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Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

It's unfortunate because taking notes by hand is still a useful skill, and writing in cursive is much, much more efficient. I did learn cursive in school, but didn't learn it very well: my hand would cramp up, and I couldn't keep up at "meeting pace" without my letters turning into scribbles. I had to spend a long time as an adult trying to improve my handwriting to get to the point where I felt like I could take legible, useful meeting notes.

Meanwhile I hate typing notes because I feel like typing forces me to think too linearly. Whereas in meetings I tend to end up with several clumps of loosely-connected notes, and I tend to spread them out somewhat evenly across the page. So even though I can type faster than I can write by hand, I still prefer writing by hand because of the freedom I get on paper. I also think the act of writing somehow helps me remember things better than typing. And e-ink just feels wrong, it's like the worst of both.

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> writing in cursive is much, much more efficient

That is very false. It’s kind of slow compared to handwriting print-looking letters (eg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D'Nealian)

Source: https://theproductiveengineer.net/is-it-faster-to-write-in-c...

And also for many years I wrote cursive, then I switched to something that looks like D’Neal, and it was somewhat faster and easier to read (but not super fast)

I think cursive existed due to the technology of the pen required a technique that managed the surface tension of the ink.

  The origins of the cursive method are associated with practical
  advantages of writing speed and infrequent pen-lifting to
  accommodate the limitations of the quill. Quills are fragile,
  easily broken, and will spatter unless used properly. They also
  run out of ink faster than most contemporary writing utensils. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive#Origin

I actually wonder if shorthand would be a useful skill for a lot of people. I never learned it (though I sort of had my own informal system) and, indeed, basically never typed until college (and never learned to touch-type) because those were things secretaries did back in the day.

It's used by court reporters. I've been in a couple of depositions, mediations, and a lawsuit. The court reporters use a special device that works for fast shorthand typing, and their fingers blaze across those devices.

I know that shorthand would decrease the time that I spend taking notes or would increase the quality of the notes.

Shorthand is something different. There are a couple different systems to take notes by hand. As I remember Gregg and Pittman (or something close to that) were the two primary systems.

  Shorthand is something different.

I'm not sure what you mean. Shorthand is what was being discussed.

The post confused shorthand with stenography. Short hand is a condensed writing system. Stenography is an input system that produces fully form to standard text, significantly faster than you could type it one letter at a time on a standard keyboard.

Court reporters, also known as court stenographers or shorthand reporters, use a stenographic machine that records a form of phonetic shorthand. [1] [2] [3]

[1] https://dlelegal.com/stenography-court-reporter-miami/

[2] https://planetdepos.com/trending/content/what-stenographer

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_reporter

This article doesn't actually support the claim that D'Nealian is faster than cursive. It just states the claim, without any references.

D'Nealian is intended as a teaching script, so the claim is dubious to me.

That said, I definitely don't write in stereotypical looped cursive. I remember that I did learn D'Nealian in school, and my handwriting today is something like a hybrid. The main improvement in speed for me came from the ability to write entire words in a single flowing hand motion, rather than having to pick up the pen repeatedly between letters. Cursive provides a consistent method for doing that.

Right. D'Nealian is clearly an intermediate form, which is intended to be abandoned once proper cursive is learned. It's also rather ugly and it looks immature when used as actual handwriting.

This website just looks like an SEO farm.

If you don't mind me asking, how did you make the switch? I've been writing cursive since early childhood and "chickenscratch" would be too nice a word for what my handwriting looks like.

Every time I've tried to change to print, however, I inevitably get stuck on the fact that I write like a child for months and months before any improvement can be seen. It's just very embarrassing to hand someone a note that looks like it was written by an elementary schooler who just learned their letters.

I find the quality of my non-cursive writing increases by leaps and bounds if I can just manage to make myself slow down enough.

Between chickenscratch cursive and elementary school print, I would prefer the latter.

Why? Because I can't read chickenscratch cursive, but I can read print no matter how badly it is written.

