The End of Handwriting | Hacker News Reader

The End of Handwriting

wired.com

141 pointsbeardyw326 comments

I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time.

I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved. Additionally, I have only ever used cursive for signing my name to documents.

I find it baffling because I have an advanced degree in medieval Celtic Studies. I study manuscripts in depth and I have seen some of the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine on the very expensive vellum manuscript page. In some cases worse than mine. Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old. Compared to the history of manuscript writing, cursive is very young so I am baffled that people are worried about it.

I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something so I understand if we continue to teach that. Cursive, however, should only be done by those who want to use it. If you want to have an after school cursive club, great, have fun! Otherwise, leave the rest of us alone and let us have recess.

> I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something

Agree 100%! I still regularly write things by hand, but I already stopped using cursive during high school, like most of my classmates. (I think cursive was only mandatory in elementary school and maybe also in junior high school.)

Lol I have a friend whose handwriting was so bad, his mom found the leading expert in teaching how to write correctly (at the time / wherever he lived at the time), that eventually broke him and he gave up.

We are all very unique and different.

What's funny is I gave up on cursive as long as I hit the internet in the mid 2000s because I instinctively knew it was fruitless.

You must know how to at least read cursive, otherwise you will see a word like minimum written in cursive and think it’s just a scribble.

The point is that you almost never see text written in cursive anymore.

For me, I encounter things written in Chinese way more often than I see cursive. I don't know how to read Chinese, but I don't really worry about not being able to.

My eInk notepad recognizes my attempt at cursive surprisingly well. Maybe one could one day read cursive with something akin to Google lens.

I could imagine a web page saying "you must be over 50." to enter this page. A capture saying Please read this cursive script and type in what it says...

Ah, seems you missed the glaring issue there:

"Sure, it says <<whatever>>, clear as day, but damn, 'typing it in' on these tiny little buttons on this darn 'keyboard' thingy..."

The fact that some people are totally unable to draw while others excel at it would alone imply that you should see similar variation in writing. And we do.

> What's funny is I gave up on cursive as long as I hit the internet in the mid 2000s because I instinctively knew it was fruitless.

Not exactly. Handwriting better reinforces information in our memories than typing or reading or listening alone. So, if we're going to be doing a lot of writing because we intend to do a lot of note taking (and reading of our scrawl later on), then effective writing is obviously useful, which is what cursive is supposed to be. Now, perhaps that doesn't necessarily mean you have to use cursive as you are familiar with it, but inevitably, all handwriting written quickly turns into some kind of cursive. Writing block letters is slow and tedious.

Cursive as taught in schools today is useless at best and dangerous for your health at worst.

The cursive that made the world run between 1850 and 1925 was called business penmanship and it lets you write at 40 words per minute for 14 hours every day for decades on end without pain or injury.

If you're interested here's the best book about it: https://archive.org/details/tamblyns-home-instructor-in-penm...

Note the advice given:

>following lessons will make of you a good penman, if you follow instructions implicitly. The average time to acquire such a handwriting is from four to six months, practicing an hour or so a day. Practice regularly every day, if you want the best results. Two practice periods of thirty minutes each are better than one period of sixty minutes.

After two months I can comfortably write at 20 words per minute for four hours without stopping.

When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems?

(To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)

The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.

This is a common myth, but from what I understand of people who write in the more logical shorthand systems (without abusing custom abbreviations etc.) it's eminently skimmable, even long after the information is no longer fresh in mind.

I don't know what you'd consider the more "logical" systems - there are only a few non-machine English shorthand systems with any degree of popularity. My own experience with Teeeline shorthand (which is a bit easier to learn, and I'm by no means good) is that I simply can't read quickly because I don't get much reading practice. Think about it: most of us read much more than we write. With shorthand, I only end up transcribing what I myself have written. So I'm slow at it.

No one is stopping you from using muscular movement to speed up your shorthand even more.

If you use finger movement for shorthand you still have a 30 minute writing limit before you start getting hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome after a few years.

Cursive is essentially just a shorthand. It is just a standardized way of writing fast while sacrificing some readability.

So, yes, now that the world no longer uses crusive that much you might as well pick another standard.

I would strongly disagree.

Shorthand is (hopefully lossless) compression technique.

Cursive is a font optimized for continuous use by the human hand and a stylus, leveraging keeping the stylus point on the page between letters of the same word.

It's comparing 7-Zip to Arial.

At their core, sensible shorthand systems are just another alphabet of shapes that are easy to form and string together.

They add various aabreviations and common short forms on top of that, but one easily gets something like 50 % of the benefit by only using them as an alternative alphabet.

As the sibling says, shorthand is a very different thing. Cursive seems much more a way to write with fewer finger movements. That is about it.

I'm tempted to say it is also about fewer pickups of the pen, but I think that is largely the same thing. Many of the finger movements you do when writing otherwise will be to pick the pen off the page.

Here's a nice article on some shorthands: https://blog.zdsmith.com/series/shorthands.html

I was about to reply that that most people probably can't easily read this hand anymore, but after looking at the book examples they're pretty readable to me, despite always struggling to read cursive (e.g. in birthday cards from my grandparents).

As one would hope, for a system vaunted to allow hours-long recordings. I mean: if it's a book on shorthand, only legible to court recorders, that's one thing, but this is not that.

Looking at this book, it seems very similar to how I was taught in the late 80s early 90s. We were forced to use fountain pens, and would get berated if we got ink on our hands.

I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between Tamblyn's business penmanship" and "looped cursive" and any other type of cursive to be honest. The difference in individual handwriting seems to be much larger than the difference in overarching styles?

The shape of the letters is largely irrelevant, the source of motion is the important part. In regular cursive it is the fingers that move the pen. In business penmanship it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.

Here is a video that gets most of the basics right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TWpFsv9Ib0

Here is one that gets it wrong: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vCPPcweLKWQ

The reason why the letters have the shape they do in business penmanship is for legibility and ease of motion. There are several variants of most letters you can choose from. The standard alphabet as given in that book is a very good compromise. The reason why newer cursive hands that use finger movement have a lot of the same shapes as business penmanship is cargo-culting.

Really enjoying that first video. Thanks!

>it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.

Yes, arms instead of fingers, thanks for the great ergonomic video link, this was the most surprising finding when I got into fountain pens and feels like a totally different skill from the school days of handwriting cursive: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/372976-recomm...

I attended French school (I'm not French) and up until high school I was forced to use fountain pens too.

This book is quite a find. I'm tempted to give it a go, as it could make my writing portable anywhere. My only misgiving is later getting that writing into electronic form, which nowadays is a non-negotiable. The technology for handwriting recognition, long-form, seems to still be fairly poor.

I'm starting to appreciate not having digitised notes.

When you can sit down and write out 1,000 words in 30 minites making indexes which you update weekly becomes just another form of revision. This works well for both study and business planning. Less so for emails and instant messages, but each medium for its intended purpose.

It is amazing how much of our education system requires being able to write text by the wheelbarrow when no one today can write more than a thimbleful without hand cramps and wrist pain. Imagine how much people would want to use Facebook or reddit if every like and upvote came with an electric shock. Our education system does that to everyone from age 8 and up when it comes to writing anything down.

Do they still teach cursive in school? I’m pretty sure I know a handful of college kids who never learned it.

My children go to a charter school in AZ and they are only allowed to write in cursive (3rd grade and on). Public school families I have talked to are also learning cursive.

Hmm, turns out I’m the one living in a bubble. Looks like half of the US teaches it categorically and half of the rest are “it depends”. Only a couple states have gotten rid of it and not the ones I expected.

Teaching cursive seems like a weirdly American obsession, because during school in Australia it just...wasn't a thing. Like teachers did take you through what "running writing" was, but we were never required to actually master it the accomplishments level was just "can you write? Good let's move on to how sentences are structured".

It's also fun because every few decades there's a new fad in school penmanship so each generation learns a different cuesive and it's all a mess.

I had one teacher who wrote in cursive in University, and her penmanship seemed pretty good. But I always struggled to read it. We are just not used to seeing cursive writing on a daily basis.

How old are you? The rare teachers I remember writing in cursive were very readable.

I'm in my early 30s so I never got used to reading it.

Fascinating! Can anyone from other countries chime in?

I find the discussion very weird. I'm from Germany, cursive is taught in class two. There were people in class who never got it, but mostly one or two. I don't get how people can stand writing in printing letters, doesn't it take too much time to essentially stop writing after each letter?

Germany consists of 16 states, and they all have different school systems. Where I live, children are not taught cursive at all.

I switched from Thuringia to Saxony and have younger siblings that were in Saxony and they don't differ in that regard. I thought "Schulausgangsschrift" was mandatory. Where do you went to school? What did you do in class two in German lessons? This was basically the main thing we learned there (I think).

I didn't go to school in Germany, but my kids do/did. They learn something that is called "Grundschrift" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grundschrift).

That's interesting. That Wikipedia article claims, that the idea is in fact not to not get the children to use cursive, but let them develop their own cursive. So they are still supposed to write in cursive eventually.

It takes too much time to write, period. I'm not really interested in incremental improvements in my handwriting when I can already type an order of magnitude faster.

For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW. If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive styles: https://www.schulschriften.de/html/schreibschrift.html

Fascinating! So, you weren't ever taught to print?

Different German: it is hazy, but I believe I started out with block/print letters in pre-school, and then "graduated" in some early class to cursive.

Print was more seen as a stepping stone, a teaching aide, something to be eventually superseded.

In Poland, children are likewise taught cursive from the get go when they are taught to write. There is no initial block letter stage.

No never. They taught us some type of preletters in cursive, in kindergarden, as a stepping stone to real cursive. We never wrote print in elementary school. However, the kindergarden and elementary school were catholic institutions. Most probably they are more conservative than the average in the country.

I'm now really confused. I've also been taught this type in german elementary school. But since after school cursive was thought of as children / school handwriting and not something adults should use in professional settings. Also the use of fountain pents was considered childish.

Well, I was never taught otherwise. However lots of the other kids later in high school had developed another way of writing. So me writing cursive, now, as a grown man, is a little strange. I still write with the fountain pen, because it is much nicer to write. You need almost no pressure and that is good for your fingers, if you need to write for a longer time.

UK: I find all this fascination with "cursive" very odd. I was taught to write indivdual block letters before and in the first year of school, and then like every other pupil, was excited to move on to "joined up" writing, which was (is) very similar, with the letters having small extensions to link them to the adjoining letters in a word, thereby making writing much faster. The way I was taught to write block letters was cleary designed to lead to this - there really wasn't much difference. Reading and writing joined up letters seems pretty normal to me and to my kids.

