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Comment by mrhektor | Hacker News Reader

I'd just like to say that Thomas Edison's handwriting in his letter is absolutely beautiful. It almost looks like it's been typed out on a computer using a funky font. It's funny how the handwriting of almost everyone I know is quite bad these days. My own is almost illegible! I wonder what everyone thinks about this general degradation in penmanship? I guess it's not really needed in this day and age, but there's something beautiful about nice handwriting on paper.

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I remembered someone once posted about Dijkstra's handwriting being incredible, so I tracked down the link for you, see the third image on that page for an example: https://joshldavis.com/2013/05/20/the-path-to-dijkstras-hand...

The whole blog is about trying to write like Dijkstra.

Ah yes, Dijkstra, the man responsible for adding i, j, and k to the alphabet.

The more amazing aspect of that blog post is the authors lack of familiarity with cursive script. Ordinarily, few people would be impressed by neat but otherwise mundane block letter handwriting.

Edison's handwriting is unusually legible even by the standards of that period. You can look at many other historical artefacts to see what the average looked like.

I looked up letters written by other 20th century scientists, the average looks pretty good: Marie Curie: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7722951 Tesla: https://www.benjamindecasseres.com/nikola-teslas-letter-to-b...

They all seem to have this really "flowy" style

The average looks pretty similar to what's taught in schools today (in places that still teach handwriting).

>...They all seem to have this really "flowy" style.

I guess, the flow was needed to literally maintain the flow of ink off the pen.

This is what cursive was designed for - removing and replacing the pen could result in a splotch so it was reduced as much as possible.

I agree. I would say handwriting has actually improved in legibility through history if anything. Most historic handwriting tended to be closer to what today we would call shorthand or stenography. Even in formal texts, it is common to find missing vowels or worse (and if you go even farther back in time, it is common to find the same word spelled in different ways even within the same page).

In those days people took pride in their handwriting, nowadays the best you can do is to brag about your LaTeX typesetting

Interestingly, I think the reason is that cursive has been dropped from the US curriculum since 2013: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20171108-the-uncertain-fu...

Weirdly enough, I went through school before then and learned cursive and I only use it on receipts and the occasional bank check. It has little to do with cursive being taught and more to do with cursive, and handwriting in general, being irrelevant.

You're probably right, besides aesthetic value, writing on paper has little utility left

Faster and with better retentIon when taking notes in meetings (or classes).

Same here! And I used a typewriter for my essays at university. These days if I scribble things down its just a scrawl (not really printing or cursive to be honest).

I think this is basically mixing up cause and effect. Cursive has been dropped from the curriculum because no one writes in cursive anymore.

Good riddance. I remember being forced to do this as a kid and knowing full well it was a waste of time and that my life would be spent with keyboards. The only time ive ever "needed" it was exactly once to write that paragraph they make you reproduce in cursive for the SAT, which makes no sense in the first place, as though the weight carried by an attestation is modulated by the font it's rendered in.

Now i feel bad for my colleagues who were diligent students and learned cursive. They are stuck with handwriting that becomes increasingly illegible to the general population with every passing year. The only benefit it offers is being marginally faster than printing, but still vastly slower than typing. People are so used to reading print that i would argue cursive is becoming regarded as somewhat unprofessional.

> handwriting that becomes increasingly illegible to the general population

Are younger people really not able to read cursive? I find that hard to believe; it's still the same letters.

For what’s it’s worth my Japanese friends can’t read cursive.

Plenty of the letters are different enough, especially in the middle of a word. IMO, messy cursive is WAY harder to read than messy print writing.

Good. We no longer use ink pens which make it important to avoid lifting pen from paper, so block lettering is more legible and should be what is taught.

Sure, we type often and so write much less than we used to, but most of us still write on occasion, so writing must still be taught.

> people took pride in their handwriting

A handwritten letter was often how others got their first impression of you, so you had external motivation for caring about it.

I tried to improve my handwriting some years ago but didn't really commit to it, the upshot of that is that my handwriting kind of looks like a Victorian child's. It's 'loopy' in that old-fashioned way but the shapes aren't regular and controlled enough to be considered good handwriting.

If you're right-handed, I highly recommend learning to write in italic. That's with a slight tilt to every letter, from bottom left to top right. Unless you hold a pen in an unusual way, this should be an easy movement.

You might want to start by just writing a line of conjoined wwwwwwwwww or mmmmmmmm. Then tweak the movement when you introduce individual letters, wewnwy, etc.

I did it years ago to increase my writing speed, and reduce discomfort if I was writing for a prolonged time (handwritten exams). Hugely beneficial.

