Penmanship

Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of:

+ continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a slinky)

+ continuous counterclockwise version of the above

+ continuous line mountains/valleys (draw an N that becomes an M that keeps going and has tons of peaks)

Repeat.

The first time trying it, most people will find it freakishly difficult to do smoothly and consistently. That's because your fine-motor eye/hand control circuits aren't tuned for these motions which are are the basis functions for all western language penmanship. If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve, not because you learned penmanship but because you enabled your fingers to do what your brain is telling them to do.

This will also help you have better penmanship on a whiteboard, but in-office whiteboard writing involves more large muscles as well, so it doesn't hurt to also doodle on a whiteboard this way once you have the fine-motor controls tuned up (the fine-motor remains the most important, even on a whiteboard, so starting with pen and paper doodling will get you where you want to go fastest for either format).

He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly.

Cursive Italic handwriting is much more legible, if slightly slower. There are popular systems including Getty-Dubay Italic and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting. Both of those are fine, and should be strongly preferred to 19th-20th century cursive.

I wouldn't make any claims that writing has somehow made me magically smarter or better at anything else, I just find it fun to do (and I believe that pleasure is vastly more important than "productivity" so that's a win for me). It seems probable that my composition skills are better (or at least different in some hard-to-define way) due to the slower speed and non-editability of handwritten text. I rarely find myself at a loss for what sentence to write next when I'm handwriting because my thoughts are already buffered up since it takes them a bit longer to get onto the page.

Another angle for me is that I recently picked up a chronic disease which has changed my energy levels a lot and many old hobbies are no longer feasible as often as they used to be. I can write even when I feel like there's a mountain of tires on fire inside my head.

I have no problem with the idea that legible is the primary criterium for handwriting. Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Correctness was already on the way out by the time I came along anyway. There was a uniformity to my mother's and grandmothers' handwritings that was not present among my peers and me in school.

The only experience that I have that says someone must continue to learn cursive is that there are lots of historically important (or at least interesting) documents that are difficult to read even for me, and my kids would have a harder time still. Reading is not the same as writing of course, so merely practice reading these types of things is probably enough. I guess it's similar to Fraktur, which is difficult to read if you've never seen it, but not that bad with just a little practice.

edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...

But I digress! I did also want to state that I disagree with the author's statement "Nobody writes it anymore".

Clearly the author has not met many doctors or lawyers or spent much time in Europe.

Cursive is very much still in use by all three of the above.

I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well.

Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem.

I've got no architectural training, but I make my p's in two strokes (and my n's, for that matter, too).

I think the author is mistaking their self for everyone.

I have rows of my bookshelf dedicated to all my journals. Written by hand. In cursive (for the most part, some technical journals I used standard print for diagrams and annotations).

I use a reMarkable2 as well for ephemeral notes, bullet journalling, and reading/sharing documents from my computer. I like being able to hand-write a note and email it as plain text to myself. Process it with a script and boom, new draft post. While I sit at my desk, no computer in sight. Bonus, character recognition of my cursive writing is pretty accurate.

Not mentioned in the convo so far is shorthand commonly used by legal secretaries and journalists. Mastering this is akin to switching from Qwerty to Colemak rather than just trying to improve your qwerty.

For anyone who's considering investing more in hand-written notes, look into various shorthand notations. I like Pitman but there are others depending on handedness, pen preferences, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand

I'm still learning, but I now use it interspersed with my cursive script and find I can read my shorthand more easily than my cursive.

(Either way: invent your own symbols for words/phrases you write a lot. Text shorthand, foreign languages, and math symbols all find their way into my notes. U for you, y for and, o for or, ∀ for all/each, etc.)

The author was born in the 90s, and was in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, when keyboarding was already seen as a primary skill. His take that "nobody writes cursive anymore" is true, given that for him, "everyone" is under the age of 30. Those of us who grew up prior to personal computers and phone touchscreens being ubiquitous can scream all we want "I learned cursive and I still write it!", but it doesn't change all that much. Some of us learned and it and can't do it any longer. Some of learned it and still do it, for whatever personal or professional reason.

