Shunned in computer age, cursive makes a comeback in California | Hacker News Reader

Shunned in computer age, cursive makes a comeback in California

reuters.com

29 pointspseudolus36 comments

In my experience, the Latin cursive that you may or may not have learned in an American classroom sucks. Common characters require too many strokes or raising the pen. Having to dot your i's and cross your t's breaks the flow. Also lots of people can't even read it.

It was only when I learned Russian Cyrillic that I grew to appreciate a good cursive writing system. It's super fast, most characters resemble their printed counterpart, and lots of words can be written without needing to lift the pen once. Yes, there's some ambiguity like ли and ш, but that's rarely a problem once you actually know the language. In comparison to the English cursive I learned in school, it actually feels like a system intended to be read and written by regular people for everyday use.

Tangentially, as a pharmacist I could always tell which doctors grew up in Russia. All of them have this nice loopy cursive way of writing.

What I like about russian cursive is that most letters terminate at the bottom instead of the top which means you don't need to cross over a letter or make some other mark that is messy to start the next letter.

To me it feels like Cyrillic cursive has at least as many differences from its printed counterparts as Latin has. For example, д is written like a g, б kind of like a d, т like an m. The last one is especially confusing because м also exists.

I think handwriting is important, but "cursive" is meant for quills, where if you lift your pen, the ink spills out.

They should teach good handwriting, and not worry so much about having letters that have to flow into each other.

To me thats a strange take. Letters that flow into eachother make it easier to write IMO. To Me it’s a bit similar to just using a keyboard and taking the hand off the keyboard to fuss with the mouse.

Easier to write maybe (when I take notes just for myself I use a messy mix of cursive and print that no one else could read) but I think it's harder to read, especially for wide audience.

Depends on what you optimize for I suppose.

I absolutely despite printed out text in cursive font. There is no purpose, it tries to look cute but is just hard to read.

Yeah, as someone who taught themselves Palmer script [0] in high school, I learned that it can only really be written fast if you have a fountain pen (which made me buy a cheap fountain pen), and that it's hard to write block letters using one. It's easier to accurately trace the shapes of cursive using a ballpoint pen, but because you have to press down a lot more to get a solid line on the page, you're forced to write more slowly.

I think something like Getty-Dubay Italic [1][2] is more appropriate for pencils and ballpoint pens, and for teaching children to write. It's also a more basic script than cursive. The primary thing is learning the basic shapes that make up most lowercase/minuscule letters.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty-Dubay_Italic

[2]: https://handwritingsuccess.com/italic-examples/

So, what do you do between words?

Note: the ink doesn’t ”spill out”, if you cut the quill correctly, and it certainly doesn’t spill out of a metal nib.

I use fountain pens to write and (very occasionally) dip pens to do drawing/inking, but I haven't used quills so I can't speak to them.

There's a continuum between ink just spilling out and ink needing to be pressed onto the page. To me, the feel and flow of writing/ink from a graphite pencil (where I need to literally rub a mark onto the page with friction) to a rollerball pen (where I'm dragging around a ball bearing) to a fountain pen where the ink (ideally) goes onto the page with zero pressure or friction just through gravity and capillary action -- I feel like it results in very different writing experiences.

A fountain pen isn't at risk of just spilling ink onto the page; especially with a thin nib you can do very controlled small strokes, the extra precision there is part of what makes fountain pens nice to use. But it feels optimized for continuous, longer strokes. It's "wetter"; every time you lift the pen you're cutting off the flow of ink, as opposed to a rollerball where as soon as you stop moving the ink stops flowing because the ink is only flowing through the motion of the ball bearing. You can write in block letters with a fountain pen, it's fine. You can do very beautiful writing and scripts that way. But imo when using a fountain pen writing in cursive feels better than writing in block letters in a way that does not translate to graphite pencils or cheaper pens.

I can only speak for myself, but for me cursive with a fountain pen is also just much, much faster than with other writing instruments, because when you need to apply pressure to write on the page that lends itself to short controlled strokes, but when you don't need any pressure at all to write on the page then everything is just about the motion and you can do that motion very quickly with very little exertion.

I don't know the history, but it would not surprise me that cursive would at least be somewhat correlated with writing instruments that use gravity and capillary action to write as opposed to friction. It's not something I would make a strong claim about, but... yeah, I could see it, that matches my experience. I write almost universally in cursive unless for some reason I'm forced to use a pencil: and then I switch back to block lettering.

But :shrug: people do write cursive with pencils, so maybe that's just subjective.

This is a nonsense take; look at historical scripts like uncial or Carolingian miniscule, which were written with quills and definitely involve lifting the pen, often multiple times per letter.

