Some of this seems worth adopting. My personal hand already has some modifications to traditional school cursive and I've never liked certain letters maybe because of being left handed.
Backtrack-Free Cursive
101–110 of 133 posts
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#102I’ve often thought of this kind of concept for a programming language.
Maybe it’s the qwerty keyboard or my bad typing habits but certain characters break my flow when typing.
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#103As a USAian and an Old, I learned the Zaner-Bloser script in school - a cursive script that tries to minimize pen lifts, but still has "backtracks" as this article calls them, for j, i, and x. It uses a lot of the same kind of loops that this script uses, just for the simpler problem of joins. The downside of the Zaner-Bloser system, as well as Palmer and anything that derives from Spencerian cursive, is that when wr…
Interestingly I had the opposite journey, I am a Young so they didn't bother to teach me cursive in school, so in high school when I got into fountain pens I taught myself italic hand so that my handwriting would be more legible and easier to write with it -- but just recently I got tired of the two-stroke 'e' and taught myself Zaner-Bloser instead, lol. I do definitely see the drawbacks you mentioned though, after I…
Illinois still requires cursive as part of their elementary education curriculum (although it’s an outlier in that it also requires PE in every year of K-12 education and also for public university degrees¹ (maybe also private?) as well as speech in both high school and again for a public university degree.
⸻
1. Typically this would only apply or a bachelor’s and maybe associate’s degree, but when I got my teaching credential/MS, because I had an out of state private college BA, I had to take undergraduate courses for state requirements including US Government, Biology, Speech and 2 PE classes. An ancient AP test score spared me having to take US History.
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#104In the Hotelplan logo, I think they are going straight from the o to the e, with a backtrack to make the downward line in the t. Which is kind of interesting as well.
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly I had the opposite journey, I am a Young so they didn't bother to teach me cursive in school, so in high school when I got into fountain pens I taught myself italic hand so that my handwriting would be more legible and easier to write with it -- but just recently I got tired of the two-stroke 'e' and taught myself Zaner-Bloser instead, lol. I do definitely see the drawbacks you mentioned though, after I…
Illinois still requires cursive as part of their elementary education curriculum (although it’s an outlier in that it also requires PE in every year of K-12 education and also for public university degrees¹ (maybe also private?) as well as speech in both high school and again for a public university degree. ⸻ 1. Typically this would only apply or a bachelor’s and maybe associate’s degree, but when I got my teaching c…
Wait, PE is not mandatory in US schools?!? This is ridiculous.
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#106Using the term "backtracking" feels somewhat confusing, because it seems like most of the "fixed" letters they propose use what I would find more intuitively described as backtracking: having to trace back the exact path used to get to a given point in order to get back to a previous point to start drawing a new mark from. I think I'd be less confused by a term like "annotations" for what they're talking about.
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Illinois still requires cursive as part of their elementary education curriculum (although it’s an outlier in that it also requires PE in every year of K-12 education and also for public university degrees¹ (maybe also private?) as well as speech in both high school and again for a public university degree. ⸻ 1. Typically this would only apply or a bachelor’s and maybe associate’s degree, but when I got my teaching c…
Wait, PE is not mandatory in US schools?!? This is ridiculous.
[deleted]
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#108This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read . The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text. In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
If it's just for note taking, it's no different than learning shorthand, since you are the only one that has to be able to read it.
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#109This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read . The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text. In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
No experienced reader reads letter-by-letter. These issues are not really problems, because you read whole words by sight and are not usually confused by whether a letter is an "i" or a "j".
Re: Backtrack-Free Cursive
#110This is the kind of thing that makes cursive painful to read . The `i` and `j` in this script are harder to quickly lex, and the `t` (especially in the `tt` ligature) with the added loop flourish diverges sufficiently from a standard `t` to make it hard to decipher in running text. In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.
No experienced reader reads letter-by-letter. These issues are not really problems, because you read whole words by sight and are not usually confused by whether a letter is an "i" or a "j".
Yes, of course people read whole words and phrases at a time. And this makes that harder. When you systematically make many letters less easily recognizable, reading words by sight gets more painful. Sometimes just a few letters in a word are off and you can still infer it; sometimes enough letters in a word are off, and their combination/juxtaposition together with inconsistent handwriting makes it enough to have to stare at it and go "what in the world is that?".
It's remarkable what the brain is able to decipher. That's no reason to make it deliberately harder.
For writing produced quickly and expected to be read by either no one or only yourself, the combination of familiarity with your own handwriting and remembering what you wrote will make it more decipherable to you than anyone else. For anything that someone else should read, either type or optimize for legibility, please.
My reaction to seeing large amounts of calligraphy is "that's a beautiful art form". My reaction to having to read even a small amount of calligraphy, let alone quickly jotted cursive, is "can I get a transcription please?".