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Comment by coffee_beqn | Hacker News Reader

I do wonder is cursive really that hard to read without any lessons? It’s still English just with a awkward font. Writing cursive has a lot of rules but I would think most GenZers could read the constitution albeit slowly

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A lot depends on penmanship. My grandmother was taught old school, and her cursive was so precise it looked like a font. Like she didn't use a ruler but everything she wrote till the day she died looked like she did.

Myself I've lost the ability to write cursive. Obviously I could get it back with a little practice but I see zero point in doing so. I barely even write anything vs type these days.

> I barely even write anything vs type these days.

Me as well, to the point that when I do write, it's a lot slower and less legible than it used to be. Most of that muscle memory has left in the last 30 years since I've been heavily using keyboards and writing less and less each year.

My issue is that my entire method of long-form writing isn’t linear. I’m too used to highlighting a paragraph/sentence and pasting it somewhere else.

As a lefty, I was never going to have good penmanship without the ability to do it blind (your hand covers up what you are writing). I am so glad that penmanship became pointless to my career after sitting my university exams, and I had already learned that printing was the way to got anyways.

I'm a lefty, not sure what you mean by your hand covers up what you're writing?

I hold my pen so that it's pointing to the right, so that my hand trails the path of the pen tip. Do you...hold the pen so that it is pointing to the left so as to avoid smearing? Thus the pen tip is trailing the path of your hand?

If so, that's an ingenious solution to an annoying problem, don't know why I never thought of it before, but yeah that would make it impossible to write meticulously.

It could just be the way I was taught how to write but I never had problems with smearing, just occlusion. I just got used to not seeing what I was writing, and since I went into computers anyways, it was never something that needed correcting.

It's hard work though.

https://www.oldfonts.com/antiquepenman/wp-content/uploads/20...

I can read this, but mostly I'm doing it through context and word recognition, not letter recognition. It's a struggle. This means there are some words that take a while to get.

> and word recognition, not letter recognition

That's how most people read printed text as well. You're not sounding out every word, are you?

Yes, that's the point. People can get the meaning even if the legibility is degraded, but this can only go so far. People scan the sentence, and if that doesn't work they scan groups of words, and if that doesn't work they read each word, and when that doesn't work they're stuck at sounding out each letter individually.

If someone's not familiar with 1800s cursive they're going to struggle and they're going to resort to trying to decipher individual letters - they will end up sounding out not only every individual word, but every individual letter.

That might still be an indication of your and my familiarity with English cursive.

With something that I only know well enough to sound out even when printed (e.g., Cyrillic), I have a hard time making head or tail of it in cursive form.

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