Is Handwriting History? | Hacker News Reader

Is Handwriting History?

publicbooks.org

36 pointsdiodorus67 comments

I always carry a pocket sized notebook and a pen with me wherever I go. It's still the fastest method to write something down, it always works and it's socially acceptable to use in all situations. Most people whom I meet, even in private, will see me take out my notebook at the beging of the meeting, taking notes occasionally while we interact. I don't think you could do that with a computer or phone and it allows me to remember important details and action points that I (and the person I'm talking to) would forget otherwise. At work I have larger, A4-sized notebooks that I use similarly.

One of the features that I appreciate most is that everything I write down is in chronological order and can be accessed very quickly. In seconds, I can go through last weeks notes and check if I forgot to do something, or even go back a year or more to revisit my thoughts on something that happened back then. Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.

I've seen and tried some of the new epaper notepads and they're definitely getting closer, but for now they're still to slow, clumsy & fragile to replace paper for me.

I take notes on paper, and then scan them in later. I get the best of both worlds that way.

>Using a pen is also much more expressive, allowing me to highlight/format certain points as a discussion/meeting is ongoing and add illustrations, arrows etc. on the fly.

I think this is the killer advantage of handwriting over typing text in a computer/phone/similar. You have much more expressiveness: you can underline, highlight, cross out, circle, draw, make arrows, organize in lists, different indentation levels, different sizes and fonts lay things out along the page as best represents your mental pictures. And it's all simple and frictionless. I'm very very skeptical any computer program can ever be as natural as jotting stuff down with pen and paper.

I find that the more time I spend around computers, the more I actually want to hand write things. I've recently gotten into the habit of keeping notebooks for various things, I even wrote a letter by hand to someone (something I haven't done since I was a child).

There's something so permanent about handwriting, compared to an ephemeral computer file. There's also the fact that notebooks don't run out of battery, or need signal.

As far as actual penmanship goes though, I have pretty terrible handwriting, it's getting better. For some reason, buying a fountain pen has markedly improved my handwriting.

I've spent many hours attempting to transcribe my grandparents' handwritten letters. It's very difficult to decipher. Ironically, even the letters they'd mash out on a typewriter are difficult to decipher, but it's a lot easier than the handwriting.

It's not just my grandparents. Their relatives also all had wretched handwriting. I've shown them to many people, and they can hardly make it out, either.

I don't think good penmanship was commonplace :-)

This isn't the first time I've said this, but I believe doing serious genealogy will 'cure' most people of their love of cursive, and maybe writing things by hand in general.

You get better at reading it, but there is much more bad handwriting out there than good.

With all this work on facial recognition, voice transcription, etc., I'd love to see some AI work on decoding handwriting. It would be a great boon to me.

I harp on and on about this, but the looped cursive of the 19th and 20th centuries is horrible for legibility. Many of the common letterforms blur together, especially when written quickly. There were reasons for adopting it at the time, but it really shouldn't be taught anymore. Today we should be teaching cursive italic, for several reasons (legibility, ease of teaching).

I think as you do on this matter. I wish I knew how to get in touch with you. Meanwhile, there’s always the Society for Italic Handwriting, to shic( I belong: italic-handwriting.org

Kate Gladstone CEO, HandwritingThatWorks.com DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest handwritingrepair@gmail.com

I think as you do on this matter.

I wish I knew how to get in touch with you.

Meanwhile, there’s always the Society for Italic Handwriting, to which I belong: italic-handwriting.org

Kate Gladstone CEO, HandwritingThatWorks.com DIRECTOR, the World Handwriting Contest handwritingrepair@gmail.com

I've been using handwriting more often as well.

One great benefit is that, unlike when typing, your writing speed is usually slow enough to where your brain can go over it a couple times for sanity checks.

There's also the free form advantage (especially if you're just writing notes, it's fine to just draw little diagrams in the corner, scratch things out).

Even writing out pseudo-code ends up being very useful. Thinking while staring at an IDE is usually very difficult, I've found. IDEs are great for looking up and reading code (jump to definition, extra metadata) though

You can't compare to yourself with computers earlier: you have to compare to a hypothetical yourself that never had a computer. I am pretty confident I would be doing an insanely large amount of writing were I to not able to type.

If only... I recently had to take a standardized business knowledge test and I had to write a disclaimer (eg: "I hereby certify that...") in CURSIVE.