My handwriting was, and still is, pretty awful but I soon learned to argue that the legibility of one's handwriting is in inverse proportion to one's intelligence, citing doctors as evidence and positing that higher intelligence leads to faster thinking leads to faster writing leads to decreased legibility. Never really had any problems in school (or since) and I will note that when I left secondary education my school still did not have a computer, even in the admin offices. My kids' experience has been very different but with similar outcomes in this regard.

Belgium: the only handwriting i can do properly is cursive (each word is a connected string of curly letters). I often cheated on the capitals because they are a bit grandose curly in cursive. We wrote notebooks full with cursive in different languages, that's how most languages were thought. My 12yo kid was thought exactly the same hand writing but he has to write less because the usage of fill-in books in stead of empty notebooks.

Writing in cursive is common in Italy, and signatures are important, must be legible, and will be scrutinized.

Wow. That last sentence.

But then again, Italy has something of a Catholic grade school mentality, but with more gelato and better shoes. /s (Sort of - do they still have a mandatory tax supporting the Vatican?)

Reminds me of all the many hours I spent being forced to do long division of 3 digit numbers into 5 and 6 digit numbers. What a waste of time.

Not predicting the computer revolution, and specifically the calculator revolution, is not their fault.

It's like complaining that you were taught how to ride a horse, but it's 1921 now and NOBODY in New York City rides horses!!!

I absolutely have done long division, when a calc wasn't handy - back when that was possible.

This was in the 1990s so calculators were common. I was born at the worst time for math education, when calculators and Computer Algebra Systems were becoming common but math education hadn't adapted yet.

OK, valid point then.

Teachers are reactive, and slowly so, to changes in societal needs.

I had a similar experience with writing, in my case it included print exercises. It was very frustrating and it took me a long time to gain an appreciation for writing after they finally caved and found a cheap old DOS PC for me to do work on.

Isn't handwriting just the activity of writing by hand as opposed to typing a keyboard? Whether it's cursive or block/print, as long as it's written by hand it still has benefits. Many studies link handwriting to better brain connectivity and learning compared to typing.

The act of writing is the one that brings the benefits, not the looks of the result. I don't see a drawback to learning to write by hand even if nobody will ever read it or if it doesn't look good.

Two closely related but unalike things:

Personal record storage, that may require translation for others to read (looking at you, Da Vinci).

Communication.

This is one reason why I employ the Scriptorium language learning technique developed by Alexander Arguelles which focuses you on actively engaging with a text by reading it aloud, carefully writing it down while saying each word, and then rereading the written text aloud. I try my best to keep my my cursive consistent and looking nice, but despite my best efforts[0] it still gets a bit scraggly at times.

[0]: https://muppetlabs.com/~mikeh/imperat.jpg

Writing by hand teaches fine motor skills that can bd transferred later to other tasks. When I was in school, we learned not only block print and cursive but also half-uncial script. Nobody expected us to get jobs copying medieval manuscripts: we learned better how to control our fingers and wrists.

The same goes for playing recorders or simple musical instruments: you don't teach that to kids hoping that they'll get jobs playing the recorder, but so that they learn finger control and maybe, if you're lucky, something about music.

People who think that early childhood education is job training probably don't have kids. Educating kids is not about direct utility but about cultivating muscles and thoughts and habits that lead to other development later. The word "cultivation" is an agricultural term that describes tilling the soil: that doesn't actually grow crops (it happens prior to planting), but it makes the growing season to come much more productive than simply casting seed on the unbroken earth. Education is the cultivation of human potential before adulthood, preparing the child for a richer adulthood in ways that are not obviously utilitarian.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Children are tortured in school through forced and constant rote memorisation and this makes most of them hate learning anything in later life.

I feel that your viewpoint on this is that of a naive beta bucks provider’s view of school. Childrens spirit is actually broken , school is a training program in as much so that they accept a life as cogs in the machine. The hours are unnecessarily long , they are forcefully socialised and manipulated to care about what people think of them with praise and shaming tactics (gold stars , 30 sets of eyes on them all day etc.).

In this hellish environment which they will be arrested if they do not submit to and attend - they must submit to authority all day and work. Wear a work uniform. Follow work hours. Do work that could easily be compressed to 1-3 hours per day if it was necessary. But the work they do is about conditioning and breaking them so it is not compressed it is stretched out as far as possible with all sorts of justifications (the parents can’t mind them during these hours because they themselves are trapped in this situation too). The children must also hope that whatever older cog is paid to abuse and manipulate them wont punish them with more home work. This squanders and contaminates the best years of their lives.

I love computer programming and working hard. However it’s undeniable to me that school as it currently exists is not anything close to what your post makes it out to be. I would be extremely hesitant about having children in the future - if they are going to be forced to suffer as I did in school.

I'd argue that if cursive was useful, it wouldn't be dying. It did used to be useful, but there's plenty of other skills that were too, died long ago and rightly are not taught to everyone anymore.

Typing at speed on a fully mechanical typewriter was an incredibly valuable skill that required a lot of physical and mental training.

It disappeared in a single generation and nobody looked back except for old typists that refused to learn the new skill. They eventually died and now that skill is basically extinct.

Nothing of value was lost.

I was sternly told by a nun that, with my handwriting, I would never get a job.

The only thing in my entire career I've ever been asked to write something in cursive is my signature, which I reduced to a squiggle for efficiency reasons. (The history of signatures is fascinating, BTW. Illiterate Charlemagne "signed" documents with a single horizontal stroke of the pen, inside of a premade 99%-completed "signature".)

I am employed, and she's long-dead.

Charlemagne wasn't exactly please about that state of affairs though.

What state? His signature style? His illiteracy?

Signatures seem to be completely useless. Like you, my signature has devolved into a squiggle that is never the same, and it has never mattered.

I remember experimenting as a bored young adult with my first credit card, before tap to pay, when you often had to sign with a stylus on a terminal (in the US) - I would sign something different every time, sometimes nonsense, sometimes a little drawing, sometimes writing “Obama” or “Einstein” to see if I’d get a call from my bank or something - never did.

Maybe there was an era when actual matching signatures mattered, but it seems long gone.

I guess if you’re a celebrity signing autographs then it matters.

I've seen a suggestion that a signature is now nothing but a signal. An agreed-upon way of communicating "this is serious and binding". Being able to point out that a signature was faked in some cases is a rare side benefit at best.

If papers were signed, then something was agreed upon. A trade performed, a commitment made. If no papers were signed, then it's just idle talk.

That's all it ever has been; it was dressed up as a legible, personally-styled literal composition of one's name for a few centuries.

Many of the signatures throughout Europe's premodern era were crosses - anyone can make a "t" shape, everyone knew what it meant (and what it implied, morally), and it was as valid for this William as it was for that Henry because it was witnessed by state-recognized authorities (Notaries, if you will).

Egyptian signatures weren't written BY the person signing, but if you had your own cartouche, ain't nobody faking that... Wax seals only had names written in Latin print. Thumbprints were used in China, and handprints in paleolithic France.

Modern web interfaces give up on the "draw something like your signature with this janky software" bullshit, and fall to "just type your own name and we'll assume it's you."

All are societally-recognized authentic signatures.

I have a corporation in Japan, and I have a set of fancy old-school stamps.

I'm from Germany and you need to redo your signature if it doesn't match you official's, when for example opening a bank account. I needed to draw my signature on a tablet to get my ID, and was unable to do so properly, because my hand is just gliding on a glass surface. After several tries they gave me a paper to write my signature on.

I've heard stories from friends that their bank mails them whether a transaction is supposed to happen, because their signature was sloppy.

Worth mentioning that English itself has only been around since the 1600s, basically when Chaucer was around.

I think you are confused. Chaucer died in 1400. I often read perfectly readable (though with wild spelling) English from the 17th century. English was firmly established, though some formal documents still used Latin.

I don't remember being punished for bad handwriting, but I know I got chided for it a lot. And I know we spent a lot of time on it. It definitely sucked, at every level of the experience.

I also find it odd that people have some off assertions on why we learn cursive. I'm sure there is a multitude of reasons, but I find it hard to think it has any strong advantage over other ways.

I do get a kick out of my kids being baffled that I write in cursive. At this point, I think I get as much fun out of that as I do anything else.

I was constantly chided as well, The teachers seem to have regarded my poor handwriting as moral failure,ike choosing to do something naughty, rather than as something that they needed to give me more tutoring on.

Disrespect from an authority figure is punishment unless you’re a sociopath.

You said it in a more challenging way than I would but yeah I thought as i read that comment ‘it sure felt like punishment to me’ as I had similar public ‘chiding’ over my inability to improve my handwriting like it was some moral failure.

I get what both of you are saying. But "bad marks" on an assignment is more what I had in mind. And it isn't punishment to get a bad grade.

It is disappointing, on many levels. But criticism is not punishment. Even if it can be punishing.

There are ancient (e.g., Roman) and medieval cursive scripts, so I'm not sure what you mean by it being a couple hundred years old. Unless you just mean the current script we use now? (As for whether it should still be taught or not I'm impartial.)

I'm partial to cursive italic, which dates at least to the Renaissance. You don't have to learn two sets of letter forms (printed and cursive italic use the same forms), and the joins are simple. It is easy to learn, and works well for both everyday handwriting and calligraphy.

> Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old.

You must mean modern cursive, which is definitionally true. The ancients used cursive writing of various forms, of course (for example, hieratic)

But fret not! Reputedly, only a few scholars in the world are able to read the scrawl of Thomas Aquinas!

the article links the decline of cursive writing and the rise of the AI cheat happening at the same time as a definitive moment, and suggests bieng locked in an exam room with blank(unlined) paper might be a good way to force peoples hand(accidental pun) and seperate the knowlegable from the rest. my personal feeling, that as you so well illustrate, is that a significant number of academics and hobbiests will want to study and experience past practices as to keep the undestanding of cursive alive into the forseeble future unlined, just for the extra test of focus

Have you ever tried a drawing or even a calligraphy class?

I worry your teachers have ruined you by trying to make your writing more artistic when they should have perhaps made you more artistic and let you bring the fine motor control back on your own.

I agree, and my handwriting also sucks. My brother could have been an architect; his handwriting is amazing without trying. Give me a keyboard and recess too.

My grandmother wrote me letters in cursive. They got more and more unreadable as she got older. I should have bought her a typewriter.

architects dont need good handwriting anymore either

Almost the same here. Could read everything fluently before school, or even kindergarden, which I've skipped, because 'too playful'.

Whatever, I didn't learn it by reading cursive, but reading printed stuff. So that never really made sense to me, though depending on who is writing, it can look nice.

