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Comment by cyocum | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

>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...

Really enjoying that first video. Thanks!

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

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

What state? His signature style? His illiteracy?

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.

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.

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

Two closely related but unalike things:

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

Communication.

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?

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?)

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.

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.

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..."

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 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.

> 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.)

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

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.

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

> 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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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