Hacker News Reader

I recall my mother writing a personal letter to sooth a family dispute. It was long. She wrote it on the computer, so she could edit it and arrange her words to fit her meaning, printed it, and copied it out longhand for the personal touch.

> to sooth a family dispute

I think you want the word "soothe" which means to calm. "Sooth" means "truth" as in "sooth-sayer."

soothe from Old English soðian ... from soð "true" (see sooth).

The sense of "quiet, comfort, restore to tranquility," in reference to a person or animal, is by 1690s, via the notion of "to assuage one by asserting that what he says is true,"

https://www.etymonline.com/word/soothe

Sure, but we're speaking English, not Old English. In English, the (archaic) word sooth is a noun, and soothe is a verb.

Etymology is often fascinating.

For some reason, a perfectly cromulent comment [1] on this thread was commented upon as being “bot-like” and then flagged to death.

It linked to a scan of the Marion Richardson “Teacher's Book” hosted on the internet archive [2].

The actual booklets are strangely absent from the internet (if indeed these were used into the 1980s). I suppose things that aren't old enough to be exempt from mickey-mouse copyright extension are a grey area?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37913649

[2] https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007

Marion Richardson Handwriting was first published in 1935 and continued to be used in schools until the 1980s. It consists of five copy books, each with a different level of difficulty, and a teacher's book that explains the methods and materials to be used. You can download the copy books for free from this link: [Writing and Writing Patterns](https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007.)

I only see the teacher's book at that link. Were the copy books elsewhere?

This seems very clearly a bot post. This is a non-sequitur to the other comment and the way it redescribes the context seems fishy and too artificial.

It is a very bot level post, but the link goes to a real book (a scan so not that accessible) and it does at least give a bit of relevant summary on the topic to save a Google search (assuming you trust it). It could be better but I don’t totally hate it.

I'm wondering what value you think has been lost through the book being a scan? Virtually all of the pages contain little more than handwriting, so a scan is the appropriate representation.

I don't see any evidence that this is a bot post. It's the only post in the thread that actually points to scans of the Marion Richardson source materials mentioned in the parent comment.

I guess it doesn't matter now, since it's been flagged… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'm trying my hardest to imagine someone making a bot that scours the Internet for discussions on handwriting only to post in the most succinct manner a resource that is very much on-topic.

Right? So weird.

You can vouch for a flagged comment and if enough do it will become legitimzed.

By vouch do you mean upvote?

It is most certainly in sequence: Clarification of the 5+1 volumes and a link to the content for free right now - albeit nearly unusable quality scan - instead of a "backorder only" link to buy for $30.

This "you might be a bot" is going to be the next Red Scare or witch hunt (that the esteemed AI revolutionaries will deny any responsibility for). Just wait till the real bots learn to start saying that! [spiderman pointing gif]

I've taken a minute to skim the poster's recent comment history. None of them look at all like what I would expect from a bot.

The link at the V&A museum shows excerpts from a few pages. This looks incredible. It seems unlikely, but perhaps someone somewhere has scanned in a copy of an instructional book.

My cursive is terrible so I resort to print handwriting, which was never pretty either. And then I get super annoyed at how slow handwriting is, so I try to speed it up. It quickly becomes an illegible mess.

I need the fastest & most legible writing system. Legible. Fast. Can we design a hand writing system that hits 30 wpm? 40wpm? Without resorting to shorthand. I'd rather redesign the alphabet from the ground up instead of bothering with shorthand.

I actually find most cursive is hard to read, and yet I grew up with some exposure to cursive. I imagine many people younger than me would have less exposure to cursive altogether. Cursive is kind of dying off, except in terms of writing speed.

Cursive is nice because it limits the speed at which you can read it; Sometimes “faster” cognitively translates to “careless.”

Very much agree with your observation on the satisfaction gleaned from handwriting well.

About 5 years ago I "installed a font" on myself - I sat down with a sheet of letter forms and taught myself a variant of architectural lettering, which has a nice balance of legibility and aesthetics, and less rigid than engineering lettering.