Increased legibility was an added bonus, although this probably requires deliberate attention for some people.

Edit: From brief Googling, I gather the terms italic and cursive are often used interchangeably. My distinction between the two is that cursive is italic plus extra decorations (loops etc).

I love the look of italic handwriting from the examples I've just looked at! I'll definitely look into it.

Cursive is essentially what happens if you try to write without lifting your pen from the paper.

You can always get a job as a doctor writing prescriptions, lol.

More seriously, I've always had bad handwriting; I even had extra lessons to try and improve dexterity and whatnot. I did look at old school stuff at some point and it was relatively neat compared to my current handwriting - I've definitely regressed.

I don't even know why. I don't believe my small motor skills are that bad. Laziness? Not paying enough attention while writing?

Anyway typing is more my jam.

When I see that I ask myself:

- Was good handwriting necessary for success in that time?

- If so, how many people as creative as Edison languished because their handwriting sucked.

That's a good point. It's like how writing a good email is pretty essential these days, and people might lose out these days because of poor "online" communication

Listening to the average engineer presenting makes it really hard not to fall asleep. Reading the average engineers email it's often hard to find the point they're trying to make.

I think communication should be taught more in undergraduate engineering curricula.

I was looking through old (1900 - 1940) census records recently, they were all hand written then. Some people had beautifully legible writing, others chicken scratch, and occasionally I'd see something like what the average 30-something's handwriting looks like today.

When I was young there was talk about getting rid of cursive handwriting in school. We were still required to turn in writing assignments hand written in cursive in ink. The older generation would say it was a skill worth practicing, while kids would joke about all the lies lower grade teachers told us about higher grades ("in middle school if you don't write in cursive they won't accept your assignment"). Today they don't teach cursive.

I wish I had better handwriting and now I practice to improve it.

Those who learned to write with dip pens blame the ballpoint pens. However, people who actually use dip pens say that mass-made ones were not that good at helping you write better.

There is also another interesting question of how complex writing exercises set the manner to express one's thoughts both orally and on paper.

You have missed fountain pens. I found I wrote better when I used one, but it was compulsory at school until I was about 14. At that point, I immediately switched to a ball point pen, mostly to rebel and feel older.

I switched back once I was more mature.

Dip pens were obsoleted in the late 19th century.

I am a bit skeptical about millions and millions of kids all across the world having fountain pens.

It's up to each school, but it's common in the UK.

Note all the "back to school" offers, and the cheap £4 pen.

https://www.whsmith.co.uk/stationery/pens/fountain-pens/sta0...

(The same might apply in India, in which case there are literally millions of children with fountain pens.)

I learned handwriting in schools (early 90s) and like many it turned into absolute chicken scratch by high school as with many.

Somewhere between high school and college I decided it was worth fixing and after a few years it got much better, continuing to improve for the next ten years or so.

I'm really glad I did it - my notes flow more easily, my written correspondence impresses and I have the common sense to simply hand print when one shot understanding is more important than aesthetics.

How did you go about improving it?

There are a number of techniques you can use, but it really boils down to practice repetition. Some exercises that seemed to help me, when done at night before going to bed (about 5 minutes or so) is to take a piece of paper and write a bunch of parallel lines (basically small letter "L") and try to get them to be exactly the same. Then draw a bunch of circles (letter "O") and try to make them the same size and perfectly round. Do it slow enough at first so you don't practice in bad technique, then try to get faster at it.

Also, as part of a woodworking hobby I'm getting back into, I needed to start drawing out sketches of projects. I started with some light graph paper to get proportions right, but now can somewhat easily draw out the board layouts of things like desks or dressers and get fairly straight lines over distance on the paper. I couldn't do this before.

Oh, and getting something like a good fountain pen that flows good, with good paper, will make you "want" to write whenever you get the chance. Get a nice one or two, but also pick up a pack of Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens -- they actually write fairly decent, and aren't fussy at all.

I wonder if anyone has made a font based on his handwriting.

Not only that, there is not one correction in that letter. Do they have multiple drafts before writing the final version that is sent?

What I remember from my youth (60s): you basically weren't allowed to strike-through, you had to start over the sentence. Many kids thus would learn to write without making errors, making sure you would think ahead about how to formulate properly while writing.

This also has assisted me in thinking before I speak.

The presence of the backspace key has spoilt me. I hardly write anything with a pen and paper these days.

I guess people dont write much so dont have the fine motor skills. But also cheap ballpoint pens are difficult to write with. Get a more expensive pen or even fountain pen makes it easier to write tidily.

My handwriting used to be exquisite. Adults would be taken aback by the quality when I was ten-twelve years old.

It's trash now.

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