Comment by sseagull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sseagull | Hacker News Reader

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I think some of the lamentation about losing cursive romanticizes everything a bit. When people think of cursive, they think of beautiful, Declaration of Independence-like script.

I do my family genealogy, which involves reading lots of censuses and historical documents. For every document with beautiful handwriting, there are hundreds that look like scribbles and that take me a long time to figure out what they were writing. And I learned cursive in school. When I find a document with printed handwriting, I want to go back in time and personally thank the writer.

There is a difference between what some people imagine cursive to be, and what it is in practice. People will always have bad handwriting, and bad printing is easier to read than bad cursive.

See also: Doctor's handwriting

When I was in high school, at some point I realized that if I wrote (printed) my notes too fast, I had a lot of trouble reading them later on.

Since then I switched to cursive, and for the most part stuck with it. I doubt others would have an easy time reading my fast cursive (doctor-style scribbles) but at least words have a "shape" I can easily recognize, even if letters are completely deformed.

Meanwhile, my chickenscratch print took so much effort to decipher that it was easier to just look up the info elsewhere.

I find even the Declaration of Independence is difficult to read - and I, too, learned cursive in school. Heck, I've even written essays in cursive about the declaration and the constitution!

The main thing with the Declaration and Constitution is that we know what they say - we've seen it in print, in books, and so on. When we go to read the cursive, we know what to expect.

That aspect is lacking in other documents. For old documents, even the beautiful writing takes some time to decifer. I can only imagine the effort in piecing together the scribbles.

I generally liken the lamentating folks to the folks that think that we should go back to teaching "Reading, writing, and 'rithmatic" in schools because back in the day, that's how it was done and (insert rosy thing about the past here).

I think the real observation here is not so much that print is more legible than cursive, but rather that most people actually suck at handwriting. That can be solved in two ways: get them to practice it with an aim towards improving legibility (good luck), or tell them to give up and just type everything (easier).

People who adhere to a particular form, whether it's a form of print or cursive, and do it consistently and with superior execution, have very legible handwriting.

Another good resource to get a feeling for bad cursive is interpreting documents for Family Search. https://familysearch.org/indexing/projects

They have excellent desktop apps and systems for volunteers I was impressed but had to throw in the towel on anything but beginner level work.

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