Here's the hotter take:

Skills like handwriting are (hold on to your hankerchiefs graphologists!) pseudo-sciences. They are vestiges of elitist education systems, whereby a bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence, students who paid for elite education, hired private instructors to help them become members of the "learned class". It doesn't take any special intelligence to teach or to learn, and can be used as a signal to others that you "belong" to the upper class.

Fast forward to the 90s, in rural North Carolina, to a grossly underfunded school system that can't afford specialized training for teachers or students. What do we get? Over insistence on out-dated markers of education: cursive, Cotillion, woodshop for boys and home ec for girls. What don't we get? Computer science, math beyond algebra and geometry, science beyond basic earth science, and US history that stops at WWII! 1600 students with excellent penmanship, who know how to waltz, but none of us is even aware that computers can be programmed or that people get paid money to do it.

And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities (I'm looking at you France), you are just as wrong as the author who claims "I don't use cursive, so nobody uses it either".

NB: This is not an attack on the hobbyists, or on the aesthetics of cursive in general. Well-written cursive is marvelous. I just think we had too much emphasis on it it school, and likely it was due to our schools not having the wherewithall to teach us anything else of value.

I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.

I've been after a book called "Flip The Script" for ~10 years, but being out of print the prices are crazy. It's recently been reprinted, arrived today, and it's absolutely wonderful - https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript

As it says on the back "Graffiti is one of the last strongholds of highly refined penmanship." Anyway, beautiful book, highly recommended.

Am I the only one who draws the downstroke first, then back up and draw the loop (without raising the pen)?

I still write all my notes in cursive with a fountain pen. According to graphology, handwriting is brain-writing and improves as you write more.

What about those of us who draw the stem first, and then the loop ?

That said, I do write by hand (with a fountain pen! it's more fun, and slows me down a little which improves legibility) every day. I plan my day and take notes longhand, and often journal in the evening. I've done this all my working life, because writing seems to connect to my brain in a way that just typing doesn't, and I've increased in the pandemic because the more years I spend at the keyboard (I'm 52) the worse my handwriting seems to get. Doing it more seems like a good way to try and reverse that trend.

The gothic font (along the lines what you get image searching "fraktur" or "gothic font") is good for some cards or signs or something, it's a bit slow to write, but because of the corners being so discontinuous it has a very distinct look to it. It doesn't really need a calligraphy pen either.

But I always remember, I moved back to the UK when I was 8, my literacy skills were far higher than my peers in my new primary school. My new teacher did not like my writing, said it was too small, took away my pen and told me start writing with a pencil.

I was pretty good at cursive (so I thought), I still use it on the rare times I write but sometimes feel I need to print letters in case someone has to actually try and read it, so I pretty much just use cursive for my own notes, and it is messy as hell now. I forgot how to do all the nice capital letters they had too.

https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/

I wonder if there is a way to produce a “keyboard” with the same effect on the mind?

Whatever i had before was essentially illegible. I think the act of learning something by choice, as opposed to having it forced on me through public school, allowed me to embrace that artistic aspect of it and see handwriting as something other than purely utilitarian.

This is a rediculous inference - I don't do it, therefore nobody does it and it's obsolete.

I for one, write in cursive every day, taking notes in a notebook/journal, and carry a fountain pen to do so. It's just such a nicer experience than writing in biro, which I refuse to do except when it's utterly unavoidable. I can appreciate I might be an outlier, but handwriting in fountain pen is a superior experience to even using an iPad, and this way I don't have to "print" my notes, they already exist in hard copy, and are resistant to bit-rot (save a deluge). I think writing by hand also engages a different part of me to the one that is engaged by typing on a computer. I'd recommend it to anyone.

Practicing speed-writing unlocks fast handwriting....

Where I come from, writing cursive is taught in the first few grades.