With fountain pens, ink flows out steadily as long as the nib is in contact with the page, and stops flowing when the nib breaks contact. Whereas with ballpoint pens, pressure is required for the ink to flow, since the ballpoint is held in place by a small spring, and ink stops flowing as soon as pressure is removed, regardless of contact with the page.

Hence, ballpoints tend to cause wrist strain, and favour forms of handwriting which minimize contact with the page, whereas fountain pens work best with cursive. Needless to say, since the introduction of the ballpoint in schools, handwriting has gone into decline.

I've always found that note-taking by hand in school and university (implicitly through cursive, because I would find writing out in block letters way too tedious) - to really help recall and understanding, even if I was writing down what I hear by wrote. Have never had the same feeling typing out the same way into a laptop (which is what I now do at work) - that ends up more as a data-filing exercise.

In education, that's called "multiple means of representation." If you just listen to a lecture, you will remember a bit of it. If there are visuals along with the lecture, you'll remember some more. If you write stuff down, type stuff out, discuss it with a group, you'll remember even more.

I take handwritten notes all the time, but rarely have to refer back to them.

Yeah, same. Very rarely return to my notes. Writing the note and maybe glancing back at it a few times "in the moment" is enough to help with retention later on.

> In education, that's called "multiple means of representation." If you just listen to a lecture, you will remember a bit of it. If there are visuals along with the lecture, you'll remember some more. If you write stuff down, type stuff out, discuss it with a group, you'll remember even more.

However, that doesn't explain why the effect is stronger for handwriting vs typing.

My personal belief is that this is learned behavior, ie most of us were taught to take notes by hand at an early age and that leads to brain treating them a certain way.

In high school I would take hand written history notes and then type them up at night (I was a touch typists in the 90s when it was relatively rare — today’s kid type blinding fast).

This gave me a really amazing recall for the notes, and often times I would type with my fingers in the air to recall passages.

In college we had far more material and I could do this multi mode note taking and I think my performance suffered for it.

Every study or article I could find in 10 minutes of googling and reading compares cursive to typing but not to block letters. I fully can believe that writing improves retention but I struggle to believe that cursive is somehow way better than block letters.

I used to take notes in moleskine notebooks for work and it think was more beneficial than typing the same notes but at the end of the day digital notes are just so much more versatile. I can move text around, change formatting, go back and rephrase/modify/etc. The benefits far outweigh any benefit to remembering better what I wrote. That's why I wrote/typed it, so I don't have to memorize it.

Maybe I'm the weird/wrong one but I try to use my brain as much as possible as an index for where I can find the full information I need. Of course I have plenty "memorized" or things I just "know" but knowing how/where to find the information you need is way more important to me than knowing the information off the top of your head.

I initially wrote cursive, then turned to block letters as it was more intelligible and lately write in cursive-block hybrid that is easier to read/write, where simple block letters are written with curves and not connected(easier to read). The normal cursive with its dense letters is fairly hard to read, especially if light strokes are used, and stuff like doctors shorthand is practically cryptology-tier.

I use cursive to write a personal note, and also use many variations of typefaces in brush or cursive style for art projects. The world is aesthetically poorer without cursive IMHO. People who do not write that way are almost always able to read it when they try, in recent experience.

Interested to hear what other non-English languages have cursive forms.

I think most of the latin alphabet languages have cursive forms. Cyrillic as well. Definitely English is no exception.

The Cyrillic variant is almost a different set of characters! And the flowing into each other takes such an extreme there, that my last name is a nigh-illegible series of wavelets.

I have no idea how Russian, Ukrainian, etc., historians manage to read old Cyrillic documents.

Honestly, if you look at old German documents written in the Kurrent cursive system, it's about as bad. For the most part, it's just a matter practice and familiarity with the writing system.

Лишин though, that's definitely a rough one.

The latin cursive scripts differ country by country. And reading old letters, even if it's in my language, is very hard. The letters looked differently. A proficient writer would write them consistently but to read it, you're looking for "distinguishing traits", not for the letter shape as depicted to learners.

Chinese and Japanese characters also have cursive traditions. The normal handwritten form of a character often looks significantly different to its printed form. Lines that are separate in print form become one squiggly line in cursive form, so stroke order is pretty important. For example, this is 私, a pronoun to refer to yourself in Japanese:

http://db.yamasa.org/ocjs/kanjidic.nsf/a7397e6ad510cc2a49256...

Brahmic scripts such as devanāgarī, Gurmukhī, and Bengali are noted for joining glyphs with a long horizontal line across the top (shirorekhā). However, other examples such as Tamil use more curls and curves, and lack the shirorekhā.