Writing is fundamentally a communication medium, so if the resulting text is unreadable your writing does not serve its most important and fundamental purpose of conveying yourself to others.

As for how to improve: Slow down and write more. That's really all there is to it.

Here is one more from ghe source of some Wikipedia pages. It looks like writing speed is the same: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/pits.21691

D'Nealian looks like disconnected Palmer. But, the extra pen lifts slow you down.

I handwrite with a modified semi-linked italic cursive. It's about twice as fast as my printing, and I can go faster, if I let it turn into a scrawl. That can't be done with printing.

If your hand is cramping up, it's probably due to holding the pen/pencil too tightly, or applying too much pressure to the paper. If I use a ball-point pen (the most common type) for too long, my hand cramps up because of the pressure used to get the ink out of the pen. However, if I use a fountain pen, I don't need to grip it hard, nor press down to use it---it just glides over the paper, making for a much more fluid writing experience. And my handwriting got better too.

This is accurate - needing to grip and push on a pen harder makes it more difficult to control and the handwriting harder to read. Most cheap ballpoints are terrible for this.

I swear by Pilot G2 gel roller pens (or an off-brand equivalent, there are a few.) They glide across paper very readily and the writing comes out a lot neater as a result.

Indeed, I made this discovery eventually. I started using smooth-flowing gel pens and fountain pens on nicer paper.

After about 6th grade I stopped using cursive. Just never made sense to waste time and effort writing something that can't be read, no matter how efficient it is.

But I never had trouble with taking notes. You get pretty fast at writing print if you do it all the time.

I still remember my college professor's surprise when I handed in a handwritten, but totally legible, essay complete with proper use of italics. For some reason people think you can't handwrite italics.

I did the same, around the same time in my life, but I found that my print writing couldn't keep up. Hence my desire and effort to switch back to cursive once I left school.

One of my engineer friends has picture-perfect print handwriting, like a gothic sans serif font. It's very impressive at how fast he can write and still have each letter look tidy and uniform.

This is also another thing everyone says, but I took notes in one class alone: Algebraic Geometry. And that was the class I was the worst at. Usually, all the way through undergrad and graduate school I'd just go home and do the exercises at the back of the class and type up a LaTeX cheat sheet. Then, during exams whole memories would return. Even today the Nullstellensatz comes to me in full form complete with lecturer at the board and where I was sitting in the class. But everything else is an unreachable haze. In fact, I remember the shapes in the class and writing in my notebook but I don't remember the actual content.

Does anyone else have this experience? Where note taking was deleterious to learning the content?

Even though I wrote plenty through elementary and high school, I was never able to write at a speed that allowed me to keep up with college professors, which was frustrating. If I could relive my college years I think I'd make sure to obtain a laptop of some sort because that would've made notetaking so much easier.

The difference in thinking between writing and typing that you noted is interesting. It didn't seem to exist for me, but that might've been confounded by struggling to keep up with the professor — I was too focused on trying to get things written down to actually put any thought into whatever was being said, making it difficult to apply any sort of grouping to the notes on the fly.

I had this experience several times in math classes, but I ascribe it to the professor not telling us where the lesson was going in advance. It was impossible to know if a given example or proof was going to be a quick thing or a major operation that consumed the entire lecture. That uncertainty made it very difficult to structure my notes. I generally didn't have that problem in my economics classes, nor do I seem to have it in work meetings.

There are pens that will record audio and you can make a short note that will take you straight to the location in the audio recording when you review.

I don't do enough these days where I need something like that but, when I did more journalism where I was quoting people it might have been useful. A lot of meetings I'm in are recorded anyway and recording is pretty routine for interviews anyway.

The other thing with taking written notes versus typing is being behind a laptop screen can be a bit off-putting.

I was taught cursive at primary school and from the point it was taught it was mandatory for written work.

It was a great relief when, partway through secondary school, I realised I could just drop it for print as it did wonders for my ability to read my own writing, and reduced the number of "?" markers on homework from teachers too.

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