Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to fully delete things from the internet make us feel digital materials are well protected. The persistence of this data basically boils down to magnetic fields. Without power, these will…
There are literal billions of smartphones in circulation. You'd be hard pressed to find a way to destroy all digital technology without destroying all of humankind as a collateral.
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 a…
When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems?
(To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)
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 a…
I was about to reply that that most people probably can't easily read this hand anymore, but after looking at the book examples they're pretty readable to me, despite always struggling to read cursive (e.g. in birthday cards from my grandparents).
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.…
I had a similar experience with writing, in my case it included print exercises.
It was very frustrating and it took me a long time to gain an appreciation for writing after they finally caved and found a cheap old DOS PC for me to do work on.
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 a…
When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems? (To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)
The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.
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".
It's also fun because every few decades there's a new fad in school penmanship so each generation learns a different cuesive and it's all a mess.
I had one teacher who wrote in cursive in University, and her penmanship seemed pretty good. But I always struggled to read it. We are just not used to seeing cursive writing on a daily basis.
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.
Please share what the right fountain pen, ink and paper would be for a left-handed person to avoid smearing everything to kingdom come! (Asking with honest curiosity as a fellow leftie who would love to be able to use a fountain pen). I swear by uniball jet stream pens, they feel much nicer than a ball point and dry fast enough for me to use them but would love a true fountain pen setup instead!
I have 2 Sailor Pro Gear Slims 14K and one Sailor Pro Gear 21K. The later is the best writing experience. I'm not an ink maniac but I tried a few and I found that Sailor inks tend to dry reasonably quickly while still having a good flow. Midori paper and Tomoe River both perform very well. If I'm going to do a whole page of writing smearing from hand moisture can be a problem, especially w/ non-Sailor inks so in that case I use the "today" cards you can get for the Hobonichi.
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 a…
When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems? (To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)
No one is stopping you from using muscular movement to speed up your shorthand even more.
If you use finger movement for shorthand you still have a 30 minute writing limit before you start getting hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome after a few years.
When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems? (To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)
The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.
This is a common myth, but from what I understand of people who write in the more logical shorthand systems (without abusing custom abbreviations etc.) it's eminently skimmable, even long after the information is no longer fresh in mind.
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…
In college I always took notes in class then I would rewrite them and at the same time organize them. In my study groups people would always copy my re-written notes. There was certainly something there aiding in learning, more than just sending a document of notes and just reading it.
Sometimes I'd just take one set of notes and then not look at them after.
So then I got the brilliant idea to not take notes, since I wasn't looking at them!
It turned out that the act of taking the notes was fixing the material in my head such that I didn't need the notes to refer back to.