So I do a few fast strokes of lines and/or curves or dots to form a letter, and hop to the next. I wasn't slower than the cursive writers. Which works better with ball pens, than fountain pens, btw. Cursive is a fountain pen thing, IMO.

But my writing doesn't look bad at all. Just block letters leaning slightly to the right. I can even do "DIN-Schrift" like in technical drawings freehanded, slower though.

Cursive is wildly easier with a fountain pen. You don't know how much pressure a ball point requires and how much friction it has until you try a fountain pen. My "regular" handwriting is mostly legible but rather ugly. If I do cursive with a ball point it's nearly indecipherable (even to me). If I do cursive with a fountain pen it's legible and decent looking. If I take my time it'll almost look like the examples in the school books I had as a child.

It's a shame fountain pens are slightly too fiddly for every-day use since they still have some real advantages over more modern writing instruments. I've never had a fountain pen fail to produce a line unless out of ink. With ballpoints I feel like they don't work more often than they do.

I know that. I had to use fountain pens in early school. It just didn't make sense to me to write cursive with them, for my stated reasons. Regarding fiddlyness of FP vs. BP, I'm not sure. I had cheap GEHAs and Pelikans only, which I 'tuned' by exchanging the tip/feather, that helped with the fealing of 'scratching' when going over paper. Which may not be necessary at all with better FPs, and/or different paper. Never had a problem with leaking ink btw.

OTH all of that just went away with using ball pens. OFC there are cheap ones, with the thin, brassy pen refills, which often show what you describe. For me that went away with using Parker and Lamy. I guess that would go for whatever fits into Rotring and Montblanc too.

Or the endless options obsessively discussed in fora commited to stuff like this. I just couldn't be bothered so far. My stuff is good enough for me :-)

Lamy Unic

PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup.

In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.

it seems there are two kinds of people

Well it's not magic, you still need to learn the skill of how to use the pen properly to write cursive.

My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool.

Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.

That's probably because YOU use a cheap fountain pen. ;)

I use a cheap (£20) fountain pen it doesn't affect how good my writing is. That's practice not tools :)

You sound like one of the never tired shills of the Peasant's Handwriting Tools Club. Your terrible lot really knows no shame. :(

I don't know what that is and googling gets me nothing. I'm also unclear how saying "you don't need a £200 fountain pen to write well" offended you. Have a great day anyway.

It does not really help my handwriting, but writing with a fountain pen is much more pleasant. I also like the objects, the ink bottles and the small refilling ritual every now and then. But yeah, my writing is still terrible.

> In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.

I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.

The trick is to realize that you never even needed to write it at all

Writing while thinking is more productive than prompting a Markov chain. Also it's free and benefits your brain.

"The trick is to realize that you never even needed to think at all"...

> it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever

That's an exam cramming technique regardless of handwriting quality :)

> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!

Indeed, pencil is one of the best writing implements for archival purposes. As long as one doens't deliberately try to get the graphite off, it'll probably stay on.

> many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof.

I assumed this was for child friendliness - you just know kids are going to get ink on their fingers etc while changing cartridges from time to time.

It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.

I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.

The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.

Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.

> From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain.

Fountain pens or ballpoint pens?

(I do believe it was a fountain of pain either way :)

Tools definitely matter. If fountain pens just aren't practical or not your thing, modern pens like the uni jetstream are excellent as well.

Any tips for lefties? I find in very difficult to avoid complete smudgification of everything I write with a fountain pen, since it takes so much longer for the ink to dry.

Try writing right to left!

This is the kind of solution I'm looking for!

Should I:

- Write in mirror image form?

- Learn to predict my line length so I can write right to left, but have the text read left to right?

- Learn arabic or herbrew?

I'm leaning towards all three personally.

You're being facetious, but Da Vinci famously wrote mirrored script. If it's just for your personal notes and such, I feel this is actually the obvious smart solution, seeing as the flow of the writing will be aligned with the direction you're coming from.

Writing with mirrored letters would be a awesome party trick.

Counting line length before writing it seems harder to get fluent in than arabic or hebrew scripts...

Why not

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

I write with my hand below the line to avoid smudging. A consequence of this is my pen meets the page at quite a shallow angle which I find is perfect for fountain pens but scratchy with ball points. These days I do very little hand writing and find my traditional pose (described above) causes hand cramps, but I don't know if that's specific to the odd way I write or if all poses would when so out of practice

Did you learn that handwriting pose already as a child? If not, how hard was it to teach yourself writing that way?

Try different inks.

What I’ve seen being done before, not only by lefties but actually by quite a few people, is to shift your paper 45~90°, so that you’re effectively writing bottom up (right handed) or top to bottom (left handed). It can get a moment to get used to it but it alleviates the smudging significantly.

For what it’s worth, personally, I don’t like it so much, but I know people who swear by it; and had fast, clear, legible notes to back it up.

I recommend using a sheet of tissue, napkin or old school blotting paper under your writing hand.

This advice is not just for lefties. Although I'm right-handed myself, I like to use a tissue paper under my palm when scribing Wedding Cards, to avoid smudges.

No, fountain pens have a "cool" factor and can be made for decorative stuff, but that's it.

Sure the super cheap bic pens that come in boxes of 100 aren't great, but that's because they're cheap (besides being inexpensive). Something like those G2 gel pens that are also available everywhere for not very much (fairly inexpensive, but not pejorative-cheap) these days work just fine.

Fountain pens still have small edge over good gel pen, but that's significant only if you write a lot.

Fountains also feel incredibly good to write with once you find the right nib + pen + ink combo you prefer.

Deliberate practice is the #1 way to get better at most skills, and making the activity feel good will encourage that: if it feels good to write, you'll probably be more deliberate when doing it and really think about the strokes you're making.

Then you have a few "oh hey, if I do this with this part of the letter it looks really nice" moments, and people start commenting on the quality of your handwriting

> find the right nib + pen + ink combo

You left out paper. I have fountain pens that I love to use on particular types of paper. However, on the paper I mostly use (cheap paper) fountain pens aren't great...

See, here's what I don't get: Who wants to go through the trouble? Buying tons of nibs, pens, inks, and paper to find one I like, when I go months without even picking up a normal pencil or pen? I'm really curious what people are still writing by hands these days, especially where others would have the ability to comment on it. I don't think I've even used a pen for a signature in god knows, since all the doctor's offices, etc, these days either have touchscreens or email you the forms to fill out online. Are you writing for fun? Doing math? What am I missing here?

At least for me, it was back when I was taking classes in college and writing a lot of notes. Made it easy to try a bunch of pens and inks. That said, just try a few. You don't have to be systematic or spend a bunch. I like fine tips, so any fine tip is fine with me.

That, and I keep a written log of what I do during a day. Helps with annual performance reviews and to answer the question of "wait didn't I do X a week ago?" I guess I could migrate to a text file or something, but that's a lot more restrictive of a format than just writing.

Plus, my notebook isn't going to suddenly run out of battery in the middle of a string of meetings. And if my pen goes dry - just find whatever ballpoint or pencil is around, nbd.

That said, nobody's forcing you to write or whatever. People enjoy different things, and that's okay.

> No, fountain pens have a "cool" factor and can be made for decorative stuff, but that's it.

I would not disagree more. A fountain pen writes with zero pressure. In contrast modern rollerballs and gel pens have a little spring to prevent contact leaking. Uni might have a patent on that. Famously Pilot's Hi-Techpoint pens doesn't have that and it stains the place where it touches.

A fountain pen can outlast any disposable pen, allows you to write 5x longer without any strain, promote better writing quality and writing habits, and lives with you and becomes tuned to your handwriting in a couple of months to a year.

Moreover, hand writing is better for your brain and concentration than typing on a glowing box which strains your eyes, hands and brain with constant distractions.

>becomes tuned to your handwriting

I didn't know that, what's the noticeable difference?

As you know, almost all fountain pen nibs (sans some specialty ones) come with some tipping. This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

Some manufacturers have their own formulations and grinding characteristics, and some manufacturers use "default" versions supplied by the nib vendor.

As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished. This can take from a couple of months (e.g. Lamy) to years (e.g. Pilot, Sailor). Since the user keeps the pen at a certain angle, the same area gets polished a lot.

This makes the pen write smoother when held "correctly" (i.e. the way the user holds), reduces contact pressure (pen starts writing almost before touching the paper) and makes the pen a little wetter in some cases, making it more reliable and enjoyable to use.

After some point you can write without ever thinking about the pen, because it never skips (even like gels, rollerballs and ballpoints), and becomes an extension of you. It's hard to precisely and accurately describe though.

For example, I have an old Lamy Safari which writes slightly broader than its Medium designation because of this. I can understand whether my Pilot Metropolitan is happy with the ink or not from how it feels on paper. I have another Pilot which feels like glass on paper due to the same effect (it was already a smooth grind but it got even smoother over time).

Another advantage of fountain pens is the writing characteristics is a constant. Since you don't change the nib with every refill, you don't get the frustration of a bad writing pen when you replace your disposable pen or refill. You only refill the ink.

Except that the pen keeps failing a lot faster as the ink is depleted and the pen writes different whether it runs nearly dry, has to get the ink fully flowing again, or when there's plenty of ink and it flows smoothly.

Uh, no?

The feed buffers enough ink allowing you to change the cartridge or refill the pen before it runs completely dry though.

Also, I tend to use a small cartridge between three weeks and a month depending on the nib size. Considering I fill my notepad in six months, this is plenty of ink. When I write with a gel pen, the ink level is visibly different when I finish the day, so there's that.

If you use a Lamy or use long international cartridges, these durations are at least doubled (6-8 weeks of writing per cartridge).

If you fancy to see the ink level, some pens have windows, and demonstrators are clear all over already. :)

As a fellow fountain-pen enthusiast, I highly doubt this idea that the pen (and especially the nib) becomes "tuned" to your writing. I think it's either [a] placebo effect or [b] the other way around---the hand becomes "tuned" to the pen---or [c] it's more about the other parts of the pen (e.g., body, feed), and rarely, if ever at all, the nib.

> This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

> As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished.

"Polish" is making a surface more even than before either by [a] filling it in with substance so that the depressions in the surface becomes level with the peaks or [b] filing away (i.e., introducing wear) at the surface so that the peaks become level with the depressions.

Either way, I don't see how it can be achieved with writing. Paper and ink doesn't have anything that can achieve [a] nor is it enough to achieve [b]---even over time---otherwise the nib isn't made of alloy that can resist wear and tear.

I'm prepared to wager that a well-used but well-cared for nib isn't gonna exhibit a more polished angle. It could tarnish. It could build-up a patina. Maybe it could have some chemical residues from previous inks. But to have a significant and highly-localized deviation from when it was brand-new, I highly doubt it.

