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Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

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Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#111

Post by Moru »

arisAlexis wrote: post #91
Loughla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left handed and sucks at penmanship? My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).

I'm left handed and all my life people need to decode painfully what I'm writing. Most lefties write like trash that's reality

Most people write like trash if they started school after the school computer revolution. It's just about practise. I'm right handed and my handwriting is also realy bad. I started with computers much earlier than others in my class. The people in my class were pretty good, including the lefties. The English teacher was really bad but we got the explanation to that one: When he was young he was forced to switch from left to right hand. This was before the whip was outlawed as a teaching instrument...

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#112

Post by Moru »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #72
Loughla wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left handed and sucks at penmanship? My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).

Learn to type? I never got over my penman ship problem, I just learnt to type and printed all my exams in college. And then it didn’t matter much after school since I would mostly type anyways. If I had to do it over again, I would probably force myself to write right handed. It should be possible to get used to it, but that would really be a choice they have to make for themselves.

My english teacher was forced to switch from left to right when he was young and his writing was the worst in school. This was before the computer revolution so he did write all the time.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#113

Post by Moru »

awinter-py wrote: post #80
blargey wrote: post #32

"Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results" so all participants had to "type using the right index finger [only]". How does one rule out the relevance of those "unforeseen effects" when claiming to compare typing in general vs handwriting in general? The paper only contains that one line about the matter, in the…

> Allowing the use of (the fingers of) both hands would cause many unforeseen effects on the brain, which would make it hard to interpret the results. Participants gave their informed written consent but is it truly informed consent if it is written with multiple fingers?

I love this with Science. If something would be hard to work with, we just change it until it is easier to measure. That it has no resemblanse with what we were trying to measure is uninteresting.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#114

Post by luxpir »

Loughla wrote: post #71
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So no only were typists not touch typing, they couldn't see what they were typing. This is how I feel as a left hander while writing the old fashioned way. I can’t see what I’m writing so I get sloppy really quickly, and always need paper with lines. Not that this makes their methodology not totally bunk, of course.

Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left handed and sucks at penmanship? My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).

Lefty, but also someone who has a brain that prefers the right for sport (bat/ball games), as disclaimer... Handwriting is clear and can print or use cursive.

When I used to write more on paper, many moons ago, I'd turn the paper 90 degrees to the right. Many lefties curl their hands over. I never got that, I just turn the paper. The body has to compensate a little but much more natural for the wrist when writing for longer spells.

Come to think of it, I don't do it much at all now, have probably got workarounds I'm unaware of at this point. My notebook stays aligned with the desk. Perhaps a slight tilt.

Either way, experiment with moving the paper, not the wrist, and get smooth pens as mentioned elsewhere. Fountain pens from Parker used to be my go to. Gel or roller are fine though.

Good luck!

Edit: I also learned to write under the line, so didn't drag my hand through the ink. Probably due to fountain pen use forcing that. Back when blotting paper was a thing!

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#115

Post by luxpir »

throw2836384 wrote: post #99
SoftTalker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn to write upside down, then turn the paper upside down and write from right to left.

Learn Chinese. It's traditionally written right-to-left, top-to-bottom.

Also of interest are Arabic, Hebrew and other RTL scripts. Not sure if more myth than fact, but their origin was apparently in stone masonry and right handed hammer use. I can't quite believe it though, given the difference of ease in sourcing materials and the curves present in the scripts.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#116

Post by hambes »

Yeah, sounds honestly very obvious. Writing by hand is much more complicated than writing with a typewriter. However, nothing about the brain activity suggests that the increased learning effect has anything to do with the content of what is written. I propose that the increased brain activity is exclusively because one learns _to write_, but not what is written.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#117

Post by freilanzer »

crazygringo wrote: post #43
kstenerud wrote: post #31

I've been taking notes in a text editor since 1994. What I found was that taking notes via computer was much easier because I could finally keep up with what I'm taking notes about (typing is MUCH faster than writing), and could therefore spend more time considering the thing I'm taking notes on, rearrange things, group them, etc using simple keyboard commands. My impression is that my retention went way up and I had…

I am 100% the same. People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better. That has never been the case for me -- while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer, and then am struggling to catch up, and when I finally figure out what they're…

> People often claim that taking notes by hand, because it is slow, forces you to interpret and condense what you are learning into a more compact representation, and therefore understand it better.

> while I'm busy doing that thinking, I missed the last 3 sentences from the lecturer

That's not the same kind of note-taking. The first is writing for understanding, the second is taking quick notes to avoid missing anything while the lecturer is talking.

Re: Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread connectivity in brain

#120

Post by clown_strike »

throw2836384 wrote: post #99
SoftTalker wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learn to write upside down, then turn the paper upside down and write from right to left.

Learn Chinese. It's traditionally written right-to-left, top-to-bottom.

They didn't say in what way the kid's handwriting is trash, but I've noticed that westerners who have spent time writing kanji end up with handwriting that looks like it was done by a machine.

Probably the same concept at play, but what helped me as a kid was getting one of those black Pentel 0.5mm engineering mechanical pencils (used to be $5 apiece or so at Staples) and using it to write everything as small as possible. On college-rule paper my lettering would occupy 25% of the vertical space while strictly adhering to the bottom line in neat rows.

Few teachers could read my writing without a magnifying glass, but they got their revenge by specifying essay lengths in number of pages. I had to do 75% more work to meet the page count.

I wasn't intentionally being an asshole with this-- in writing such tiny lettering it forced me to pay attention to clarity of my lettering to an autistic degree, otherwise my writing would be entirely illegible to the teacher and my work would be rejected.

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