How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive | Hacker News Reader

How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive

theatlantic.com

228 pointssamclemens125 comments

It is most telling, to me, to hear people (none of them made from straw) admit that writer's cramp is part and parcel of a single session of taking notes or writing an hour-long exam. Professional copyists and secretaries in the early 20th century weren't biting down on their lower lips to push through the pain every time they put pen to paper during ten- and twelve-hour workdays. They just used better tools for that job (leak as the tools might do) and were taught how to write with focus on posture and movement, not on letterforms alone.

I don't strictly use the letterforms or all the best practices of the Palmer method—see the article for a link—but using a Palmer book as a guide, I managed to teach myself to write with a relaxed grip and no movement in the fingers or wrist, and I can go for hours now and walk away with no more discomfort than the stiffness of sitting without relief.

It is hard to write like this using most ballpoints because you do need to exert more force to get a consistent line out of the things. You don't need a fountain or dip pen, however—just a soft-leaded pencil (try an art supply shop), a good rollerball pen, or some gel pens. None of these write as effortlessly as a fountain pen, but neither do they require the kind of cramp-inducing force that a Bic pen does.

I've read mid-century materials on this topic before. My sense is that this isn't a new argument so much as a forgotten one.

The Palmer method descends from Spencerian script, an excessively flowery and not-all-that-legible form of writing from the days when people wanted to make their writing look difficult and fancy.

Writing in a fancy style is fine for calligraphers making wedding invitations or whatever, but is a poor model for teaching children or for everyday use for most people.

Italic (aka chancery cursive), a script of renaissance Italy, is a much better model.

Here’s a great page targeted at teaching children to write, with lots of exercises: http://briem.net

Also see http://luc.devroye.org/Briem1985-IcelandicMethod.pdf and http://66.147.242.192/~operinan/8/2/205.html

Please don't assume my ignorance on other hands, or that I would argue in favor of teaching students the Palmer method. Teaching children outmoded systems ill suited to the instruments they are likely to have at hand is grossly unnecessary. (One of the reasons, incidentally, that I don't think students ought to be required to use italic nibs.) In its time, Palmer was taught under the assumption that a sizeable portion of each class would need a good—not decorative—hand for professional purposes at some point in their lives. That is no longer true.

Palmer descends from, but is assuredly not, Spencerian. Nor is it in any sense of the word fancy, except perhaps in comparison to blockletter print. It is a business hand designed for practical, quick, and legible business communications. It is not a coincidence that Palmer books begin with posture and movement exercises before students are even to lift a pen. It really is meant for everyday, injury-free use.

I wasn’t trying to disagree with your original comment, which makes great points.

My point is just that Palmer’s script isn’t practical/legible in comparison to italic. It’s filled with lots of little flourishes, makes it easy to write letters in a confusable way, and is very difficult for children to learn. The capital letters in particular are ridiculous. For someone highly trained, it can be fast, but it’s not inherently faster than other styles. It only seemed “professional” because it was the trendy style at the time.

As a curriculum/pedagogy, teachers using the Palmer method focused on drilling and discipline, the same “do it correctly or I’ll hit you” style common to instruction in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Features of handwriting technique like using muscles in the arm to move the whole hand in preference to fixing the hand and mostly using finger motions can be applied to any writing style.

>As a curriculum/pedagogy, teachers using the Palmer method focused on drilling and discipline, the same “do it correctly or I’ll hit you” style common to instruction in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Where early 20th century extended into at least the 1960s at one Catholic grade school I could name :-)

There was a ruler poised over my knuckles well into the 70's...

There are two man limitations your ignoring. The arm is less precise so you need longer strokes, and changing pen pressure is much harder. Combined it's far harder to create a legable and fast script.

I’m not “ignoring” anything.

All fine hand control (fencing, kitchen knife work, writing, eating with chopsticks, soldering, knitting, playing a piano, ...) uses a combination of whole-forearm motion, wrist motion, and finger motion. The human brain/body are incredibly good at translating intended action into precisely choreographed movements combining multiple muscles. The question is how much of each type of motion to use; the more the work can be offloaded to the whole arm, and the more relaxed the wrist and fingers are, the more comfortable it is to do something for a long period of time. The fingers still do quite a bit of fine motion, regardless.

But my comment doesn’t even advocate any particular grip or hand movement technique; all I said is that those bits of advice from the Palmer school, under discussion by the top-of-thread poster, are applicable across various letter-shape styles. As far as I can tell that’s a completely uncontroversial statement.

There is a wide range of comfortable shapes people can make using whole hand motions, but arms have a vastly more momentum than the tip of a pen. So for example the center of an uppercase E is much harder to do using whole hand motions if you need to stop your arm motion in the middle to add details. It can be a fairly direct tradeoff between legibility and readability. Scripts that are less legible because they lack detail can quite simply be far easier to pull off.

> Spencerian script, an excessively flowery and not-all-that-legible form of writing

Agreed with one exception: capital A. The Spencerian A looks elegant while the Palmerian A looks like 3/4 of someone's bottom.

Everything else is a bit of a shrug in my book.

Briem is great, but can tend to very similar zig-zags when written at speed.

Modern systems aim for legibility, at speed.

