwriting by rote repetition of letters in the first few months of first grade . But then we started wr…

ah yes, the notepad-as-a-mousepad technique

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#139

Post by pests »

JambalayaJim wrote: post #125
jncfhnb wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why not just a audio/visual recording?

Even when I took notes via laptop in class it was never a direct transcription.

Re: The importance of handwriting is now better understood

#140

Post by nuancebydefault »

jmkd wrote: post #45
Aeolun wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn’t look particularly special? This is just a form of cursive right?

It was the first time a system was developed that took note of how the hand moved ergonomically in order to create a natural way of writing (drawing) unnatural letters, and linking them together. This system allows you to write cursive with exceptional flow and - if you wish - flair, rather than simply copying complicated shapes and then having that body memory inevitably degrade over the years.

It is weird, it feels backward. When I look at the writing in the scans in the pdf, it looks less fluent and more typewriter styled than how we learned to write at school. For example, the h has no loop, the capitals seem not to have extra loops wrt their non-capital counterpart. This means that you will lift your pen more often.

That said, I think it reads easier than fully cursive, because it is less dense.

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