I am told that one reason for this change was because manuscripts in certain regions used parchment or vellum, and in other regions used palm leaves. Writing on a palm leaf, if you made long, straight horizontal marks on it, you could split the fibers.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thiruvaymoli_palm_ma...

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palm-leaf_manuscript...

In the UK I don't even remember any other option than joined up handwriting. I'm pretty sure it is still the only option in schools. Writing in block letters was seen as juvenile. I presume that's not the case in other parts of that world?

Yes, though I realised what Americans call "cursive" is much much more prescriptive than our joined-up handwriting. There are rules... whereas ours is pretty much "join each letter to the next one".

There's this podcast with an American, Brit and Canadian, when the Brit called it "joined-up writing" the other 2 laughed at him...

I'm surprised you also call it joined-up writing. Are you a regulation listener?

I’ve tried to find studies that actually differentiate cognitive development improvements for cursive writing but everything I found has the same results for manuscript and cursive, but that active writing with either script is the important thing.

Does anyone have references I missed?

This feels on the surface suspect. Why would cursive have some special value over any other script for cognitive development?

I think it's just typical psychology bollocks. Cursive is faster to write, but much more difficult to read, especially if written by someone's else. So with cursive you can write down more and if you just assume that the more you write the better then you arrive at the 'obvious' conclusion that cursive is better for the cognitive development. I guess it all comes from the very old school of teaching where during a lesson a teacher literally dictated a paragraph from a textbook and the pupils carefully transcribed what they heard into their notebooks.

Except they bald faced claim it makes you smarter to learn cursive and promotes brain development. I’ve been searching literature and I can find absolutely nothing that supports their very direct claims.

“””

Experts say learning cursive improves cognitive development, reading comprehension and fine motor skills, among other benefits. … "We tell them, well, it's going to make you smarter, it's going to make some connections in your brain, and it's going to help you move to the next level. And then they get excited because students want to be smarter. They want to learn," Keller said.

“””

Instead of cursive, why not teach shorthand?

If I had learned shorthand instead of cursive, it would have helped me in every class I took after that. Being able to take notes at the speed which the lecturer is talking would have been an enormous help.

Just transcribing the lecturer may not be the best way to learn the material. If you need to identify the key points and summarize around them, you’ll better understand the material than just literally capturing the words. Short-hand was designed for verbatim transcription. Long hand may force you to be parsimonious in what you write.

My print handwriting is terrible but my cursive is pretty good. For that reason I have switched to exclusively cursive when writing anything personal. Also, you can create your own little embellishments and style which is fun

Meh. I write almost exclusively in cursive because I use pens, particularly fountain pens, and it's much faster to write that way. In my experience cursive also works a lot better when using styluses because the flow of the letters helps hide that 20ms lag. When I use pencils, I tend to write in block letters because I think that flow helps a lot with cursive and my personal opinion is that pencils don't give as many of the same advantages as a good ink pen and that graphite works better when done in short strokes rather than curves.

It's not a useless skill. I'm happy to know cursive and I enjoy writing it, and I like the way that it looks. There is an intrinsic joy in writing in a beautiful way. It's a faster way to write. But it's certainly not a skill that anyone needs to feel obligated to learn or shamed for avoiding. I'm skeptical of claims that it improves cognitive outcomes, I'm not sure how that would be tested in the first place in a controlled way.

I'm also largely unsympathetic to arguments about aesthetics, tradition, etc... Reminds me a lot of the "everyone should learn to play an instrument/do a sport/etc" arguments. Things can be good without being mandatory. Lots of stuff will improve your cognition, social skills, and character, but not every single thing that does so needs to be a requirement.

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I kind of put cursive in the same bucket as Vim. I'm glad I know Vim, I think it's a faster way to edit text, I think that over time it becomes more intuitive even if only being used at a basic level. Practicing modal editing certainly could have cognitive benefits I suppose. And I think it's just an elegant and an aesthetically pleasing way to reason about text.

But do I think people should be required to learn Vim? No, of course not.

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I don't think it does any harm to teach stuff like this; a lot of early elementary education isn't really about the stuff that's being taught so much as it is about learning how to be taught and how to operate in group settings and how to excel at something. But I'd find it difficult to justify passing a law about or caring enough to try and mandate cursive; I'd be tempted to take those requirements and expand typing programs even more than what's currently required.

Learning to type well had an immense positive impact on my life that I think is easy to quantify. In contrast, learning cursive... :shrug: I'm hard pressed to think of how my life would have been different if I never learned it, other than that I might not have become quite as snobby about pens as I am today :)

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