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Comment by qsymmachus | Hacker News Reader

Russian Cyrillic is hand-written exclusively in cursive. Children are never even taught how to write block letters.

The author may be right to argue that cursive has no decisive advantage over block letters, "so why teach it?", a more fundamental question to my mind is why bother teaching _both_ forms of hand-writing? If we have to pick one, why privilege block letters over cursive, if both are equally effective?

Edit: anecdotally, I write cursive cyrillic faster than I write block letter English, and Russian isn't even my native language.

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Keyboards eliminated the advantages cursive had for input speed in most cases, and I find block characters easier to read. Definitely don’t feel cursive has advantages when handwriting speed is less relevant.

People who learned block letters first, and who rarely encounter cursive, undoubtedly find block letters easier to read. But you might imagine that if had learned cursive first and used it regularly, you would have no problem reading it.

The point I'm trying to make is that the preference for block letters is an accident of how most of us were taught, and not intrinsic to the writing style itself.

I've been taught cursive since elementary school and I've seen plenty cases when people's cursive was almost unreadable for me. Which almost never happens with block letters. Cursive has only one advantage - maximum speed of writing. If you need to write down something fast especially in large quantity (like lectures in university). But readability is usually harmed in that case. Especially bad situation with doctors, I've never understood how they can produce such cryptic notes when people's life can depend on it. Anyway, I don't see a point in cursive today (even though that's the only way I write text in my native language, but that's rarely needed).

That's undoubtedly true, but I think the more important thing is that cursive is just dead in adult society. Reading other people's cursive handwriting represents a tiny, infinitesimal percentage of the reading in most people's lives. Computers, books, magazines, newspapers all render text as block letters and that's what most people are used to nowadays.

Teaching cursive is a complete waste of everyone's time.

I grew up in France where we were taught cursive exclusively. When people get older, their handwriting changes and can be very personal and hard to read (even for other cursive writers). Besides, apart from their own writing, most people read exclusively block characters from books and screens.

Actually, I wish I could write block letters more fluently as my (mixed/cursive) handwriting is quite embarrassing!

It's not just raw input speed - writing on paper allows you to quickly jump around the text, making small corrections, adding notes/symbols/drawings, etc.

I can jump around and make corrections in vim far quicker than I can flipping a pencil, erasing, flipping it again, writing correction. And that's for a simple edit that doesn't require moving block of text. Hand writing it slow and inefficient.

Because you don't write a lot of code on paper? Working with text (for notes or prose) is very different than working with code. You don't think "I need to correct that thing located 23 words forward so I use 23w or press w 23 times" - you position your hand and make a correction.

For one thing, in English at least (and AFAIK throughout users of the Latin alphabet more broadly), you pretty much have to be able to write block letters as a literate person. Block letters are generally less ambiguous. (Especially all CAPS.)

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