Anyone wanting to see different systems used during 20th century might be interested in this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Handwriting-Twentieth-Century-Rosema...

What are you thinking of as modern systems? In my experience, Palmer or Zaner-Bloser fails much worse at speed than chancery italic -- tending towards very similar loops :)

After college, my handwriting (Zaner-Bloser, as taught in elementary school) had deteriorated into a completely illegible scrawl. I taught myself to write again, using Arrighi's Operina and Briem's commentary. If I were homeschooling my children, I'd probably use either Getty-Dubay or Barchowsky.

This hobby was missing in my life… I always thought writing cursive is oddly rhythmic.

I strongly agree with you about chancery italic as a better "standard" handwriting than Palmerian and its relatives (e.g., Zaner-Bloser, which I was taught in elementary school). It degrades less at speed, and has the advantage that it can be taught first without joins(i.e. as printing) and then have joins added later. That is, the transition from print to cursive doesn't require learning completely new letter forms.

Practice might be another aspect of this. When I was a young child, I had the ability to write longhand all day, and a callus on my middle finger where I rested my pen or pencil. As an adult, that is all gone.

On the other hand, I certainly used ballpoint pens a lot when I was taking primarily handwritten notes or taking exams and I didn't get writer's cramp the way I do today if I write for any length of time. I never really cared for fountain pens and the mass market alternatives weren't available at the time so all the way through high school and college I mostly used ballpoints. I did type in college for papers and articles but notetaking was all by hand.

since you went through the research, what do you think of the other "methods". I ask because of this:

The Palmer Method began to fall out of popularity in the 1950s and was eventually supplanted by the Zaner-Bloser method, which sought to teach children manuscript before teaching them cursive, in order to provide them with a means of written expression as soon as possible, and thus develop writing skills.[6] The D'Nealian method, introduced in 1978, sought to address problems raised by the Zaner-Bloser method, returning to a more cursive style. The Palmer company stopped publishing in the 1980s.

Zaner-Bloser, to my knowledge, is not so far off from Palmer except in its prescribed teaching style, as carried out over multiple years in a child's schooling. The final product, that is, looks quite similar, and the techniques are not so far off from one another.

D'Nealian was one of the final blows to nibbed pens in the U.S., even wiping them out of most Catholic schools: it was ballpoint from then on, almost without question. With longhand in the workplace largely supplanted by typewriters (and soon by personal computers), the public at large moved toward writing implements that were "easier to pick up." After all, few people have need for an instrument whose finickiness is made up for only by ease of use in long sittings. Ballpoints are among the easiest writing tools to care for; you basically keep them out of the wash. No ink refilling, no cleaning out converters between colors and brands of ink, no ink drying out after two weeks in the drawer, no worry of the dreaded "baby bottom nib" of new fountain pens. Buy a Bic, get on with life. There's much to recommend them. If your writing is purely utilitarian and miscellaneous—lists, thank-you notes, reminders, memos, etc.—you probably don't want to bother with anything more complicated.

As it was taught to me, D'Nealian seemed to be designed for easy entry, plain and simple. Many other methods tend to concentrate on technique early, quite apart from letter formation. In D'Nealian, students are taught the proper manner in which to hold a pen, but little else. And ballpoint pens don't really allow for the old "proper" grips that are still often taught, as other commenters have touched on. You have to exert force downward onto the page to get a ballpoint to write, while the old, loose tripod grip that is still recommended was designed for nibs that only needed to glance the page. So D'Nealian is associated in the minds of many students with cramping exertion, and forcing the pen into practice.

Anyway, as soon as you can hold a pen, you start tracing and copying letters. You basically "draw" them; the letter is taught, not the movement. That's about all I can remember.

I'm not in education, so my recommendation of one over another shouldn't be sought. But I would easily believe that there were great things to say about a system that gets children writing as soon as possible. This is particularly true if the manner in which we make our letters by hand will have no bearing on our future prospects. Which, of course, it almost certainly won't.

Personally, I think D'Nealian looks childish. And if you aren't writing with a flowing technique, I see little point for joining all letters in a word. Not that cursive has always been written with streamlined, flowing, efficient, "full-arm" movement, as in the Palmer method and some of its relations. But from my point of view, why waste the extra ink or graphite needed to join letters just to encourage cramp?

I don't think D'Nealian killed cursive; Palmer or similar methodologies, which are hellish to learn if you go by the book, would likely have done even worse. More or less everything that we deal with today is in manuscript, unless your apartment complex happens to have cursive lettering on its awning or something, in the hopes of looking nice. Or maybe if you're digging through old relatives' things. So it's natural for children not to care about it, and even resent the drills needed to learn it.

I think the argument that ballpoints killed cursive is naturally overstated. If ballpoints hadn't become popular around the same time that typewriters did, there may well still be need of different writing implements and quick cursive in the workplace. But certainly ballpoints do make cursive much more difficult.

Since Bic Cristal pens are my writing tool of choice, I have to say I find it strange you only mention Bic. Maybe a Bic pen isn't the right tool for how you write, but you can definitely use it without getting cramps.

Quote from Rosemary Sassoon's book in the OA...