When I asked if we really had to write in 19th century writing, she replied that this was the "writing of the business world".

No words.

Historically, block letters were taught to young children first because they were seen as less difficult to form, and therefore writing by someone with little fine motor control would be somewhat legible. Cursive was how adults wrote. In that sense, she was correct.

That said, "the writing of the business world" today is Times New Roman (or maybe Helvetica Neue). It replaced the Palmer Method of Business Writing[1], which is quite distinct from the the cursive that is taught in schools today (Zaner-Bloser[2] or D'Nealian[3]).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method

2: http://content.yudu.com/web/y5b2/0A3vbrb/16Grade6Student/htm...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian

As someone who was forced to learn Palmer style in school, I must say I always hated the capital Q. I don't know if I just couldn't get it right, or I never really saw it as legible, but it annoyed me that it looked too much like a 2. I went back to block letters in college and never thought much of penmanship.

Until college, when I learned a bit of LaTeX and became fascinated with fonts. Still hate that Q though. Thank goodness for computers.

IMHO cursive script is optimised for writability, but not readability. If asked to use it, I'd probably say "I can try if you really insist, but you're unlikely to be able to read it" --- instead, I'll use my "personal font" which looks like either Futura or Courier depending on what I'm writing, and which others have commented quite positively on the legibility of.

I learned Palmerian cursive back when that was what was taught in elementary schools, and used it for everything (exams, essays, note-taking, letter-writing) through college and graduate school. By the end of that time, my cursive had become completely illegible to anyone but myself.

I later re-taught myself to write an italic cursive, which frequently gets complimented when people see it.

I always carry a pen.

I prefer handwriting to taking electronic notes and have never found a touch device I'd rather write on than paper.

Aside: Teaching kids cursive also still has value in teaching fine motor skills.

> Aside: Teaching kids cursive also still has value in teaching fine motor skills.

It's also been shown to be helpful for students with dyslexia.

It's also arguably faster since you aren't lifting the pen from the paper. I don't write in "formal" cursive, but there's definitely cursive elements in my (cruddy) penmanship, and I know a lot of people who write similarly.

The studies which I’ve seen cited as proving that turned out, when I checked the actual citations, not to have proven it. Two examples of research showing cursive's lack of observable benefit for students with dyslexia/dysgraphia:

"Does cursive handwriting have an impact on the reading and spelling performance of children with dyslexic dysgraphia: A quasi-experimental study." Authors: Lorene Ann Nalpon & Noel Kok Hwee Chia — URL: http://www.researchgate.net/publication/234451547_Does_cursi...

and

http://dyslexia.yale.edu/EDU_keyboarding.html

> Aside: Teaching kids cursive also still has value in teaching fine motor skills.

IMO, it's the most important thing, we have to teach fine motor skills very early to little humans if we want them to be full humans.

> if we want them to be full humans

This is a circular argument. You just punted the discussion to "what does it mean to be a full human and why is handwriting a necessary part of that." I ride horses, as people have for millennia; I would never claim nonriders are less than human.

It's not a circular argument because it wasn't an argument at all. It was a fairly conservative opinion.

It certainly helped me. I struggled with fine motor control as a kid, and it wasn't until a teacher sat me down and made me practice my penmanship over and over again that I got over the hump.

I won't say I enjoyed it at the time, but as far as 'educational events I can point to and say this made a difference', it is, perhaps surprisingly, quite high on the list.

Declaring that some human beings are not “full humans” is a very bad idea.

I’ve never seen evidence that cursive has more value, in that regard, than any of the other forms of our handwriting. Studies I seen cited on the matter — when I looked up th3 originak studies, not merely the second- and third- and fourth-hand reportage in the news and social media — turned ou5 to support cursive over any of the other ways we write by hand.

It's history the way Fortran is history. Most people in most situations do not use it. Specific people in specific situations still use it, and it's still the best tool for that job.

Taking note is still faster in with a pen and paper. Thinking as well. And I'm on the very upper scale of computer skills.

Lately I even removed some part of my project management tooling to replace it with paper. Very short term actionable data is more productive on paper for me.

You must be a very slow typist :). I can write on a keyboard much faster than on paper, and I'll bet I can outpace any regular person in this way. One could try and compete by employing some stenography shenanigans, but at that point I'll just enable abbrev mode in my Emacs and beat them again.

Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text. The moment I expect needing to write a lot of math formulas, or drawing any kind of diagram, I get my paper and pens. Writing by hand is amazingly flexible.

> Writing by hand is amazingly flexible

Once, as an exercise I attempted to transcribe my Statistics notes into LaTeX. I was perfectly capable of inserting the proper math notation, but I never realized how versatile layouts can be so easily made on paper. Things like alternating writing sizes (doable in digital, but usually ends up looking horrible), varying levels of indentation and line height, margin notes, asides, ease of diagrams (again, doable digitally, but time-consuming), notation (crossing things out, circling, arrows, etc), and so many other things. Typesetting for print or digital requires a complete change of layout and even approaches to presentation. You don't realize how much freedom the blank paper gives you until you try translating it to the digital document.

Typing on a computer is much easier than by hand Formatting otoh...

> but I never realized how versatile layouts can be so easily made on paper.

Until you need to change them.

It's significantly easier to change formatting on a typed document than handwritten.

Yes but I feel that changes when you have something like a diagram. For example, drawing Organic Chemistry mechanisms. Yes you can do them on the computer with ChemDraw and if you need to change something you can, but in practice it feels so slow it's just quicker to cross out your mistake on paper and try again.

Too bad digital notes don't have coffee rings and chocolate stains on them.

http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

You must have a very limited way of expressing your self :)

I can express with a pen using symbols, drawing, spacing, diagrams, flow...

Too many people confuse taking notes with transcription, or forget to take in consideration the cost of context switching.

I've tried many UI sketching/prototyping apps over the years and keep coming back to pen and paper. It's not just the speed but the ephemeral nature of paper that invites to exploration and mistakes. Using Balsamiq or any other app seems much heavier in some way...

To me handwriting and sketching feels more responsive. Yes with a software tool you might be able to construct a perfect triangle in a few clicks and then it instantly appears, but my brain interprets all those clicks as lag. The goal is to use my hands to make something appear. All those clicks are moving my hands but nothing is appearing! When I sketch it, the instant my hand moves the pen a line appears. It takes longer to construct the whole triangle, but the process itself is zero latency.

I admit it is not rational but it's just how I feel.

Ouch :). I suppose I asked for it, and yeah, you're right. I mentioned doing symbols, drawings and diagrams on paper, but 90% of the time my notes are just plaintext stream of thoughts or outlines.

I think that’s covered by the "Where typing fails me, though, is anything other than writing regular, linear text" part.

Also we’re not really talking about note taking, more by which mean you put ideas on a written support.

I am under the impression that people who spent the majority of their formative years on pen and paper will in mostly be more comfortable thinking on pen and paper, but increasingly I feel that the lack of practice in hand writing will put a lot more friction in that process, tiping the balance in a different way.

Also there’s a flurry of study floating around about university students who can’t think while typing (and It’s usually about note taking to get back to your point), but it feels counter to my own experience, and I wonder if it’s not an effect of the studies done on students who just came out of a decade of pen and paper learning. Just like how children can have a hard time reading and understanding the meaning at the same time, or how their first years of writing is really taking an input and transforming it to an output.

> increasingly I feel that the lack of practice in hand writing will put a lot more friction in that process, tiping the balance in a different way

It is definitely true for me. One of the main reasons I default to typing is not the speed, but the fact that my handwriting is absolutely abhorrent, and I feel displeasure from just looking at it. I suppose it could be improved with training, but I generally didn't find time for it yet.

let's see you write out complex equations with equal facility.

I explicitly mentioned in my comment that this is where I switch to paper.

sorry missed that.

As others mentioned, that's certainly not my experience, but the tactile nature of taking noted by hand still helps me remember better.

I've been half-heartedly considering learning shorthand. I still like taking notes by hand, but I often realllllly wish I had a mostly verbatim record of some meetings.

> but the tactile nature of taking noted by hand still helps me remember better

As a data point, I can confirm that too - for me it also seems that writing something by hand is significantly more helpful to learning/remembering it than typing. Because of that, during my university years, while I often took lecture notes on the computer, I would rewrite key points on paper several time, to make them stick in my head.

In agreement with TeMPOraL, I think there is at least two different kind of ‘note taking’ or even problems to think about.

For coding problems or algorithms for instance, I honestly find it way easier and faster to type, even pseudo code or sequence diagrams (basically ascii art at that point). It specially helps to be able to move around blocks or ident/deindent, bold or format whole portions.