Another part of my hypothesis is that you don't actually keep the pen at the same angle everytime you write. You still produce the same(ish) handwriting but writing angle is easily affected by external factors. In other words, the writer compensates for these external factors subconsciously in order to produce the same handwriting. E.g., I write differently on my journal vs. if I'm filling out a form. I write differently when I'm jotting down notes in a meeting vs. something more deliberate. I might adjust angles if the paper has a different texture, or if the ink isn't drying as quickly. I would write differently on my desk at home vs. a hotel room desk. Heck, I write differently at the start, middle, and end of a journal.

I'm just saying this because I think people could stress over fountain pens over what is basically superstition and there's already plenty to think of when using fountain pens. It won't change your pen's "attunement" if you lend it for friends to try occasionally. Conversely, don't be afraid to give second-hand pens a try just because the previous owner's writing style might be too different from yours.

Hey! Welcome. Let me respectfully disagree with you with my stained fingers.

I'm using fountain pens as my primary writing instrument for more than 15 years now. My familiarity with these marvelous things go back even longer than that. So, I believe I know a couple of things, probably not much as you, about them.

First let me start with the polishing issue. Not all paper is same, and even smooth paper is very abrasive in its nature. You can actually slowly polish a fountain pen nib with a coarse brown bag. If you want to do it faster, you can use a micromesh (which I'm too coward to use). If you search Fountain Pen Network, there are tons of resources how to work with both.

If I understood it correctly, you said that the nib is not made of an alloy that can resist wear and tear. Yes, that's true. Today's nibs are mostly steel or gold alloys. However tips of said nibs are different. If you want to watch how Lamy's nibs are made in house, you can watch [0]. The link I shared starts right at the nib production and finishing process.

I'll politely counter your wager about nib polishing with another anecdote. My father gave all his fountain pens to me since he's not using them anymore. One of them is used everyday for years, and he uses his pens at a slight angle. The well used pen writes scratchy when I hold it like my other pens, but writes buttery smooth when I hold like him. Another pen also exhibits this but to a lesser degree. Interestingly, when my father tries my pens, they write a bit scratchy because of his holding angle. The seldom used pens write smooth regardless of the holding angle (they are essentially new old stock).

Another interesting anecdote is between me and another pen enthusiast. I have a particular Lamy Safari which I use every day. Also, Lamy's tipping material is a bit softer than other manufacturers, so they polish faster. We tried a couple dozen pens that day. He took that Safari, wrote with it and said "this is a well tamed nib. did you polish it?". He didn't know that it was my EDC pen.

You said that your pen holding angle changes depending on what you write. Mine don't. I keep my pens at a very particular angle independent of what/how I write. So much that, my Metropolitan writes a little scratchy if I hold it too close to the nib, near the front end of the finger rest, and I don't even use pressure. But that pen is with me every day for more than six years (or more? IDK).

Another thing about nibs is flex (not like a flex nib, much more subtle) or breaking in, which is very apparent in Kaweco pens. That little, stubby bastards' nibs always start a little dry. After a couple pen flushes and with some writing, they start to break in. They start to write the way it should after a couple of weeks generally. When they find their tune, they write pretty dependable though. Lastly, Montblanc says their nibs need a couple of weeks before reaching their true performance. I want to experience this some time in the future, but I can't today.

A well-used nib doesn't exhibit a Lamy 2000 like "narrow sweet spot", the angle doesn't get narrower, but that sweet spot develops a sweeter spot if you write at the same angle after some point, depending on the tipping material and geometry.

I mean, I have a lot of pens, and I can distinguish between an unused nib and a well used one on the same body and same ink just from the feel for it.

I'd love to continue this friendly discussion. Heck if I had a macro lens, I'd happily share close up photos of the said nibs, so we can learn together, but alas.

I'm not afraid of fountain pens, or second hand pens in general. I got myself a nice Pilot Elite from a pen show this year. I need to fix its nib (it's a bit loose), but it's a well used buddy with a buttery smooth gold nib.

[0]: https://youtu.be/2jf3lbhQR6I?t=98

I agree with you - the low/no pressure that a fountain pen writes with is important. However, I will say that decent rollerballs (eg UniBall Vision) require only the weight of the pen itself, which means there is very little difference from fountain pens (but not none).

Recently I restarted using my Vision Elite rollerball and Signo gel pen, because the last notebook's paper didn't play well with my fountain pens.

While I love these pens as well, they require a little bit more pressure than a fountain pen, and their difference becomes very apparent in long writing sessions.

Being said that, they're probably the best rollerballs and gel pens you can use, because of their pigmented inks and archival qualities. Plus their blue black is a nice color, and Vision Elite can actually shade while writing.

Also, a fountain pen can be held at a smaller angle to the paper. Unlike the other kinds of pens, it even tends to write better that way. I find the smaller angle more comfortable to hold.

that may be the case for your particular writing style, but it is not universal.

i have a mild orthopaedic problem, and i found, in my twenties after years of struggling with disposable pens, that a fountain pen allowed me to write more lightly and fluidly on the page with the result that my words per minute more than doubled. my writing is still ugly, but it is vastly faster and a bit more legible.

fountain pens are not only for "decorative stuff" but have actual functional advantages due to their mechanical dynamics

I envision electrically charged ink, and opposing paper, so one only need approach the page with implement, and the ink flies upon it.

Just need a clothing iron as a fuser and you’ve got yourself an artisanal copy machine.

As I am mainly left-handed, I learned to like writing with a nice wooden pencil, like Faber-Castell, and a sharpener. Then, if it is something serious and if it is possible to use a felt pen, I use Staedtler or Faber-Castell felt pens in different sizes. I hate ballpoint pens.

Have you tried a good fountain pen? A good nib makes all the difference.

The thing about being left handed is your hand will naturally drag across the fresh ink of a fountain pen.

Fountain pen + left handed + left-to-right language is sadly a no go

I'd like if you address the main point of his post: being left-handed.

I've never liked fountain pens because most languages are written left-to-right, which means you will get smudged much more easily than if you were right-handed.

The seemingly best advice I've seen is to learn how to be an "underwriter", aka position your hand north to where you're writing, instead of sideways. I say seemingly because I'm not willing to spend that amount in effort when I can write fine with pens.

The issue with being left handed, when writing a language that is written left-to-right, is the hand gets dragged over freshly written ink. A fountain pen has liquid ink that takes longer to dry than a ballpoint pen, it would make things significantly worse.

I understand liking fountain pens for their "old school steam punk" factor, but I think recommending them to improve your cursive is a little nutty.

I love writing by hand, and for years I was looking for the ideal instrument. Frankly, all the big "pen enthusiast" websites gave awful advice IMO. I essentially wanted something with the tactile feel of a good pencil, but with the permanence of ink. Finally I stumbled across fine line markers at an arts supply store (I like the prismacolor ones but I'm sure there are others). They come in various widths (some as thin as a thin mechanical pencil), and they don't smudge, bleed, or need to be refilled. They have a great tactile feel and an extremely sharp, crisp line. I'll never understand why pen forums never seem to recommend them.

For handwriting in general, I would not recommend a fountain pen. For cursive in particular, though, sure. The soft, pressure-sensitive tip of a fountain pen is the only place where cursive really makes sense to me. With a ballpoint, felt-tip, or pencil, printing feels much more natural.

For what it's worth, I'm not a big proponent of fountain pens or cursive, but I do think they go hand-in-hand.

In Poland you started with a pencil, but as you got more proficient you could switch to a fountain pen. I never did.

As a leftie I was forced to do exercised designed for "normal" children, that were just painful. Thinking about using "normal" scissors with my left hand makes me sad and angry almost 40 years later. But I do enjoy a nice fountain pen and a thick paper - it's relaxing.

As an alternative, for people who dislike fountain pens -or stained hands-, I'd suggest a Tombow Fudenosuke marker pen. There're two variants, with a softer or harder tip, and there's a pack with both so it's easy to try both. The softer one produces a heavier result.

There are other brands, of course; Pentel has a similar marker and some other smaller brands too. I just think the Tombow is very nice and easy enough to find.

These pens are sort of the modern version of the Japanese calligraphy brush, so they're nice for writing but much more practical.

As a left handed person, fountain pens are basically a no-go. What actually helped improve my handwriting was not doing cursive, but writing each letter individually, which forces me to pause between each letter. Still using the lower case forms (though I did try all caps for a while), but just forcing myself to slow down. Still have problems with 9 vs 4 though

I’m left handed, with the right ink and paper this isn’t a huge problem. I picked up fountain pens a year ago and I will never go back to regular pens for my own writing.

Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.

If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

I've never been able to work out how to write in the alternative positions without it hurting a lot

> Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.

> If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

I see comments like this occasionally and find it mildly amusing as a lefty who has been writing with a fountain pen for over a decade and doesn't have noticeably different hand position (either compared to righties or compared to my use of a pencil or ballpoint pen). Yes, some lefties do have hand positions that look incredibly uncomfortable and some lefties have trouble with fountain pens, but that doesn't mean it's a general/total non-starter for lefties to successfully/comfortably use a fountain pen.

Pen pushing is a problem if a writer used to a ballpoint pen or a hard pencil and needing to apply pressure to get ink to flow and applies that much pressure to a fountain pen. But once one makes the adjustment to a fountain pen's (low) pressure style, pushing is only a minor annoyance for fountain pen writing until the nib is broken in (at least that was my experience).

As others have said, it's also important to pick the right ink/pen/paper combination so that you're not laying down too much ink and so that it dries reasonably quickly.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

It perhaps is a combo of cheap pens and learned pressure from pencils/ballpoints (and let's not forget smudging from hand sliding on paper if the ink takes too long to dry - I will emphatically not levitate my hand).

How do right-handed Arabs and Israeli Jews write right-to-left?

Judging by the google image results for "arabic handwriting", they hold the pen above their hand instead of to the left

I have not seen the word "cursor" used that way. From context it sounds like it means "the point where the pen meets the page", which does fit in with the etymology of cursor ("a thing which runs").

But I couldn't find a dictionary which supported that definition. Is that your own coinage, or is it a jargon that I didn't know?

Please share what the right fountain pen, ink and paper would be for a left-handed person to avoid smearing everything to kingdom come! (Asking with honest curiosity as a fellow leftie who would love to be able to use a fountain pen).

I swear by uniball jet stream pens, they feel much nicer than a ball point and dry fast enough for me to use them but would love a true fountain pen setup instead!

I have 2 Sailor Pro Gear Slims 14K and one Sailor Pro Gear 21K. The later is the best writing experience. I'm not an ink maniac but I tried a few and I found that Sailor inks tend to dry reasonably quickly while still having a good flow. Midori paper and Tomoe River both perform very well. If I'm going to do a whole page of writing smearing from hand moisture can be a problem, especially w/ non-Sailor inks so in that case I use the "today" cards you can get for the Hobonichi.