"We must find ways of holding modern pens that will enable us to write without pain. …We also need to encourage efficient letters suited to modern pens."

Can you describe the way you hold your pen when writing and perhaps comment on the way you form your letters? I'm interested as I find the ubiquitous Bic impossible for more than a couple of sides.

I take your point, but it has to be said that the copyists and e.g. book keepers in 19th and 20th century wrote more slowly and methodically than students scribbling in a lecture. As the author Rosemary Sassoon quoted in OA put it...

"most of us need a flexible way of writing—fast, almost a scribble for ourselves to read, and progressively slower and more legible for other purposes."

I have a suspicion that we mainly use pens/paper for the writing fast bits and the purposes for which slower writing was needed are now achieved using our keyboards.

My personal test for a pen of any kind is to hold it lightly between thumb and index finger, and then drag the pen down a page so that the only force pressing the nib/ball/tip onto the paper is the pen's own weight. If it leaves a line then I can use it without hand pain for fairly long periods. If it does not, then I'll use it mainly for shopping lists and post-it notes. Most but not all fountain pens pass that test as do some of the gel pens that produce wider lines such as the Uniball signos. Felt pens e.g. Sharpie fine points can pass the test as well!

As mentioned in a sibling comment to this, italic writing was taught in most UK schools for most of the 1960s onwards.

I've almost exclusively used fountain pens for about 5 years now, and it's been amazing. Modern fountain pens don't generally leak much, and they are SO much better to write with than a basic Bic/generic ballpoint. The primary difference is that you don't have to push down at all which saves your hand from a huge amount of stress after a long writing session. I really don't understand why more people don't use them these days. Another bonus is that you can choose from a very wide variety of inks, so you can change it up whenever you feel like it.

My daily driver is currently a Monteverde Invincia Deluxe Stainless Steel ($65), which looks fantastic and is a great performer. I highly recommend to that anyone with large hands, because it's definitely not small. I also recommend the Pilot Metropolitan (~$12) [1] and the Waterman Phileas (~$50) all of which I have used extensively for class notes.

If I don't have one of my FPs for whatever reason, then I have been known to go for smooth "roller ball" pens as well - they use more lubricated ink than standard ball points and require less pressure, so they generally feel like mediocre fountain pens.

[1] https://www.massdrop.com/buy/pilot-mr-fountain-pen

I tend to prefer roller ball pens but I'm pretty much a lost cause when it comes to writing at this point anyway. Handwriting was never one of my better subjects in grade school under the best of circumstances but looking through old notebooks as they progress over the years apparently reveals a general descent into total loss of right hand muscular control. :-)

I bought a copy of Write Now! and it improved my handwriting considerably. After going through it (it's essentially a workbook) I was kind of pissed at the absurdity that was the cursive that I learned in grade school.

Which "Write Now!"? There appears to be several by different authors on Amazon.

I ordered http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0876781180?psc=1&redirect=t... a long time ago.

This: http://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Self-teaching-Handw... seems to be updated.

Just a heads-up, Japanese import stores sell these for about 4 bucks:

http://www.gouletpens.com/Platinum-Preppy-Fountain-Pen/c/280

It's a great fountain pen for four bucks, I use them exclusively now (and don't worry too much about losing them, because four bucks!!).

The Pilot Kakuno is about the same price.

how would you compare them with Gel Rollerballs ? [1]

I am partial to the Parker rollerball refills - I use a Parker Chinese Laque Ambre - but do not want the inconvenience of a fountain pen.

I believe a rollerball is like the Nespresso to the fountain pen's espresso. Slightly worse - but much better than ball point pens.

But the best part that I like about rollerballs is how you can get an expensive experience in a cheap pen. For example Mont Blanc refills can be hacked to fit a cheap G2 [2]

[1] http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/241755-which-p...

[2] http://www.instructables.com/id/Save-$200-in-2-minutes-and-h...

I think your analogy is pretty good. I usually have a few loose g2s with me in case I run out of fountain pen ink in class. I find that gel pens sometimes make globs of ink, and that the lines aren't as nice as my FPs, but the writing experience is similar.

I do like the solid weight and feel of my fountain pens though, which is often lacking in rollerballs. The weight of the pen is the only thing that holds it against the paper the way I write, so light pens can be annoying.

Ur right about the weight. And I believe that is what a lot of people complain about in a rollerball. Which is why I use my Parker Sonnet. A good heavier rollerball is the cool looking Retro 51 (which uses Parker refills).

I miss writing with fountain pens, and use gel rollerballs exclusively now (cheap, waterproof, I don't cry if I lose it, and the office has boxes of them). I like them well enough, and my writing is more legible ... but I really miss the experience of writing w/ a fountain pen. The feel is very different.

If you're curious, one of the cheaper ($3-$4) disposable fountain pens (I think it was Pilot?) were a great introduction. When I first used one (on nice paper that didn't suck up all the ink into ugliness), it was amazing, even though I know there are better ones out there.

Japanese Gel Rollerballs are also excellent. The Uni-ball UM153S Impact Gel Rollerball 1.0mm Tip (made by the awesomely-named Mitsubishi Pencil Company) is my go-to pen for everyday writing.

