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Comment by Bakary | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the idea of cursive being useless or difficult. Are Americans learning some sort of old-fashioned lettering that I'm unable to picture? To me cursive is just the natural, fast, and smooth way to write by hand, whereas separated block letters are goddamn slow and jarring

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I love shitting on Americans as much as anyone else but I went to school in Sweden and I also never managed to get proficient at cursive writing - it was always slower, more painful to the hand and far less legible than block letters to me. And my teachers really tried, one even gave me some special triangular pencil that was supposed to help your grip. Once I was out of grade school I never used it ever again. And now in 2022 I struggle to remember the last time I wrote anything by hand at all.

My schooling (in the US) went "all-in" on cursive - It was taught very early and all turned in assignments for all grades after learning cursive were required to be in cursive or you got a zero on the assignment.

Yet, I have the exact same experience as you - "slower, more painful to the hand and far less legible than block letters"

I suspect this is the most common outcome - which is why so few people write in cursive by choice. If it was strictly better we'd all keep using it when we didn't have to.

We mostly type these days and block writing’s good enough, so it’s a waste of time for the masses in my view.

It's a waste of time in the sense that it's too late to change, but in itself it is the mechanically superior way to write and block letters ought never to have been adopted.

I just feel aesthetically depressed when I think of millions of Americans having their pen nibs jump everyday across the page like an alarmed bug, when they could be forming those delightful, uninterrupted, smooth-ass lines. Csikszentmihalyi (RIP) is turning in his grave at all that missed flow.

Who are these millions of Americans who are writing a bunch of stuff by pen every day, instead of on a computer or phone?

>Are Americans learning some sort of old-fashioned lettering that I'm unable to picture?

I had to Google what cursive is to make sure I understood the article. Cursive just feels like a slightly different font to me. I have a hard time wrapping my head around people being unable to read it.

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