Ouch, the 21k is 420 bucks. I want. Thanks for the info, I truly appreciate it.

A big advantage of fountain pens is that when the ink is not dry yet you can easily erase the color chemically with another type of pen.

Look into Noodler’s Bernake Black ink, it dries very very quickly and I’ve used it as a lefty for years with no problems.

I'm also left handed and the closest thing I've found to fountain pens are rollerball pens, it's very smooth and easy to write with them, they are sharp and dry instantly.

I'm confused. The only thing both have in common is that they are pens. For the rest they are on opposite ends of the pen spectrum. Unless a pencil or a felt tip are called pens as well?

Lamy has left-handed nibs for their pens. So there are options.

I agree. The thing with fountain pens that many sibling commenters miss is that they run the ink so much more smoothly, which means you can use much less force when guiding the pen. It's not just pining for the old ways but that the writing feels completely different with a different class of tool.

I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.

With a really good ballpoint there's no difference. Saying this as someone who had to use fountain pens throughout the school. I now been using UB-157 for years and it is entirely effortless.

Depends what you mean by ballpoint. For a liquid ink rollerball, that's true or very close. For a gel ink pen, or an oil-based standard ballpoint, that's very much not true. Conventional ballpoints require much more pressure than a rollerball (like the UB-157) or a fountain pen. Gel pens are in-between.

I we had the same here in the Netherlands. Never helped me one bit. I even had to go to after-school handwriting coaching. My handwriting is still horrible.

I think my main problem is that handwriting is so slow. I get impatient and rush it turning it into a mess. Reading it is also slow, even when written by someone with good handwriting it's a PITA to read cursive. I hope it dies out sooner rather than later.

I think the slowness is the point. I write in a journal as a way to collect my thought, get new ideas, focus my thinking. I’m always telling myself to slow down, because legibility and intelligence seem to both increase when I do so

I grade my university students' work with Herbin Violette Pensée ink and a Platinum Plaisir fountain pen. The symmetry of using a student's ink to grade students' work tickles me.

For other people who grade big stacks of papers, nota bene: fountain pens with a soft nib are a lifesaver! They require almost no writing pressure, which is so much more comfortable. You also get to use fun ink colors.

Went through school in France too, was forced to use a fountain pen too, had my hands soaked in ink at the end of every day too. Except it never went away, and my handwriting is still awful.

Years of every teacher I had writing in red at the top of every test or homework "Applique-toi!", as if this injunction was all that was required for me to finally realize I had been holding the pen wrong for over 15 years. Fuck that, I'm glad it's over.

I will gladly celebrate the death of handwriting when it comes, that we may focus on more important matters and stop judging books by their covers.

I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, but those smeared, so I eventually switched to pilot v5 or muji pens.

But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.

Technical pens (staedtler) are great for math writing and quite precise (I studied engineering and used these a lot for notes with lots of formulas, diagrams, math notation etc), but the ink does take a bit to dry so it can be smeary particularly for left-handed use. They’re also a bit unforgiving with writing angles (likely not optimized for writing, for sure but they do work)

Absolutely. Fountain pens are the way to go - with one I can write beautifully, with a BIC or Biro it’s a spidery mess.

> Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

I love fountain pens. Well-made ones are elegant and feel good to write with. I love the look and feel of certain kinds of permanent black and blue-black ink that you can’t find for ballpoint.

They were extremely useful in dealing with hand cramps at a time I was doing a lot of mathy stuff for work (tens of pages of derivation a day for a while). They retrained my hand to not push on the page so hard and not grip the pen so hard. That eliminated most of the problem.

That said, they have had no effect on my handwriting. Which was bad-to-mediocre before and remains bad-to-mediocre now.

I disagree about the thicker paper part. It's the "sizing" of the paper that's important, that's the preparation of the paper that makes it more or less absorbent. Moleskine/Lechturn and similar notebooks have a sizing on the paper that makes it less absorbent and easier for a fountain pen to glide over. Printer paper is way more absorbent and creates more drag causing you to use more effort. Source: I use a cheapish but decent Lamy fountain pen on both kinds of paper, and I write cursive and shorthand for speed, but print for long term legibility.

Any suggestions on how to get into fountain pens? I handwrite a lot, but fountain pens have always intimidated me.

Get a pack of Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens. Just write with them, with no pressure. The cheapness and disposability means no reason to be intimidated. Then after you go through one pack of Varsities, buy a Pilot Metropolitan for about $20, and optionally a $10 piston-fill adapter and a bottle of ink. A Metropolitan is one of the cheapest "good enough" fountain pens.

As a CS student, the way I learned things I needed to memorize was by writing it down / copying / summarizing on paper and studying from that.

It’s a little ridiculous to reframe that a significant part of my education was an exercise in copying information over by hand, but it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me.

Also: my reading speed was ungodly slow. I think I considered it typical to spend 3 hours on 10 textbook pages. Sometimes it took longer. But the information stuck, and I knew it well.

> it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me

It's not just you. My kids didn't want to hear it, but they're coming round to the benefits of writing notes during their learning.

Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...

Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529...

Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/

The studies you linked are garbage not related to the only part that matters - learning. What they measured is that if you ride a bike while listening your legs will have higher muscle activity, and so will your brain that managed those legs.

There is only downside in distracting yourself to have to copy everything verbatim instead of, you know, actually focusing on the material being presented

Cite?

good handwritten notes do not copy everything verbatim. You tend to summarize as you write it. That is part of the learning process.

While you're summarizing, what happens to the concurrently presented material which you're also supposed to summarize? How does that affect the quality of summarizing, and do you know of any study that proves the loss of focus is worth it?

Although they can - this was a method of instruction. It's not a terrible idea for assimilating information, but of course, the cranky, opinionated by low info peanut gallery always knows better.

That's exactly the kind of study routine that's proven to lead to mastery of the material (understanding, not just memorizing). Starting from there and with a few tweaks you've got yourself a Zettelkasten.

I did the same, double copy: one during the lesson, ugly and full of mistakes, and one at home, well done and corrected. Took time, but I really made sure I understood the topic.

In college I always took notes in class then I would rewrite them and at the same time organize them. In my study groups people would always copy my re-written notes. There was certainly something there aiding in learning, more than just sending a document of notes and just reading it.

Sometimes I'd just take one set of notes and then not look at them after.

So then I got the brilliant idea to not take notes, since I wasn't looking at them!

It turned out that the act of taking the notes was fixing the material in my head such that I didn't need the notes to refer back to.

Currently, at work, I can't make progress on anything to do with geometry or graph structure or math without LIBERAL use of scratch paper.

Keeping notes on what I'm doing in org-mode is somewhat helpful, but drawing rough sketches of what I see in the debugger is essential.

Similar experience, I took written notes in uni and it worked pretty well. I think my laziness helped - I wanted to write the minimal set of notes possible, so it encouraged me to understand the content, figure out what was significant, then write that down.

Same here. Part of me wonders if primary school trains your brain to learn via writing things down on paper.

Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I'll often type it in so I've got it saved in a searchable, archivable form. But putting it on paper first seems to help me think about it. It's like I see the words in a deeper way than when I'm putting them on the screen.

The thing is, writing on paper is much slower and hurtful than typing, but then again maybe that's the point when the goal is to keep it brain-stored and understood.

The best tests in school were ones that allowed me to bring in a notecard of notes. I would have to ration out the information I was going to write; how and where and how big were all important.

By the time I filled both sides with an entire college class of info I might not remember, I often didn't need the card... so I began doing this for other tests where I couldn't bring the card in.

I'm your opposite as the extremely sparse note-taker. I can use a notepad for writing down basic checklists but absolutely cannot take notes when learning. My main way of learning, and doing cognitive work in general, is of listening/absorbing, then ruminating and synthesizing my own new ideas later.

I wonder if my contrary experience is linked to my being mostly aphantasic and also lacking an internal monologue. Verbal input and output are activities I have to engage which takes me out of my default mode of thinking. And they are somewhat mutually-exclusive. Roughly speaking, it is like I have different mental postures for these. I think easily in a "resting" state. Figuratively, I have to "sit up" (for reading) or "stand up" (for listening). To write or speak, I go further into a variant "fighting" posture, e.g. getting myself centered and my reflexes cranked up more.

Also, I feel like anything I really learn is merged into my unified "world model" almost immediately or with a very short latency. But, I have very poor rote memory. I don't memorize what I hear or read. I extend my understanding and then can speak from that understanding later, in my own words. I do best when I can learn something abstractly and synthesize a bunch of related ideas from that understanding. I can infer my own abstractions, but I need to do so rapidly before I lose the examples being communicated.

I struggle when there is an expectation to memorize disconnected examples and defer the abstraction. If I don't generally understand new content in real-time as I listen or read, it is just noise. I cannot recall content I didn't understand in order to figure it out later. I only retain the meta-memory that I was exposed to and rejected some arbitrary noise...

I find it odd that some people find that way of teaching/learning odd.

I'm a software developer, so I type a lot. Typing is very practical for throughput and speed.

But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook.

Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems.

I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.

I hate writing by hand the same way I hate walking through deep sand. It's extra effort for the same distance and I'm mentally way ahead of where I am physically.

Why not try to refine what you have in your mind for a couple of cycles before putting it down to paper, or typing it out?

Mind likes to run in circles with scissors at both hands and hurt itself while trying to think fast. Teaching it to walk slowly results in clearer and more refined results.

Not that person, but because there is an option to use a keyboard and easily edit, reread, reedir and again.

As why go in circles in own head when I can be moving forward with keyboard.

In this age of keyboards, cloud computing and AI, we think being fast is better. We lost our patience, and want everything instantly. However, there are some processes which needs time.

Life is same everywhere. It makes the same trade-offs. Fast growing plants have less mass, they are less dense, and if they are edible, they're less delicious and nutritious.

However, hard woods, strong plants and nutritiously dense foods grow slowly. It's the same for ideas, and human mind.

When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts. When you put a speed limiter with a pen, you force your brain to reconsider what it just said to you, and as a result, you get better, more refined ideas in less time actually.

I have written elsewhere. I design my programs, their architecture and algorithms on paper, with a fountain pen. I keep lab notebooks. This allows me to refine everything before hitting my first key on the keyboard. I iterate less, produce more. The algorithms I design come out already refined to a certain degree, and when combined with architectural knowledge, their first iteration come out performant and efficient.

Let me ask you the same question:

Why bang my hands and head to a keyboard while trying to solve a problem while I can solve it with a cup of tea, a nice pen and paper and create elegant code in one go and enjoy all parts of the process, and spend less time as a result?