Excellent pen. My daily "driver" are the Uniball Jetstreams, a ball-point that writes like a gel rollerball. Amazing little pen, considering its $7.

Those actually look almost exactly like my pens of choice from the Google supply cabinets. They are very nice, I like them better than the more common G2 because the ink doesn't glob up as badly.

I'm a year into the fountain pen habit, and have an absurd collection at this point.

My daily carry is a Pilot Vanishing Point (EF or a custom-ground 0.6mm italic) and a Sailor Sapporo Mini (hard fine). Those are about $175 and $200 retail, respectively.

Note that I didn't pay anywhere near that, as I've been buying, trading, repairing, and selling pens since shortly after I started. In total, I'm slightly in the black at the moment.

I recommend Reddit's /r/fountainpens - there is an IRC server listed in the sidebar, and it's surprisingly active.

I used to use fountain pens for a long time but returned to Bic Cristal ballpoints a few years ago. They just work and they are available everywhere.

I too love fountain pens and write very fast using one.

The only problem is that, in business meetings people tend to assume you're trying to make some kind of hipster statement.

Everywhere I go I'm usually the only one using a foutain pen; what a shame.

In France everyone uses ballpoints, and yet everyone writes cursive, so I very much doubt there's any connection between the two.

The weird handwriting of Americans certainly has to do with how they're taught, not what they use.

I have three kids that are currently learning to write (aged 6, 7 and 10) and a great deal of time is spent forming nice, cursive letters (copying lines of frequent letter pairs to lean how to join them properly and nicely for example).

I'm not saying this is good or bad (I like cursive and am happy my kids are learning it, but would like they would also learn to touch type, which isn't taught in school), but I am saying that you write how you learned to write...

I wouldn't say that everyone uses ballpoints, I used fountain pens during most of my education in France and so did most of my classmates. Many (most?) teachers still require their students to use fountain pens (one of the reasons is probably the fact that you can use an eraser, so it makes for cleaner papers...). Even after getting out of school, I don't use ballpoints if I can avoid them, because they're not as fast.

As I said in another comment, if you use a fountain pen in a business setting (as I do), people look at you funny.

I was around 10 when erasers first appeared, and they were strictly forbidden during all my school years, because they tended to make a big mess (or a hole) in the paper. We were told to strike errors properly, with a ruler.

Today it's true that they are permitted, to my amazement.

Among my children's teachers, some recommend fountain pens, some say they dislike it, but mostly kids can use what they like best.

Likewise - British here and fountain pens were compulsory - first and only thing I wrote with until I left school. Everything had to be handwritten, typing, pencil or ballpoint got you a fail. Regardless of the fact that I learned "joined up writing" from day zero, my handwriting still looks like a spider had an accident with an inkwell. Weirdly, identical to my uncle's.

Since, I barely write - I type everything.

Edit: also, this wasn't long ago. Finished school in 2001.

I took touch typing in the 1980s. It was just on an IBM Selectric "massaging" typewriter :-)

Bvvvvvvvvvvvv.... (the sound that thing made)

Discussions about cursive writing on the Internet confused me quite a bit until I noticed that there seems to be a pretty large difference between what I learned in Germany and what people in the US learned.

What children learn in Germany for at least a few decades now looks like the following: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Vereinfachte_Ausgangssch...

From what I understand, the cursive script that was taught in US schools was much more complicated with lots of little flourishes. The simplified cursive script seems a lot more practical to me, and I wonder if that is a factor in the the decline of cursive writing. The negative reactions to cursive writing I've read on the internet from people in the US seemed a lot stronger than anything I've ever heard from Germans.

For what it is worth, the lowercase cursive characters I learned in American public primary school around ~2002 were very similar or possibly identical to the lowercase characters in your image. However, the uppercase characters did have some more complexity.

Since I was taught in a California public school in the 1980s, I believe I was taught using the Zaner-Bloser method. As someone else mentioned, the lowercase letters look mostly the same, but there are more differences in the uppercase letters. The main thing that strikes me in looking at your example is that I would have to lift my pen/pencil to generate most of those uppercase letters. In general, if I write in cursive, I only lift my pen/pencil off the page at the end of a word, and I tend to drag the tail of the last letter of the word back if I need to cross a 't' or dot an 'i' or 'j'. I also developed a habit of crossing my 'z' (and 'Z', and the number 7), oddly enough, from my German teacher in high school (though she was from Munich, and probably learned her handwriting in the 1940s or 1950s).

Indeed, in France everyone still write in cursive even with ball pens.

Having to lift the pen for each letter seems so tedious that I don't understand how Americans can write such long texts in print.

The only case where we don't is to fill administrative forms, as they force you to write in print for legibility.

In Australia in the 80s I learnt something like this: http://www.startwrite.com/graphics/fonts-vic-link.jpg

Interesting, I guess there are some regional differences then, as well. This is what I learned in elementary school in the 90s (in NRW): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Deutsche_normalschrift_a...

For what it's worth I still try to use it whenever I write by hand (which is rare in the first place), but often revert to print because I can't usually decipher my cursive a day later.