For more architectural or organizational problems, hand writing on a blank canvas is more efficient. Not faster in my case, but the freedom is unmatched.

Funnily enough, for math with equations and lot of symbols, I’m not proficient enough to have a free flow of ideas that I jolt down on paper mindlessly. There’s so much friction from the start that the burden of formating in a software for instance is negligeable compared to the struggle I’ll have to come to the right exceptions.

I'd say it's as much history as cooking food over a fire. Modern cooking appliances make it easier/more practical but there's nothing quite like a good BBQ...

Have you got a BBQ? My answer to such a question, following some clumsy digging in my kitchen and backyard, is increasingly no. Sometimes, embarrassment giving way to defensiveness, I wonder why anyone bothers to ask. For years a “fire” has sufficed for my cooking of food; it’s months since I chargrilled some meat. Presented with a gas hob, more and more super markets point me to ready meals to cook with my microwave. (I worry that the content of my burger bears no resemblance to real ingredients, but on the flip side—ha! flip!—I’ve begun losing all sense of what that indication of my insides might look like.)

I recently got a tablet for use as a home entertainment controller and newspaper and the first thing I wanted was a pen or a stylus with the tactile feedback of a pen. My cursive is far from Declaration of Independence level but as a personal project I've been practicing and it's remarkable how fast writing anything becomes. I'd go so far as the argue children should be taught cursive first and then learn to recognize block letters later. Watch your waitress sometime if she takes notes on a pad and you'll see what I mean. I'd love to see an app that can be trained on my own handwriting and used to fill in fields and create custom gestures to execute complicated commands. I don't know if I'd like to program on something like that, but as far as my day to day living it would be incredibly convenient.

Such an app exists, for the iPad and (as I recall) the iPhone; its called WritePad Pro.

Thanks for the tip. I'm using Android, unfortunately, but I'm sure I can find an equivalent with some google-fu and WritePad as a keyword.

Not sure if it bothered anyone else enough to look, but I tracked down the missing source for the header image [1]. The U.S. Declaration of Independence [2] is another nice example of handwriting, but unlike a random, faded (and potential non-English?) recipe, it seems very legible and might not have helped the author's argument.

[1]: https://www.flickr.com/photos/calliope/5094055919/in/gallery...

[2]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8f/United_S...

edit: Phrasing

The Summer Institute of Linguistics site outside Tucson keeps many of the many languages spoken in Mexico in a room with no vents. The fear is that if a fire occurs, the documents with the writing kept within will be lost. I would include those in history, but I am not a purist so much that I consider that language doesn't evolve.

I carry a pen, and a neatly, uniformed folded piece of paper in my wallet. Folded to open like a book, accordion like. When I'm done with it, I open it up and file that sheet of paper for a while just In case I need it. My pen is a G2 0.7 in a machined brass body.

The G2 is absolutely amazing as a product in that it's far superior to the competition (for my needs at least) and still reasonably priced.

I've switched to a Signo DX 0.38 as I find I'm a bit cleaner with it.

I have had trouble with G2s clogging after a bit of use, so that they stop and start unevenly. I've found the Uniball Signo 207 and Vision Elite to be much better, depending on whether you want a gel or liquid ink.

I've gone between both - for a while. The G2 is more "scratchy" on paper - and I like that.

My brother (43yo) had to take a full day writing test for a new job last week.

He, as most people, have not wrote long text for years.

He told me that his hand was really painful at the end of the day. I can understand that !

Not until I stop writing out poetry drafts. I find a mix of writing, typing, reading aloud and recording my verse helps take a rough draft into something more coherent and whole.

Each of these methods must use varying parts of my brain as I find they often find improvements that others miss, but I always start with pen and paper, often getting a good 9/10s of it made that way.

TL;DR: No

(personally, 'no' as well. I sometimes work places where electronic devices aren't allowed)

Is this headline the first exception to Betteridge's law of headlines?

No.

And if your comment was a headline, that wouldn't be either.

Mine is. I had better handwriting in primary school. It can be quite embarrassing on the odd occasion where I need to fill out a paper form (which itself is rarer these days).

I found that once I was writing frequent love letters and, more recently, writing poetry, my handwriting improved quite quickly.

Being left-handed, my handwriting is now merely bad. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com