> Fast growing plants have less mass, they are less dense, and if they are edible, they're less delicious and nutritious.

I suspect you made that up. Mint grows fast and tastes great. Watermelon grows super fast and tastes super great. And plenty of slow growing plants are plain inedible.

It is not even clear what you mean by "nutritious dense". But, my family used to grow both vegetables, fruits and even potatoes/herbs. Speed of growing and how nutritious or tasty they are does not seem all that much correlated to me.

> When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts.

You will prune them even gaster and more reliably when you see own thoughts written.

No constraints when writing. Not having to fit your thoughts into some predetermined format on the computer helps.

No editing either. Also no undo. I think this is forcing one to in memory buffer edit before putting it down on paper which is a good thing once learned.

When I use notebooks, I always leave the left page blank for corrections, future summaries or reflections.

I agree. I still design my algorithms and software architecture on paper, and keep "lab notebooks" for serious projects.

I find it's beneficial for my memory, concentration and general brain fitness. Also, as a result, I write less code. What I write lands closer to optimal for the case at hand, so I debug and tune less.

All in all I enjoy designing software more and write better software at the end . Win-win.

Plus, fountain pens are nice.

This echoes a lot of my own thoughts. I've taken to carrying a pen and small notebook around. At first, it was to help spend less time on my phone while eating out or something, and to keep track of all of those 'wow cool ideas' about building MTG decks, and 'what if' scenarios for a Pathfinder game I'm in.

Having all of the former pages on hand, made it so that I could cross-reference a current idea with one I'd already been sketching on some days or weeks back. I could see that I wanted to use the same card in 3 places, and then force myself to consider which one to put it in. I could sit and stare at something I'd written, and turn it over in my head, take a sip of my beer, and contemplate, "What are the motivations of this fictional character?"

I'd forced myself to start thinking more long-term. I ran a Pilot g2 down to about 1mm of ink remaining, filled the whole notebook out, got a new one.

It's a notebook with nothing important or classified, I regularly allow friends and family to scribble a page here and there, and have torn out a few bits to use as a kindling for a firepit with a faulty igniter.

As someone who values fast typing, and optimizing it as a way to minimizing the gap between thought and implementing it (e.g. from smart auto-completes to vim mode, etc ) I can hardly fathom how any like minded person can willingly throw away this amazing tool called hand-writing.

Sure, it doesn’t „scale“ into large texts as good as a keyboard, but beats „the digital“ still when it comes to immediacy, expressiveness and intimacy.

hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun.

This whole discussion seems to be driven by modern intelligentsia dismissing that they themselves most likely used cognitive foundations built by their hand-writing as a starting point into their own current skill-realm. For the vast majority of people (the non-intelligentsia) hand writing is an essential tool, and we shouldn’t deprive them and our kids of developing the cognitive links that come with using it.

In short: You don’t use keyboards for small or quick amounts of texts, just like you wouldn’t handwrite a code-base.

IMO The bigger „threat“ to hand-writing is proper voice assistants.

> "hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun."

I'd add that you can shift sideways into drawing diagrams, or mathematical notation, or devise your own symbols on the fly in the blink of an eye without any friction, apart from the overall manual experience. So a way of capturing thoughts quickly before they evapourate. Then these notations can be rendered into electronic texts at leisure.

I don't think handwriting will go away, it might become a "proof of work" in an age of artificially generated texts. I recently started including the manually written manuscripts (that I make on my reMarkable) with my blog posts to show folks I actually wrote them. See https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/

When everybody is jumping towards AI and digital texts, what remains may become more valuable. I don't know, but am keen on finding out.

https://archive.ph/is4BJ

Thank you for providing this. In my firefox this article rendered as only the first paragraph then went straight to the comment section and I was very confused about why this was worthy of HN unless to talk about such a short content section!

Usually archive link is at the top of the comments

I wonder what broke in this case

Given that blue books are likely to make a comeback in college as one solution to AI based cheating, I think that rumors of handwriting's death are somewhat exaggerated. Unfortunately that means that the ability to write in cursive might become a class marker, but given that being literate is likely to also become a class marker, not sure it is worth worry about >_<.

Writes and Writes-Nots https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

I guess I've been out of college for a decade now. Did they get rid of blue books or something? I was forced to always sit with handwritten exams, including some CS ones.

Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to fully delete things from the internet make us feel digital materials are well protected. The persistence of this data basically boils down to magnetic fields. Without power, these will degrade much faster than even papyrus.

Assuming civilization as we know it today does not persist, how much of the knowledge and culture we've created will be recoverable in the future? We have more books than ever, but what about first-hand materials, journals, notes? I can't help but to feel that digital sieves like Google and the Internet Archive are our Library of Alexandria moments in waiting.

yeah sadly both things can be true, the data we value for privacy is incredibly sticky, and the data with sentimental value to us is incredibly fragile.

The vast majority of written works did not survive. Paper will rot, and inks fade - in the typical case you only get a couple hundred years (deserts like Egypt give you thousands - which is why archaeology is so interested in Egypt, there is a lot more remaining to study but we have no idea how Egypt reflects people elsewhere). Before the printing press, books had to be copied by hand each copy separately - this is a lot of labor. I'm told (I can't find prices online, just contact us...) that you can buy a hand copied of the Torah (first 5 books of the bible) for prices starting at $50,000, and if you want a known scribes' work the cost can go up to $200,000 - this is a bit of an outlier as the Torah is a sacred work and so they will start over if there is even one mistake (not cross out the mistake), but still that gives you the idea of why you would choose not to copy a book if it wasn't extremely important.

Many of the written works we have remain because Christian monks choose to copy it again and again - we mostly have no idea what works they choose not to copy (there is evidence they choose not to copy some works, but you have to be careful as there were multiple monasteries and one choose not to copy something doesn't mean a different didn't copy it thus it survives anyway). We also don't know which works don't survive because some per-christian civilization didn't copy it - folklore tries to blame Christians but many things didn't survive for them to make a choice. (in other parts of the world it wasn't Christians of course, but same considerations applied to them)

A hell of a lot more texts survived from ancient Mesopotamia thanks to them writing on clay tablets. If the town burnt down the tablets just get better preserved.

True, at the expense of being even harder to write than pen/ink.

I'm no expert, but my understanding is most of the tables survive because the town brunt - otherwise the clay was erased and we lost what was on it. It is really hard to write something book length on clay because of thickness, but for lists you will erase when done (think shopping lists - which is of great interest to archaeology because it is insights that wouldn't have been put in books) clay is easier than making more paper.

There are literal billions of smartphones in circulation. You'd be hard pressed to find a way to destroy all digital technology without destroying all of humankind as a collateral.

Ancient Greek is also important to our human past. So are the other hundreds of dead languages. Nobody would disagree that someone should know how to read them, but few argue that every single person should be fluent in them.

If all should fail, we'll just pick it back up, just like we have before with those things. Until then, they will remain dead to most.

"Good" handwriting is just not a skill that is needed by everyone.

Legible handwriting, sure, but it's not some social tragedy that kids don't learn cursive or that most adults communicate through keyboard.

The kids who grow into adults who need handwriting as a skill, whether they become architects or just like to write their thoughts down, will learn to write legibly by virtue of the fact that they need the skill. Simple as.

Tell that to the folks in Türkiye who have to hire scribes to transcribe their parents' letters.

Not offering the class from the beginning to all is a lost opportunity, and moreover, robs children of a connection with their parents and grandparents.

I generally dont handwrite large amounts anymore, however I have begun writing sentimental letters to family members by hand on occasion, but they are fully drafted out digitally first. I will keep going back and editing what I've previously written, which you can't really do on fancy paper.

Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I keep a notepad at the side of my desk specifically for that, so I can just pull it over and work out the coordinates of cube vertices yet again, or how to generate a triangle strip, or to rearrange an equation

> Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code.

I am so glad I'm not alone there. It's hard to not feel stupid when you have to work out the winding order of some triangles for the 10th time.

When I find myself coding in circles (admittedly, I spend less time coding these days so fairly infrequent) I know it's time to get a big piece of graph paper and start drawing boxes and arrows.

A lot of my doodlings are remembering which trig operator I have to use. It's usually tan

I scribble about programming because nothing digital has so far allowed me to use spatial arrangement, arrows and such to organize my thoughts as conveniently.

I very rarely write on paper anything more than a short sentence at a time.

For me, paper is less about writing and more about laying out my thoughts.

(So far writing on digital tablets has been a less than great experience and I really like the real world arrangeability and simultaneous viewing of multiple pieces of paper.)

While I do a lot of typing, I still tremendously value hand writing. Whether that be journaling on a (somewhat) regular basis or sitting down to flesh out a concept and do some deeper thinking, I find nothing quite matches the experience of putting pen to paper.

Perhaps ironically, back in college studying data structures and algorithms, the best way I found to really grok the concepts was to write the code out by hand. Sample size of 1, but there's something about that process of having to slow down that really benefits my brain in a way that typing / dictating can't reproduce.

I've tried for years to keep a regular journal. But everytime I stare at a blank screen I can't summon up enough activation energy to write anything.

On a whim, I tried writing in a physical journal, and to my surprise I found it a lot easier to be consistent and write down my thoughts before they disappear. It also improved my handwriting over time, and also your hands hurt less the more you write.

One theory I have is that writing is just slow enough for me to buffer my thoughts in memory. Typing is too fast, and by the time I've written a sentence I've lost track of my train of thought.

I feel completely opposite. When I write, I find that my brain is overflowing with different ideas and different sentence structures. If I write by hand, by the time I finish writing out the first idea the second is gone from my brain. When I type on a keyboard I actually can finish typing out the first idea without forgetting the second.

Overheard a bank teller the other day saying they're teaching cursive in school again. And she makes her kids hand write thank notes for b'day gifts.

Back In My Day we did cuneiform on stone tablets, and were grateful. Postage was a lot less back then too.

This is a false equivalence. One is a tedious and deprecated way of writing, the other is a complete dependence in technology. Imagine if the power goes down. The kids won't be able to write anymore.

A typewriter wouldn't need power.

Okay great. One in 10.000 that has a typewriter will be able to write.

While they are definitely not in common use and probably have some defects, I don't think they are that seldom. Most are probably rotting in the cellar/attic.

Back in my day we didn't bother with this new fangled "writing" nonsense, we just remembered things.

Cuneiform? Bah, fancy-pants! Soot from torches onto the stone walls of our cave was good enough for us, shoulda been good enough for you too.