That's what they taught me in Bavaria during the 80ies. It changes over time as well as (how could it not) from state to state. The tiny Saarland could introduce right to left, just to piss off everybody else (and save hugely on schools, because all parents would find ways to register across the border)

Given the amount of typing that today's children will do I think it's a very good idea to teach them something that stands a chance of not being replaced by something more primitive as soon as they leave school (or much earlier, as in the case of my age group). The days of artfully written letters written on expensive paper won't come back any time soon.

This is also what I was tought during the 90'ies in NRW. However, I know from my parents that during their time (somewhere late 60'ies) it was possible to take an additional course in “Schönschrift” (nice script) which translated to the handwriting Germans have been using for centuries before: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deutsche_Kurrentschr...

My grandparents have letters that are written in this script, and I’ve seen it used in official documents from around 1900. I fell in love with this script and try my best and learning it currently. Just looking at it will make it obvious that it’s pretty impossible to write with a ballpoint pen.

According to wikipedia, american may learn D'Nealian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Nealian which is not terribly different from what is taught in France (Écriture A : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modèles_d%27écriture_scolaire_...) or from Deutsche Normalschrift (whose t is more readable than other german scolar scripts).

I call bullshit, in Russia people still write in cursive long after introduction of ballpoint pen, because that's what people are taught in school. It also happens to be much faster than print, regardless of the writing implement, so that helps too.

Same in the UK.

We were certainly taught cursive, but I don't know a single person who still uses it other than me. Their writing is (for the most part) slow and legible, mine is fast and almost unreadable. More so when I use a fountain pen.

Still, it's moot - as the article author said - because I haven't had to handwrite more than my own name in the last 6 months.

There are three styles...

                   AmE         BrE
                   =========== ===========
    Italic         Cursive     Calligraphy
    Connected      ???         Handwriting
    Unconnected    Print       What you do on forms...

In Poland, people in schools are too usually forced to write in cursive. But that doesn't mean people like it or are particularly good at it. I was amongst the not-so-few that just couldn't/wouldn't write legibly enough. Some teachers would just give you 0 points for stuff they didn't want to or couldn't read. The most ironic part is, most teachers (and most adults in the "real world") have terribly illegible cursive too. Say when they'd write a comment on your exam, I could rarely understand it. Usually you'd ask some other students for their guess or just go ask the teacher.

If you want to try fountain pens but don't want to spend $$ on a nice one at first, check out the Pilot Varsity line.[1] They're cheap and disposable and seem to write pretty well. (I'm no expert on fountain pens though.)

I use them for note taking at meetings and whatnot. You do want a fairly fine/tight paper to write on though - the same as any other liquid-ink pen.

[1] http://pilotpen.us/categories/fountain-pens/varsity/

I can recommend the Pilot Metropolitan [1]! I have two and they are better than some "very nice" fountain pens I've used/had. Very smooth, very little issues with leaking, pretty cheap at <$20.

[1] http://www.gouletpens.com/Pilot-Metropolitan/c/191

I'll second this recommendation. the metropolitans are great pens.

I loved them. I seem to recall them not being waterproof, though.

For paper, try the bamboo-based paper from Staples. :)

I love fountain pens and highly encourage everyone to try them (with a good notebook helps). First, ballpoint pens are wasteful — 1.6 billion pens a year are thrown away[1]. Fountain pens are reusable, ink is comparatively cheap and lasts forever, and finding your ink is a fun and personal experience (I really like the "bulletproof" Noodler's inks which are waterproof, bleach proof, etc.). Fountain pens last forever — which is why folks still hunt around for 40+ year old used ones.

Second, it really does make writing fun. I hated writing — my handwriting is messy, it's slow, and it's not as easy as typing. As the article argues, a good fountain pen makes it much, and in my experience much more enjoyable.

Third, it doesn't need to be expensive. Get a Lamy Safari (EF), a Lamy converter and a bottle of Noodlers ink. I also love my Faber Castell Loom[2] (it's the smoothest pen I own), and I carry around a Kaweco Al-Sport[3] everywhere (it's the perfect pocket pen).

[1] http://www.epa.gov/superfund/students/clas_act/haz-ed/ff06.p... [2] http://www.gouletpens.com/faber-castell-loom-metallic-orange... [3] http://www.jetpens.com/Kaweco-AL-Sport-Fountain-Pen-Fine-Nib...

Nice HN discussion about handwriting from a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2500864

I like this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501152 – a partial quotation:

> Almost all US schools have standardized on forms of looped cursive (e.g. Parker Penmanship, Zaner-Bloser) -- a set of letterforms designed not for handwriting, but for the movable type printing press! Looped cursive was made to be attractive with the fewest unique joins possible so that printers needed to stock fewer pieces for their movable type presses. Looped cursive is slower, less legible, and more difficult to learn than forms of writing actually made to be written (such as cursive italic).

Any lefties here? I'm a lefty and feel stuck with the basic ballpoint because any other pen I try ends up with everything smudged. Not sure if that's just poor form on my part.

I'm a lefty and I switched successfully to Mitsubishi Jetstream pens a few years ago. They don't smudge unless you're writing on glossy paper. I bought mine at a Japanese stationery/pen shop in SF (at the mall next to Union Square) a few years ago, but you can find them anywhere. Here's a Rakuten link: http://global.rakuten.com/en/store/atn/item/sxn-15005/

Me too. I love nice pens, paper, calligraphy, the works. I practically fetishize it and drool over Moleskines every time I'm in a bookstore.

