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The End of Handwriting

wired.com

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Re: The End of Handwriting

#141

Post by orthoxerox »

senko wrote: post #91
swannodette wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m left handed, with the right ink and paper this isn’t a huge problem. I picked up fountain pens a year ago and I will never go back to regular pens for my own writing.

Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens. If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

How do right-handed Arabs and Israeli Jews write right-to-left?

Re: The End of Handwriting

#142

Post by bluGill »

skeezyboy wrote: post #80

silicon valley resident assumes rest of world is like silicon valley and that everyone has a smartphone

Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. More than half the world population has smart phones, and even some very poor countries have surprisingly high penetration.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#143

Post by moregrist »

elros wrote: post #10

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…

> Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

I love fountain pens. Well-made ones are elegant and feel good to write with. I love the look and feel of certain kinds of permanent black and blue-black ink that you can’t find for ballpoint.

They were extremely useful in dealing with hand cramps at a time I was doing a lot of mathy stuff for work (tens of pages of derivation a day for a while). They retrained my hand to not push on the page so hard and not grip the pen so hard. That eliminated most of the problem.

That said, they have had no effect on my handwriting. Which was bad-to-mediocre before and remains bad-to-mediocre now.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#144

Post by noosphr »

cyocum wrote: post #111

I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time. I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved.…

Cursive as taught in schools today is useless at best and dangerous for your health at worst.

The cursive that made the world run between 1850 and 1925 was called business penmanship and it lets you write at 40 words per minute for 14 hours every day for decades on end without pain or injury.

If you're interested here's the best book about it: https://archive.org/details/tamblyns-home-instructor-in-penm...

Note the advice given:

>following lessons will make of you a good penman, if you follow instructions implicitly. The average time to acquire such a handwriting is from four to six months, practicing an hour or so a day. Practice regularly every day, if you want the best results. Two practice periods of thirty minutes each are better than one period of sixty minutes.

After two months I can comfortably write at 20 words per minute for four hours without stopping.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#145

Post by voidUpdate »

orthoxerox wrote: post #141
senko wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens. If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

How do right-handed Arabs and Israeli Jews write right-to-left?

Judging by the google image results for "arabic handwriting", they hold the pen above their hand instead of to the left

Re: The End of Handwriting

#146

Post by linuxguy2 »

tnvmadhav wrote: post #2

https://archive.ph/is4BJ

Thank you for providing this. In my firefox this article rendered as only the first paragraph then went straight to the comment section and I was very confused about why this was worthy of HN unless to talk about such a short content section!

Re: The End of Handwriting

#147

Post by neutronicus »

odyssey7 wrote: post #67

As a CS student, the way I learned things I needed to memorize was by writing it down / copying / summarizing on paper and studying from that. It’s a little ridiculous to reframe that a significant part of my education was an exercise in copying information over by hand, but it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me. Also: my reading speed was ungodly slow. I think I considered it typical to spend 3 hour…

Currently, at work, I can't make progress on anything to do with geometry or graph structure or math without LIBERAL use of scratch paper.

Keeping notes on what I'm doing in org-mode is somewhat helpful, but drawing rough sketches of what I see in the debugger is essential.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#148

Post by bachmeier »

For me, it's the opposite. I had been steadily moving from writing by hand to writing on a computer/device, even though it's so much easier to think clearly when writing by hand, due to search, reminders, etc. Now I write as much as I want by hand, have Gemini convert it to markdown, and I have the best of both worlds.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#149

Post by XorNot »

cyocum wrote: post #111

I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time. I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved.…

Teaching cursive seems like a weirdly American obsession, because during school in Australia it just...wasn't a thing. Like teachers did take you through what "running writing" was, but we were never required to actually master it the accomplishments level was just "can you write? Good let's move on to how sentences are structured".

Re: The End of Handwriting

#150

Post by UltraSane »

cyocum wrote: post #111

I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time. I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved.…

Reminds me of all the many hours I spent being forced to do long division of 3 digit numbers into 5 and 6 digit numbers. What a waste of time.
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