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The End of Handwriting

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Re: The End of Handwriting

#221

Post by yencabulator »

delusional wrote: post #77
voidUpdate wrote: post #71

I generally dont handwrite large amounts anymore, however I have begun writing sentimental letters to family members by hand on occasion, but they are fully drafted out digitally first. I will keep going back and editing what I've previously written, which you can't really do on fancy paper. Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I keep a notepad at the si…

> Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I am so glad I'm not alone there. It's hard to not feel stupid when you have to work out the winding order of some triangles for the 10th time.

I scribble about programming because nothing digital has so far allowed me to use spatial arrangement, arrows and such to organize my thoughts as conveniently.

I very rarely write on paper anything more than a short sentence at a time.

For me, paper is less about writing and more about laying out my thoughts.

(So far writing on digital tablets has been a less than great experience and I really like the real world arrangeability and simultaneous viewing of multiple pieces of paper.)

Re: The End of Handwriting

#222

Post by taeric »

jeltz wrote: post #175
kqr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Cursive is essentially just a shorthand. It is just a standardized way of writing fast while sacrificing some readability. So, yes, now that the world no longer uses crusive that much you might as well pick another standard.

As the sibling says, shorthand is a very different thing. Cursive seems much more a way to write with fewer finger movements. That is about it.

I'm tempted to say it is also about fewer pickups of the pen, but I think that is largely the same thing. Many of the finger movements you do when writing otherwise will be to pick the pen off the page.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#223

Post by beardyw »

lubujackson wrote: post #216
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.…

Worth mentioning that English itself has only been around since the 1600s, basically when Chaucer was around.

I think you are confused. Chaucer died in 1400. I often read perfectly readable (though with wild spelling) English from the 17th century. English was firmly established, though some formal documents still used Latin.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#224

Post by rightbyte »

benrutter wrote: post #76
tenuousemphasis wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try writing right to left!

This is the kind of solution I'm looking for! Should I: - Write in mirror image form? - Learn to predict my line length so I can write right to left, but have the text read left to right? - Learn arabic or herbrew? I'm leaning towards all three personally.

Writing with mirrored letters would be a awesome party trick.

Counting line length before writing it seems harder to get fluent in than arabic or hebrew scripts...

Re: The End of Handwriting

#225

Post by riffic »

Handwriting is an embodied form of thought. Its indirect utility isn't easily replaced by board-keying or tippy-tapping on a screen.

there are at least one or two enlightened comments in this thread saying their memory retention improves if they write stuff down on paper.

try it, it can't hurt.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#226

Post by privong »

michaelt wrote: post #168
privong wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the pape…

> many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I assumed this was for child friendliness - you just know kids are going to get ink on their fingers etc while changing cartridges from time to time.

It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.

I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.

The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#227

Post by Telemakhos »

close04 wrote: post #163
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.…

Isn't handwriting just the activity of writing by hand as opposed to typing a keyboard? Whether it's cursive or block/print, as long as it's written by hand it still has benefits. Many studies link handwriting to better brain connectivity and learning compared to typing. The act of writing is the one that brings the benefits, not the looks of the result. I don't see a drawback to learning to write by hand even if nob…

Writing by hand teaches fine motor skills that can bd transferred later to other tasks. When I was in school, we learned not only block print and cursive but also half-uncial script. Nobody expected us to get jobs copying medieval manuscripts: we learned better how to control our fingers and wrists.

The same goes for playing recorders or simple musical instruments: you don't teach that to kids hoping that they'll get jobs playing the recorder, but so that they learn finger control and maybe, if you're lucky, something about music.

People who think that early childhood education is job training probably don't have kids. Educating kids is not about direct utility but about cultivating muscles and thoughts and habits that lead to other development later. The word "cultivation" is an agricultural term that describes tilling the soil: that doesn't actually grow crops (it happens prior to planting), but it makes the growing season to come much more productive than simply casting seed on the unbroken earth. Education is the cultivation of human potential before adulthood, preparing the child for a richer adulthood in ways that are not obviously utilitarian.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#228

Post by Philpax »

bluGill wrote: post #123
jiehong wrote: post #49

Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0]. [0]: https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/

The Japanese are famiously behind everyone else in dropping hand writing. In part because their script is really hard to type (or so I'm given to understand), in part just culture. We can debate if hand writing is good or bad, but an outlier example is not part of any useful debate.

The script is not hard to type; in fact, a similar problem is happening there as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

Re: The End of Handwriting

#229

Post by fluorinerocket »

taeric wrote: post #217
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.…

I don't remember being punished for bad handwriting, but I know I got chided for it a lot. And I know we spent a lot of time on it. It definitely sucked, at every level of the experience. I also find it odd that people have some off assertions on why we learn cursive. I'm sure there is a multitude of reasons, but I find it hard to think it has any strong advantage over other ways. I do get a kick out of my kids being…

I was constantly chided as well, The teachers seem to have regarded my poor handwriting as moral failure,ike choosing to do something naughty, rather than as something that they needed to give me more tutoring on.

Re: The End of Handwriting

#230

Post by IAmBroom »

dranudin wrote: post #218
IAmBroom wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating! Can anyone from other countries chime in?

For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW. If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive style…

Fascinating! So, you weren't ever taught to print?
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