But as a lefty, I feel like the proper experience of using them is pretty much off limits to me.

Whatever kind of paper they use in moleskines and gel pens have been a saving grace for me. For some reason it works much much better.

I'm a lefty, and I can barely get pens to work most of the time because of the angle I have to hold the pen to write with (lefties tend to push pens, which makes them not work). Pencils weren't much better because of the smudgy mess it created all over my hand and the paper. Getting through school was excruciating and messy until I got to college and it was considered "okay" to turn in work I had done on my computer.

I could have pretty decent handwriting for about an hour and then fatigue simply set it and most of my writing is an illegible mess. Not surprisingly, when I was young and we were graded on handwriting my grades were pretty poor.

Cursive didn't help much either as the continuous strokes simply meant I made more of a mess all over myself.

I was an okay sketch artist as a kid, so I had good pen control, just could never really adapt myself to the written word.

Lots of lefties go through all kinds of contortions to improve some of the situation, you'll notice Obama reaches around where he's writing so he can pull on the pen. I tried that for a while but the back and shoulder cramps were pretty spectacularly killer.

https://traceyricksfoster.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/obama-...

Lefty, grew up in France (= forced to use a fountain pen from 1st to 12th grade), I just learned how to write in a way that minimizes smudges (my 2nd grade teacher would tear apart any piece of work with smudges on it and make you redo it, that's French education for you), plus heavily use blotting paper.

Now I work for a big tech company and still carry a notebook + fountain pen + blotting paper to meetings, it amuses my coworkers.

I switched to Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens a year or so ago for daily use and will never go back to a ball point pen ever again. I also switched to vertical writing a when I was very young. I could never get comfortable writing with my wrist all twisted over the top like the teachers wanted me to do. So my note pads all sit with the lines vertical and I write up.

Even worse, for my own personal note books and random writing I use steno pads and write from the bottom to the top of a page. My wife hates it because when I ask her to read something I've been working on she has a lot of trouble reading it. But I've been doing it for so long it's natural for me. If I need to share something with people I can write "normally" or type it out. But personal use my system works for me.

I'm also left handed and have tried out way too many pens. As others have suggested, Uniball Jetstream pens are fantastic and are nearly impossible to smudge by accident. They also come in a variety of sizes. I really like the 0.38mm for taking notes on the small margins of academic papers.

The main pens I've been using these days are disposable fountain pens [1]. They write great and somehow the ink rarely smudges, though more often than with the Jetstreams. But overall I find it more pleasant to write with fountain pens.

[1] http://pilotpen.us/brands/varsity/varsity/

The only way I've successfully used a fountain pen for any length of time as a lefty was to write right to left with it. As with a right handed script you're drawing away from the finished script so you don't smudge it, but your angle and letters are "wrong" (until you get used to them that way). When I was in high school I read that Leanardo DaVinci wrote "backwards" in his notebooks[1] because it was more comfortable for him as a left handed writer, which of course as a nerd I had to try :-).

[1] http://legacy.mos.org/sln/Leonardo/LeonardoRighttoLeft.html

Yep, have similar problems with ballpoints and soft-leaded pencil.

At the moment I am mostly using Artline 200 Fine 0.4mm pens. These are not ballpoints and the think ink lines dry fast, so the text is hard to smudge. They are not without issue though. As the nibs are only crimped into place and writing with your left hand means you are pushing down and to the right; the nibs slowly get pushed up into the pen body. So I have to replace them when the nib disappears which is before the ink runs out.

If I am forced to use ballpoints for any lengthy text I end up rotating the paper close to 90 degrees and writing at an extreme angle to get the pen to drag rather than push across the page.

I took a calligraphy workshop, and since I'm a lefty, I ended up having to hold the paper with the top edge to my right and write vertically down the page. That way, the letters came out looking correct and I didn't smudge the paper.

I have always wondered if right-handed people who write with right-to-left scripts (Arabic or Hebrew spring to mind) face the same struggles that lefties who who write the Latin alphabet face. Arabic calligraphy in particular, has managed to reach a high degree of refinement despite the risk of smudging.

If so, there must be a lot of products and techniques to accommodate their needs, which could help you.

I'm a leftie and also a fountain pen user/lover. It's totally possible!

In Germany you can buy fountain pens for left handers. (Faber-Castell and Lamy I know of)

See Noodler's "Ben Bernanke" inks[1] which are fast drying and meant for lefties. The name is a play on the fast drying inks Bernanke is using to print more money.

[1]: http://www.gouletpens.com/noodlers-bernanke-black-3oz-bottle...

I learned cursive writing in first grade in 1958 (in Detroit) and we were already using ballpoint pens. But the desks we used had working inkwells, emptied of the ink, so I'd guess the change was fairly recent because a few years later the inkwells had been removed just leaving big holes in the desks where they'd resided.

The biggest thing back then was that I was left handed and the teachers forced me to write right handed. My mother ended up getting me 'permission' to write left handed and I have been happily ever since ;<).