I'm still working on some of my cursive forms, but I definitely enjoy writing more (and the rhythm!! It's like music or dance, and almost meditative) now that I've started using it again as an adult.

PDF: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007

> It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas

I agree the act of writing things out helps. But I strongly disagree this is specific to handwriting. Typing things out has the same effect.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-athletes-way/2...

"New research from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggests that handwriting practice refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that appears to help adults learn generalized literacy-related skills "surprisingly faster and significantly better" than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos."

From that same link:

"After six learning sessions, everyone in the video watching and type-writing group had learned the Arabic alphabet and could identify each of its 28 letters. However, people in the handwriting group—who used pen and paper to write each letter during their learning sessions—gained the same level of proficiency after just two learning sessions."

Replace handwriting with any other activity. It is probably the same. Doing something helps learning faster than just watching.

No, according to the link the hand-writers learned Arabic much faster than the learners typing on keyboards. Handwriting Arabic facilitated faster learning of the language than typing it out.

This comports with my personal language learning experience, for what that's worth. I couldn't say whether it translates to other subjects.

Full article is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641140/

This is specific to the act of learning a language, where writing out the characters with intentionality will obviously have more carryover to memorizing the forms of such characters.

When the learning tools are detached from the subject at hand - as is the case in most college classes where basic literacy is a given - it's hard to see how one particular tool could possibly be better than others.

Yeah but he is still right when you go under surface level : learning to write is basically learning to draw specific shape that have specific meanings.

It is not surprising that peoples learn to recognise those shape faster when they actually had to learn to draw them instead of just pointing (typing) to use them.

But I don't think it makes any kind of real difference to achieving proficiency level for reading/thinking/writing the language. Recognising the glyphs is a small part of learning a language, you learn grammar, vocabulary, sentence construction, idioms, mostly by repeated exposure and chances are the vast majority of it is from reading ; it wouldn't be very efficient to learn by hand writing everything...

That sounds like a pretty specific literacy skill.

Purely anecdotal based on my own experience, typing information does very little for me but hand-written notes vastly improve my ability to retain information.

I learned that style pre 1980 in the UK. My writing still looks pretty childish and I don't get any compliments. I can take longhand notes at speed though.

This doesn’t look particularly special? This is just a form of cursive right?

It was the first time a system was developed that took note of how the hand moved ergonomically in order to create a natural way of writing (drawing) unnatural letters, and linking them together.

This system allows you to write cursive with exceptional flow and - if you wish - flair, rather than simply copying complicated shapes and then having that body memory inevitably degrade over the years.

Ah, I imagine it’s what I learned, without anyone saying it was special, so it’s just what I consider the default.

I never got any good at it, but after 28 years my ability hasn’t degraded either.

I thought I lost my touch, but all my remaining writings from 28 years ago show exactly the same level of suck xD. So at least the part about body memory seem to be completely correct.

It is weird, it feels backward. When I look at the writing in the scans in the pdf, it looks less fluent and more typewriter styled than how we learned to write at school. For example, the h has no loop, the capitals seem not to have extra loops wrt their non-capital counterpart. This means that you will lift your pen more often.

That said, I think it reads easier than fully cursive, because it is less dense.

> It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas

The act of writing imposes structure and optimisation on the language to convey (transfer) an idea.

Structure, because of grammar and notation. Optimisation, because we don't wish to exhaust ourselves in writing or the readers in reading.

But knowledge of grammar is essential.

What writing tool is this system designed for? Does it work well with "regular" ball pens and pencils?

Is that true, though? I'm happy with my handwriting, but rarely ever get to write anything. Far more time spent at a keyboard.

I'll try adding this to my routine. Curious if I can track an increase in my mood and general happiness if I'm writing more.

Yes, I keep notes by writing them and, it reduces stress and makes me remember them more easily. Keeping them on the computer doesn't have the easier to remember component. I can only search them easier.