A few years ago the province of Ontario (Canada) put it back on the curriculum:

> Cursive writing has been added to the Ontario curriculum because research shows fluent handwriting ”provides students with more opportunities to express their thinking,” the Education Ministry says. It also helps to develop fine motor skills, increases word retention and a child’s ability to understand words. As well, it increases the speed at which a child can write, says Bill Tucker, a professor in the education faculty at Western University and a former director of education for the Thames Valley board.

* https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting...

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...

It's been shown, repeatedly, the writing things down by hand aids both retention and understanding. I didn't know this was a Thing generally through school, but I also definitely took copious notes in classes that I never actually studied, and good excellent grades anyway, so I guess I was living it.

I still do this professionally; in meetings I take notes longhand, and then summarize back into orgmode for a searchable record. It feels like a superpower.

(Protip: if you're at all curious, experiment with fountain pens. Super fun, and if -- like me -- your handwriting is terrible, the imposed slowdown and added intentionality may help your penmanship.)

Also, and not for nothing, but I just moved cross-country and as a part of that did a big sift and purge of 25 years worth of STUFF in our Houston house. This turned up a box of the first 5 years of WIRED, which made me sad, because back then the magazine was doing interesting long-form journalism and not clickbaity crap like this piece. Sic transit gloria mundi & all that.

I'm reading "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous book on the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things"), a Roman-era scroll on Epicurus' philosophy, by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. The work was copied by hand repeatedly since 50 BCE by monks and other scripturae, despite its essential refutation of both faith and religion.

In his day, Poggio, like Petrarch, was famous for the elegant beauty of his penmanship. Like the best of his craft, Poggio wrote not for speed but for beauty and timeless legibility.

While I have no plans to write in latin, this has convinced me that I want to learn how to write (and print) with style. (My cursive has always been horrific.) Since reading-to-learn is best done by taking notes by hand of whatever you want to remember, I'm hoping this pursuit will not only improve my retention but also my attention to detail since it will give me time to think out more fully what I think is important and how best to say it.

I just dropped a thank-you note in the mail this morning, not only handwritten, but in cursive. Now, it is true that I am old.

I do most of my handwriting in a cypher. I've done it so long, it's become more natural than writing legibly. Just now I wrote a shopping list in code. Nobody will know that I'm buying milk and tomatoes.

Oh that takes me back to uni. I was trying to learn Greek at the time. So all of my grocery lists and to-do's were just English, transliterated with Greek letters.

I like printing (it's clear and easy to read and write) and don't like cursive (it's less so imho) - so may cursive rest in peace

I love writing cursive, there's a zen to it.

I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think.

I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw.

It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.

I haven't written cursive for years and inspired by this article just tried it out and it still works! I never had a pretty hand writting and it's still just as ugly but very much functional.

Generally, I still do hand writing in terms of visualizing software with pen and paper but not in cursive but print letters as glace value is much more important here than information density and speed of cursive.

I find these fears really unfounded tbh. If we really need to hand write I think anyone can learn this skill in couple of days as we still have great hand dexterity, maybe even better than previous generations.

My handwriting was especially bad even before smartphones, so I'm glad I rarely need to write anymore.

My Handwriting is, actually, not bad at all. During school days, we four friends used to kinda compete on many things, including Handwriting. We tried a lot, from cursive to type-like to stick, to cowboy’s rope, to queen’s drape, and all sorts.

After high-school, I settled on a mix between a curvy to type-ish Handwriting, which I carry to this day. A few years back, my daughters complained that my Handwriting is “too stylish” for this day-n-age. Even their teachers had to decode why I write some letters the way I write.

So, about a year back, I decided to dedicate a blank Notebook (not ruled or dotted) and I’ve been practicing a simplified version, mostly by removing the curves so they and the younger generations can read it easier. I’m taking it slow - write once a week or so.

For me, it is therapeutic to feel the tactile feedback and listen to the subtle scratchy sound made when the fountain pen writes on well-made paper. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/handwriting/

When I lived in Japan my method of study was to write down all the kanji I didn't know. I don't really think you can learn a language like Japanese without writing it down. There is something magical about writing that locks information into your brain in a way very different from just reading it on a smart phone.

Full disclosure: I'm making a site that allows you to read books and then practice kanji by hand and then save to flashcards for later review.

Example:

https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag...

Click on the "kanji" at the bottom to expand and show the kanji in the page. Click on a kanji to see the animated strokes and practice it right there by hand.

I recently picked up my fountain pens after a 5 year hiatus. I used to collect them in my college years and continued using them in grad school. I loved the feeling of writing formulas on blank sheets of paper and pretending to look like a Physicist. But it all stopped after I began working with a computer. I started to collect HHKBs instead. I find it much easier to gather my thoughts and think logically and remember stuff when I’m writing with my hands.

There’s a running theme in my life that I prefer manual things. I enjoy practicing Olympic weightlifting, driving my 14 year old manual transmission and inking paper and tying with my HHKBs in Vim. To me, tools are the best when they feel like an extension of my physical body.

In the late 1970s to early 80s, I learned a more or less standard cursive for the time. My high school, college, and even graduate school education relied a lot on "blue book" exams, short essays written in class, in cursive. Over that period, my cursive declined into an illegible scrawl simply because I was optimizing for speed. I did develop a 100wpm typing speed, but that probably wasn't a major contributing factor.

Years later (early 2000s) I decided my handwriting was unacceptable (was still using it for note-taking), and taught myself cursive Italic, which I still use today. Both prettier and less fussy than the cursive I was taught, works well with fountain pens, which in turn reduces muscle cramps.

One person who has been hoeing this row hard is Kate Gladstone:

https://handwritingrepair.info/

Certainly, requiring that folks write things out legibly is one way to address cheating using AI.

Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0].

[0]: https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/

The Japanese are famiously behind everyone else in dropping hand writing. In part because their script is really hard to type (or so I'm given to understand), in part just culture. We can debate if hand writing is good or bad, but an outlier example is not part of any useful debate.

The script is not hard to type; in fact, a similar problem is happening there as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

My father has dozens of notebooks in which he writes prose. I couldn't imagine doing the same. I want my writing to be searchable and digitalized. It's easier to edit text when it's not committed to ink.

Nevertheless, I still handwrite an awful lot, but it is annotated drawings, mathematics, the things that can't be done easily with a QWERTY keyboard.

I don't want to input LaTeX on a keyboard, I want to handwrite on an iPad and have AI transform that into LaTeX for me.

Technology therefore is killing handwriting in some contexts and enabling it in others.

This would actually be a cool use case for AR glasses- digitize everything as you write it, tie it to the physical notebook it’s in, so that you can later search it, or have the system tell you things like “you wrote your thoughts on your summer 2032 London trip in pages 34-39 of the red muji notebook that should currently be in your desk’s bottom drawer”.

I do a lot of writing by hand, and I have books and loose papers to write in, and several pencils and erasers. I also use the computer for writing, but perhaps just as often I write by hand.

what is your profession?

Not OP but I write by hand daily, I take all my meeting notes by hand and all my personal notes by hand too actually. Over a full day I probably do an hour or so of writing. I also often lug quite a few different notebooks around with me (agenda, customer notes, meeting scratch, brainstorming/abstracting): https://s.h4x.club/8LuKkvpP - I'm a bizniz person on the strategy/growth side of things.

I thought about this idea a while ago: handwritting is also important for ideographic system like CJK, because that's how new character are invented and circulate.

I don't write often anymore (since I can touchtype much faster), but on the occasions when I do, the "trick" I've found is to write big (like, think of how you'd want to write, then enlarge 2x2 or even bigger). This allows me some latitude when lines or curves go awry (which on smaller writing would be too obvious), and also visually dampens (since the "font" is so big) the amount of off-alignment of the letters.

I wonder if slide to type has any overlap with cursive writing.

I do know I unlearned a bunch of my handwriting hardwiring when I learned to use a palm pilot. It had a system called graffiti that "simplified" some letters... which ended up replacing them in my handwriting habits after a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29

I agree with the common sentiment that handwriting is a great tool for thinking. I prefer paperless studying, but I'm always looking for good tools for writing on my electronic devices. Although formal typesetting is beautiful, my long-standing habit of handwriting always makes me want to add my own notes. That's why I really like using OneNote, as it allows me to combine both typing and handwriting.

I've been keeping a journal since the '90s, handwritten in cursive. Other than my signature, it's the only cursive writing I do. Everything else I use block capitals. Writing by hand helps you remember things in a way that typing does not (though taking notes of any kind helps).

You can have my Japanese fountain pen and mechanical pencil when you pry them from my cold, dead hand.

I was an artistic kid and essentially came up with my own distinct handwriting "font". It was beautiful. 35 years later, all typing, I've lost most of it. Now my handwriting is illegible especially because that "font" is still the way I write but I don't have the muscle memory to execute it any more. The whole use it or lose it is very real.

> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad?

Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

I understand your opinion and I'm curious as to your reasoning why it would be bad.

It's a subtitle so it doesn't count /s

Betteridge's law still stands. That wouldn't be bad.

(If it would be bad, we wouldn't stop writing by hand)

For me, it's the opposite. I had been steadily moving from writing by hand to writing on a computer/device, even though it's so much easier to think clearly when writing by hand, due to search, reminders, etc. Now I write as much as I want by hand, have Gemini convert it to markdown, and I have the best of both worlds.

For me, cursive ended decades ago when I started college. Printing I can still do and do it rather quickly. But as always, I am the only one who can read it. This devolution started will before Email became a thing.

But I wonder how many young people are comfortable with writing in general, printing or cursive.

I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things like that. Forty years later, I'm trying to go back to cursive because it's faster, but it's a whole lot harder now.

Handwriting is an embodied form of thought. Its indirect utility isn't easily replaced by board-keying or tippy-tapping on a screen.

there are at least one or two enlightened comments in this thread saying their memory retention improves if they write stuff down on paper.

try it, it can't hurt.

As someone who despite all attempts at improvement has always had handwriting that looks more like what a chicken might create on paper if you inked its feet and fed it meth, good riddance. Being left-handed too, think smeared chicken scratches.

I keep a handwritten diary and a handwritten blog. Not that my penmanship is particularly exquisite – in fact it’s pretty mediocre – but handwriting by its nature is a very focusing activity for me. It’s one of the life hacks for my ADHD.

I still write lots of stuff by hand, and I am still looking forward to tablet user experience where the pen suffices as input, instead of worrying about having to carry an external keyboard.

This is what would be a great use of AI, not stuff like Recall.

for me, the end of handwriting wasn't where/when I learned it, I learned cursive in kindergarten, and continued it for many years. it wasn't until I ran into teachers who valued time over accuracy that I faulted (it's not defaulted) and started writing scratch (which I can't even read!), and then typing.

now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".

I hate seeing teachers destroy a child’s good handwriting.