My grandmother forced my left handed mother to do everything with her right hand, including write. Now she writes with either hand :)

My primary school (UK) had desks with inkwells in the 80s. I have no idea when the inkwells had last been used. The idea of giving 4-11 yo kids ink seems crazy now.

I was an "ink monitor" at school in the UK in the 1950s. My job was to go round and fill up empty inkwells. It was the pinnacle of my career ;-)

I don't remember any problems. We were very well-behaved.

I have a nice Baoer 79 Montblanc Starwalker clone that I paid under $4 for ( delivery included ) Here is someone's review http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/240914-baoer-7...

If you prefer something larger,the Jinhao 159 is a clone of the Montblanc Meisterstück 149 http://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/216230-jinhao-... and is under $6 on ebay

Is there even a point to learning cursive anymore? Seems like a waste of time if they're still teaching it to kids. I can't think of any practical purpose for it. Knowing cursive is about as useful as knowing how to use an abacus.

Knowing how to use an abacus makes early arithmetic so much easier for young school children.

I think knowing cursive is still useful, too, because if you do know how to use ligatures to join letters you can write MUCH faster than if you have to write in print. As an engineer, I prefer smallcaps when I need someone else to read my handwriting, but if it's just for my own consumption (task lists, notes, etc) it's faux* cursive 99% of the time.

* faux because it's really just joining letters and filling the missing letter spaces with zig zaggy curlies ... which have no bearing on readability, per this: http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/cmabridge/

I also use faux cursive. I find it faster to print initial letters. Also printed "m", "n", "r", "s" and "w" are as fast, and more likely legible. That evolved over many years of note taking. I used to prefer Rapidograph, but now its rollerball.

I think it's useful for being able to read old documents. My parents and grandparents wrote only in cursive and I'm finding I have to read their writing to younger people who can't read it.

I am not sure learning how to read cursive is very hard and teaching that may still be a good thing to do. Learning how to write it seems the difficult part though considering most people who do not know how to write cursive can read it just fine.

Note: Some cursive is much easier to read than others

I also know how to read Old Church Slavonic, but I'm not going insist that people learn it to read old Slavic documents...

I don't know why anyone would want to write in print, I can't stand it.

Yeah, my reaction to most of these sorts of articles is "lawl, handwriting." Even on my Note 3, it's usually faster for me to type by tapping on Hacker's Keyboard than to use handwriting recognition (even if the recognition were perfect) and a lot of people seem to find Swyft-style keyboards really efficient. Eventually I think handwriting will go away just about entirely, and all that will remain will be reserved for moments like in The Diamond Age when a character is taken aback at the quality of an invitation's Chinese calligraphy, and the fact that it's used is more for a status symbol of being able to learn such an unnecessary art and perform it well than for anything else.

I'm surprised no one has mentioned felt tip pens as an alternative to fountain pens.

The Paper Mate medium point felt tip pen is my favorite writing tool. It provides a good-looking and effortless stroke and you can buy them pretty much anywhere.

Fountain pens rule. But the problem with acquiring them is that nowadays a lot of fountain pens seem to be made to look fancy and not to write well.

I learned this when I bought my first and only fountain pen last year. The difference in writing experience is amazing - I take so much more notes now, and actually carry a notebook with me.

Sustained fine grained and fluid hand movement is more difficult to learn then drawing a sequence of geometric shapes and a lot more challenging to read. School should be about understanding ideas and the value of critical thinking. Using or requiring the use of an inefficient presentation method does not help with that mission.

I suppose the mass move away from cursive writing started with the printing press. By simplifying the symbols we gained a powerful tool to spread the ideas they convey. This has just become more true with the computer which, much like the printing press, has a much easier time with distinct disconnected symbols.

I believe it's more important to learn how to write and express your ideas using all available technologies then spending time learning the particulars of one.

The hammer doesn't need to be beautiful to build a beautiful house it needs to be efficient. Writing does not need to be elegant to convey a beautiful message.

In my hometown in the 80's, elementary school kids were not allowed to use ballpoints. Fountain pens were allowed from the 3rd grade. Before that, wood-based pencils only. Even mechanical pencils were forbidden. It was said that ballpoints and mechanical pencils, especially the former, would have very negative effects on developing one's handwriting.

This was the case for Chinese, in which a good handwriting was highly regarded. As far as I know, there are no studies to prove or disprove the claim. It was true for me personally and for my classmates. I could execute many handwriting forms in pencils and in fountain pens easily while extremely hard, if ever possible, in ballpoints. After using ballpoints for a pretty long period, I couldn't write as well even if I picked up my fountain pens again. It had to take some time and some writing to get it back.

This is rubbish. Ballpoint pens had long been in existence before I went to school, and I learned cursive. My daughter's French classmates are all, today, taught superb cursive handwriting.

Okay. So was I, but primarily I don't see people using it for everyday writing. Why do you suppose that is the case? Most people know how to use cursive, but they choose not to do so.

That's exactly the author's point. We still teach a cursive writing style that is better suited for fountain pens, while working with ball-points that require a lot more pressure to start marking. Being trained in a technique is not enough, if that technique no longer works with the tools that are widely used today. When I write with a fountain pen, I too find that cursive is more natural. When I write with a ballpoint, I actually tend to write in short clusters of one, two or three "joi ned le tt ers.", so my hand has a chance to relax between each... diglyph, I guess you'd call it.

