Comment by autocorr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by autocorr | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that I didn't see hand fatigue mentioned, which is probably the number one reason cursive is actually useful, not that it is fast or "aided in cognitive development". Business scripts (like Spencerian in the early 20th c) were developed if you were Clerk or someone who had to scribe stuff out for hours on end, and it had to be legible and consistent. The mechanics of it are quite simple. If you hold a pen, pinch it, and write each letter by moving the your fingers in and out, you will tire quickly or get hand cramps. Cursive scripts on the other keep your fingers fixed, and you write by moving your whole arm, and bending your wrist back and forth, that's why letters come naturally at a fixed angle, because your wrist is going up and down as your arm moves across the page. It also makes writing legibly easier when you write large, your arm system is like one of those old line plotters doing big sweeping motions that you can easily control. Try writing large letters with finger movements while keeping your wrist and elbow mostly still and it's like chiselling them out. It's hard to maintain the right movements over large sweeps and make consistent letters. So this I feel is the number one reason to learn cursive, if you go to college and want to take notes for three hours a day while keeping your hand comfortable, it's natural to write through your whole arm, and the way to write naturally with your whole arm is to basically flick up and down while smoothly pushing your arm across the page: cursive scripts.

Unless you are left handed, in which case none of these things are true. I quickly get hand fatigue when I (try to) write in cursive.

I really struggled with cursive in grade school because very little of the mechanics of right handed writing work for left-handed kids, and the teachers didn't have anything to offer other than criticism of the writing I could do. Most lefty's I have talked to had the same experience.

Then just write right-to-left. And to keep things readible mirror letters top-down (i.e. resulting in non-mirrored but 180 deg rotated page) :)

I know, and it's a shame, because it actually takes very little effort to do better teaching of left-handed:

http://handedness.org/action/leftwrite.html

I had many teachers who insisted on cursive, and none of them were half as lucid as you were just now.

That’s how the cargo cult works. You’re teachers couldn’t explain why cursive was “better” but forced its use anyway.

Similarly, forcing left handed students to write with their right hand finds a rationalized basis in superstition, although it’s been explained that when a cultural custom forces a bias toward a specific dominant handedness by default, it benefits safety optimizations in aggregate.

I know zero people who write in cursive.

I know very few people who even hand write anything.

I know few people who read anything worthwhile too, but that's not an argument.

I do not know anyone who writes in non-cursive. I live in France where cursive is the norm.

Everyone I know hand writes on a whiteboard of a piece of paper. Or when they make a note to the teacher. Or when they use a post-it.

In the US it's a dead art. I learned it as a kid and never use it. My kids are actually not learning it. It's been removed from the curriculum in New York and I'm pleased.

It's still very useful for taking notes. I find taking notes on a computer is not nearly as effective as taking notes with pen and paper.

My reply was mostly for the "zero people" - contrasting it to "everyone" in other cultures.

I think that cursive is hardly readable (mine certainly, other too - and we almost see only cursive here in France).

Block letters (which I understand being separated letters, but still lower and upper case) is much better, but also much slower. Maybe that it is OK when someone is trained (where "OK" means " good enough for everyday handwriting, including taking notes").

A lot of discussions in this thread are probably due to the fact that we have, in France and most of Europe, either cursive, or capital block letters. We do not have the equivalent of typed text, where every letter is distinct (it is not that we cannot imagine how it looks like - it is just something we are not used to).

The recent US handwriting I saw was by Donald Trump - and is is all uppercase. I hope that this is not the non-cursive everyone discusses about but just his own style of "uppercase block letters".

Here's some handwriting sample for you:

https://i.imgur.com/0Pdq8Ci.jpg

Sorry for the poor photo quality, but it's the best I could manage to do at the moment.

On the left is some writing that I did just now, just for you! On the right is a page of notes that I wrote a few weeks ago. It didn't occur to me to get anything in there for scale until just now, but the larger notebook (the one on the right) is roughly 13 cm across by 21 cm high. The smaller one 12.7 cm by 19.6 cm according to the cover.

You can see on the right that I've written some elaborate headings... I'd imagine I'm one of very few people, if not the only person, who writes headings in such a script. Below that, you can see that I employ cursive and block for different purposes: most writing is in cursive, but "foreign" language (Old English in this case) words are written in block. I do similar things in other sorts of notes; for example, I might write source code or command names in block to keep them visually distinct from the commentary.

In the US, it seems that most people these days "learn" cursive at some point, but abandon it the first chance they get. This wasn't always the case (my mom and my grandma write exclusively in cursive, for example). Personally, I tend to only write with block letters if the scribbles are intended for a recipient (or, as mentioned above, as a semantic device).

> I live in France where cursive is the norm.

I live in Silicon Valley where I don't care where people who live anywhere else do it because they don't matter.

Do you know any undergrads? Writing notes in cursive was was essential to me taking a bunch of math and CS courses at once and doing well.

> you write by moving your whole arm

Which f*cking nobody properly teaches or bothers to mention (at least where I was studying). The problem with cursive is not the cursive itself but incompetent teachers who don't know how to write. Add to it mid 20 century style of teaching forcing students to write tens of pages of notes each lesson for 16 years, all the time doing it wrong, with fingers only, and you get a population of people who can only scrawl something unintelligible on paper. I'm forced to write in separate letters when doing notes because otherwise it is too embarrassing.

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