Handwriting is good for your brain (2022) | Hacker News Reader

Handwriting is good for your brain (2022)

kids.frontiersin.org

24 pointsBluestein14 comments

For the record, neurodivergent people are almost always excluded by research such as the ones mentioned. I claim that for people with dyslexia hangwriting is almost always worse than typing.

I can barely read my own handwriting. I just don’t have the fine motor coordination for it. In the context of learning per the article, typed notes are more useful to me as I get more out of them.

That’s an interesting thought.

I’ve often wondered if I had some mild dyslexia, for the longest time I’d mix up b, p, q, and d… but never diagnosed or anything (so I’m definitely not going to try and use myself as a counterexample or anything like that). Massive caveats aside, I find writing in cursive really helps me focus, I wonder if any folks with real dyslexia have done any experiments there. Maybe the better differentiation between the letters could help?

> hangwriting

oh c'mon

but seriously they'd have to screen people to exclude neurodivergent people or make it so they never sign up; my guess is that the latter is really how most of research in this field works, they just ask the students to participate, eleven or so sign up and voila, publication!

> oh c'mon

Spellchecking on Android is a disaster.

In my university I often see students and researchers who explicitly ask for test subjects who do not have a mental health diagnosis, dyslexia, etc.

I’m screwed then, because I hate handwriting.

For me, it’s slower, less legible, less archivable, less shareable, and harder on my hand muscles.

I only write in caps (to make it more legible), and if I have to write in cursive (which is almost never), it’s completely illegible.

I was kind of embarrassed by my handwriting in my mid twenties. So I spend an hour now and again over a couple of months practicing. I was amazed about how little it took to improve. My motivation for practicing, was way higher than in elementary school for sure, but having now observed my kids and their friends reach adolescence, I believe that general fine motor skills keep improving into adulthood. So “age” likely played a part in my improvement as well.

Handwriting is a skill, like anything else, and can be improved through intentional practice. This is a good guide and practice workbook for learning and practicing practical handwriting:

https://a.co/d/4HmGcC5

To be clear, there are a number of things I’m bad at that I feel motivated to improve.

Handwriting just isn’t one of them.

it does feel good to write, especially given i spend most of my time in front of a screen (laptop, phone, tv)... i just wish i had more reasons to handwrite things.

Ideally you could handwrite something and your unobtrusive bionic whatsis would ask you for a directory where to put the OCR of it as a text file maybe with images.

Anyone else have awful penmanship? My chicken scratch is so bad only I can read it. Tried to switch to cursive but was still bad to read.

I also get horrible cramping when handwriting after a paragraph or two. I'm clearly out of practice and need to stretch but it was always a problem for me in school.

I made up for it with stellar typing skills since I type way faster than I write .

Same here, on all accounts.-

(Thinking, on some accounts there are parallels with the "transition" from handwriting to typing in education ...

... and the transition to AI).-

It's a skill that you need to intentionally practice, like anything else. I like this book for learning and practicing good penmanship:

https://a.co/d/4HmGcC5

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