Under the discipline of a schoolteacher, I could force myself to write "superb cursive handwriting", but when writing for speed and legibility, I adapt to the limitations of my tools.

Not writing in cursive helps but it doesn't solve the fundamental problem that ballpoint pens are significantly worse than fountain pens when you need to write for several hours in an exam for example.

"And since the thin ink flows more quickly, I have to refill the pen frequently."

While technically true, that fountain pens will use more ink, keep in mind that (a) ink is cheap, (b) refilling is easy, and (c) some[1] pens have a larger ink capacity.

[1] http://asapens.in/eshop/fountain-pen/gama-ebonite-pens/gama-...

"Fight for your Write” campaign—brought up an fMRI study suggesting that writing by hand may be better for kids’ learning than using a computer."

How about writing by hand ON a computer?

For me is totally stupid to teach kids to type on a keyboard, when in the present and near future you could use other faster and better means for writing, like this speech recognition I am using now or stenotype.

The other day I saw a friend using a new prototype of a new digital stenotype on a maker space and I was sold instantly. This is the future.

But children need to learn how to draw, and train their hands in precise manipulation. If you lose handwriting training when you are kid you also lose the ability of doing precise work with your hands as your brain will prune the neural connections with your hand as you don't use it.

You can do that on a computer. Today we have affordable galaxy notes. I use an expensive Cinqiq, that will become much more affordable in the future. Training kids looking at the rear mirror makes no sense to me.

The Apple Newton was the last chance for cursive. Having two, I found that was the easiest and most accurate handwriting input. Alas, "egg freckles" rued the day and no more tech used cursive input.

Microsoft's handwriting recognition is surprisingly good at understanding cursive. I have a Lenovo Helix and use the built-in digitizer with some frequency due to RSI issues with typing. I don't think it's a huge use case, but it's nice to see the technology carrying forward in some capacity.

This is why I started using Uniball Eye pens. They require so much less pressure, it's quite a relief for my hand. And when I picked them up, I started using cursive again in my handwriting.

I love fountain pens. Like automatic watches, they create a certain attachment and appreciation for function.

...in America.

At least in Argentina, the children at school still use a fountain pen and learn cursive. In secondary they usualy switch to a ballpoint.

Many European countries too, but people still write things by hand.

Wow, why would they torture children that way? Even ballpoint pen is obviously outdated and should be held back, keyboard is the king.

Cost.

Cost? Fontain pens are very impractical devices. Ink wells, ink spills, carrying pens around, fixing them - this ends up.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, I only saw one friend writing in another script but he is clearly a minority, the vast majority of people on my case (France) are writing in cursive.

Has anybody switched to writing on a screen as a regular thing?

What about gel ink?

I used to get very sore neck muscles, not pain in my hands.

If an essay exam final was truly 3 hours, rather than twice the length of a 1 hour midterm, I came out in agony.

I say good riddance. Leave it to people who make a job out of it. We should admit it and move on, removing stuck bits of handwriting from where it doesn't belong anymore.

I personally never liked writing on paper, it was ugly and time-consuming; I would never be able to express myself on paper: I'll compress the meaning away or just quit halfway through.

Yup, my typing speed is ~80 WPM and my writing speed is probably way less and not even as easy to read.

My typing speed is more than 80 WPM when I'm 12 hours into a bad day and my handwriting is horrid, but I still often use paper to clarify my thoughts, take notes, and draw diagrams. More often than not, I never actually read what I've written, the act of writing just makes it easier for me to retain the information.

Similarly, I've found that I can retain the content of electronic documents more easily if I type them out in a text editor. Sometimes I just delete the text, other times I retain it as a more portable version of the content.

Most members of my family think it's strange that I work with paper so much (and continue to buy most of my books in paper form), given that I've made a living writing software and websites for almost 20 years. I just think that, even with computers in the house from a young age, I was taught to use my brain through paper, and every alternative they've come up with to date has been, at best, a half-assed imitation.

I was taught to use my brain through a keyboard :p. Writing on paper seems clunky to me.

And since I'm homeschooled I've been typing most of my answers to books on a computer (for 4-5 years).

I have yet to find diagramming software that lets me express myself faster than a couple of quick doodles on a piece of paper.

I find myself loathing to explain something with a "simple" chart that can take 5 minutes to draw by hand but far more on a computer.

I just use my finger on my tablet. The app recognizes my skewed lines and transforms them into regular forms and connections. Then I can easily export to SVG and finish it up on the computer.

"lets me express myself faster than a couple of quick doodles on a piece of paper."

... and then take a digital photo. Which is the process I've adopted. This is a hard problem to solve with the clumsy digital tools we have at our disposal at the moment. Probably not with this generation of input.

For block diagrams, graphviz is the fastest for me. If I need anything more complicated than node->node relations, pretty much any editor akin to visio is still faster than doing it by hand and looks much prettier because I have infinite space and can rearrange things on the fly. By hand is useful when all I have for collaboration is a whiteboard, though.

I still like it for taking notes. Stuff seems to stick better in my mind when I take notes by hand compared to when I take notes by typing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com