I still think about a kid who transferred into my class in elementary school sometimes, over 40 years later. Our school taught D'Nealian handwriting. When this kid came in he didn’t write this way, but his handwriting was incredibly clean and looked really good; I was jealous and wanted to write like him. The teacher told him he was writing wrong and forced him to change and learn the D'Nealian way. He struggled a lot and I felt really bad for him. Sorry you had a similar experience.

I actually write more quickly in block print than I do cursive. My left-handedness and the various accommodations I’ve adopted might have something to do with it.

handwriting will never end because it develops the brain by the sole action of writing. We should write and learn to think by writing

I write tons of stuff by hand. I journal and take pages of notes every day.

Handwriting certainly won't die until I do, at the very least.

You are no longer your handwriting.

There's a thing in China where younger generations have to write out the pinyin for certain words when writing notes by hand. (I'm not sure if it's because they've forgotten the characters, or just how to write them. Maybe a little of both?)

So for example, if someone is jotting down a grocery list, they'll write common words like rice or milk in Hanzi, but then struggle to remember the characters for deodorant, and just write it out using pinyin.

There's a lot of hand-wringing about it there as well. Kids these days!

I fucking hate hand writing. It stems from a formally diagnosed issue (no not dyslexia.)

It held me back during school, Nobody could read my writing, therefore I was thick as shit. All my exams were hand written, so they needed to have my exams transcribed by someone who could read my writing. (I could dictate my answers, but that required a different "statement", and dictation was expensive so the local authority said no. [its also a very hard skill to pic up on your own])

For normal school work I had access to an emate 300 which was great, but it was down to me to learn to type at any speed.

I got mediocre grades.

Had my mum not been middle class and frankly karen like in pursuing all of the options, I'd probably be in jail right now.

That being said, had I not learnt to hand write, it would have fucked me even more, as my fine motor skills would have been non existent.

(I also now use a wacom tablet as my main pointing device, which is ironic.)

I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill".

Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day.

I believe this is trying to judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, in a lot of regards.

YMMV.

If you don't want to be replaced by machine you need a skill which machine can't replicate and train that skill somehow. Or become a very good machine operator.

Machines that can hand write already exist: https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw

Machines have been writing with pens for longer than I've been alive - since 1958 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter#History.

For that matters, pens are a type of machine. if you use a pen you are a machine operator.

A pen is a tool not a machine, or does your pen have a motor?

What is the difference between tool and machine?

Whether there is a drive unit.

    tool + drive = machine
    machine + sensor = automaton
    automaton + decision = robot

Stealing this.. thanks!

Like this?

https://hackaday.io/project/190788-homework-machine

Yeah, but fine motor skills is not something required today all that much. Machines already took over all the fine motor skills jobs.

> degradation in motor skills

If writing was so important for motor skills then it is very weird that kids only needs this single exercise.

Why don't we have many different things to do with hands then?

Like gym lessions which teaches many different sports/exercises instead of doing many years of the same exercise.

Nothing in the study accounts for other factors. I played a number of musical instruments growing up, and if I had ignored handwriting, I'm fairly sure I would still have better than average fine motor control.

While good handwriting is a skill that can be taught and learned, not everyone can learn it. Like art, some people have an innate ability, and some have no ability and never will.

For me, I have poor motor control in my hands. I physically cannot make the kind of precise motions that good handwriting requires. The act of writing is painful and physically and mentally fatiguing. I can't even do basic geometric engineering drawings. My hands just can't make consistent lines.

On the other hand (heh), anything I write longhand may as well be encrypted to anyone but me. Good for keeping notes private, I guess.

I will say that memory retention through writing does still work for me. It seems to be a truly universal mechanism in the human brain.

This is also partly an autistic thing. Lots of us have poor fine motor control, and thus terrible handwriting. It's also one of those things that doesn't seem terribly important: good handwriting is mostly a performance for the exclusive benefit of others. There's nothing intrinsically good or valuable about it and our time would be better spent learning about trains. That's not an objective thing, just how the autistic mind sorts priorities.

I was horrified to learn that almost no one now knows how to sharpen a goose feather to use as a pen. Very few people know how to tack a horse either. And don't get me started on cuneiform.

The world is certainly in a dark state and the end is nigh.

silicon valley resident assumes rest of world is like silicon valley and that everyone has a smartphone

Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. More than half the world population has smart phones, and even some very poor countries have surprisingly high penetration.

>There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light.

How are they charging it and what network serves mud-huts?

I'm not sure, I'm guessing solar. Perhaps a community charger or something. Whatever network serves their country would serve them.

>Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth.

Again, youre dreaming. Not even close to 6/7 billion smartphone owners.

https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owner...

World population is in the 8 billion range last I checked, while smart phone owners are over 5 billion. That is most, and close enough to everyone for discussion.

Good fucking riddance.

Not every skill is worthwhile. Trying to justify clinging to this obsolete practice simply reeks of sunk cost.

This is an interesting comment. Esp. when there's concrete and mounting evidence for the benefits of it.

There is also "concrete and mounting evidence" for the unacceptable dangers of mass vaccination - according to anti-vaxxers.

If you set out on a mission to find evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find it. The quality of that "evidence" is another matter entirely.

If handwriting is increasingly useless by itself - and we are already in a world where the vast majority of writing is digital - then for it to be worthwhile, the "side benefits" of learning and practicing handwriting must outweigh the benefits of literally any other thing you could be doing instead.

That's a very high bar to clear - and I don't think that the janky evidence we have supports this.

I understand. In the comments there are already links to high quality research, plus experiences of the users.

But as you say, if you set out on a mission to find (or equally ignore) evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find (or ignore) it.

So good luck. What you think might be very different from the reality.

I'll leave it here because it's pretty evident that even if I lie tomes in front of you on that particular subject, your mind is already set in stone on that matter.

I continue to argue that if it were actually, practically useful, it would not be dying. People would just use it all the time because it is so useful. That's not the world we live in.

This is the problem of today's world in every level. We need to see "direct, immediate practical uses" of something, and if we can't, we deem it's not useful and start to phase it out.

Some people like to write their todo lists on paper, some on their phone. Some people journal to a notebook, some do it in an app. Because we think the usefulness of writing is only the things we write. We ignore its secondary effects.

Writing imposes a speed barrier to brain, slows down the thinking process, esp. if you are writing with a permanent pen (anything sans a pencil). This slowing down allows refinement of the thought, but since it happens automatically, we don't appreciate it. One can type thrice the speed they write. It'd be perfectly legible, but is it perfectly filtered? I strongly doubt that.

I find my ideas are fuller when I write, rather than type. I find my words are more powerful, sentences are shorter yet more meaningful and dense. When I can't quite collect an idea or something gets too scattered, typing it out doesn't help, but getting a paper and writing the idea out allows me to round it instantly.

On longer projects, I keep lab notebooks. I do my design + write my mental process down. This allows me to visit a decision and see why I did it, preventing future errors, plus I have a lessons learnt document. This doesn't work with a keyboard. I tried. Many times.

We humans don't know what we don't know. I didn't know the power of writing until I started doing it regularly. I didn't know how it benefited my concentration until I started to see the effects. I didn't know until I half-filled my first lab notebook and saw the thinking trail and I remembered everything without effort.

Our quest for efficiency and progress is both a blessing and a curse. We abandon things as useless we don't fully understand. Then we wonder about what happened to us. Writing is one of these things we don't fully understand and deem useless because we don't fully grasp what it does. People who understand its importance create things like ReMarkable which is used more and more around me.

I still prefer pen and paper, because I use permanent inks on posh paper, then label the notebooks and visit them when necessary. Less important things are typed on a keyboard, shared on a digital garden, but regardless of how hard I tried, typing away on a wonderfully crafted keyboard in an impeccable app is no substitute for writing, the brain processes writing triggers, the things it unearths or the ideas it allows to be born.

I think comparing a nebulae to a fusion reactor on earth is apt. While former are much more primitive, they form stars. While the latter has all the tech humans can offer, it just creates little sparks compared to the former.

So, we shan't bash things we don't understand fully, and shan't throw stones to others since we all live in houses made of glass.

"Writing imposes a speed barrier to brain" sounds like a bad thing, period.

It's not like you can't impose a speed barrier at will. Plenty of writers or programmers spend time thinking, writing absolutely nothing - regardless of whether they use a mechanical keyboard or a goose feather quill. Humans aren't LLMs - nothing compels them to produce text at all times.

Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.

Sorry, I don't know how to put it more politely, because I ran out of words. You sound like someone who refuses to believe that vitamins are healthy for the body, because the pills smell funny.

What you said is true though. I also spend some time not writing or typing anything but thinking, but I know where I want to arrive and trying to find a polite and concise path from where I am to the point I'm trying to arrive.

When I'm using pen and paper generally that arrival point is non-existent. IOW, I'm working on much harder problems and hacking a mental path towards somewhere I don't know, so I need to slow down, and chip away a problem step by step.

Some programmers go to a whiteboard, some talk with rubber duckies or their colleagues, to add an external speed brake to the process, because when you tend to think hard, the brain's speed brakes wear down. This is not myth, it's neuroscience. Adderall and Ritalin is used to add these speed brakes to people who born without them. This is a thing. Don't ask me how I know.

"Your first draft will be shit, edit until it makes sense" is the 0th rule of writing anything. What I do is writing that draft on paper, and editing in my mind. Then write the 5th or so draft to the computer.

This allows me to create what I want in less iterations in less time.

What you already said is also true. Humans are not LLMs. We're not copies of machines, or copies of each other, for that matter.

You sound like someone who says "vegetables are natural and healthy and humans ate vegetables since time immemorial and everyone should eat this" and then points to a fucking tomato. Which wasn't even a part of human diet in most of the world until ~4 centuries ago. This is the kind of thing handwriting is.

Really, it just sounds like you like tomatoes way too much. Which is fine. But don't you go around preaching about how tomatoes are a vital part of human diet and everyone should eat them all the time.

> Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.

Disagree. At least for prose, I do my best editing that way. (All right, not a goose quill - I use a ballpoint.)

I find it easier to draw a line through some text than to move the cursor to the start, hold down shift while moving to the end, then hitting backspace or delete. I find it easier to move some text from one place to another by drawing an arrow than by selecting the start, shift selecting the end, ctrl-x, move to the destination, then ctrl-c. And so on.

In short, pen and paper break my mental flow less, so I can put more uninterrupted brain onto the actual editing.

Now, sure, after I'm done with the editing, then I have to go to the actual file, find the start of that text to delete, hold down shift while I move to the end, and all that. But I'm not making the edit decisions while I do that.

This is just what works best for me. If it doesn't for you, that's fine. Don't use it.

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