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> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad? Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad? Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
I understand your opinion and I'm curious as to your reasoning why it would be bad.
PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example). Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practi…
I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill". Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day. I believe this…
now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".
PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example). Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practi…
I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.
PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example). Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practi…
I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.
My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool.
Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.
PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example). Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practi…
In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).
As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.
I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.
I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think.
I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw.
It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.