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Comment by customguy | Hacker News Reader

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary.

I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.

It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.

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I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.

That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here

How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?

There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters.

But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly.

To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it.

More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.

Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.

If you mandate force feeding at scale, then yes, some instructors will do so clumsily -- this is virtually guaranteed, although it is true that some topics are more prone to this than others.

But I think you misinterpreted my comment -- I am not advocating for doing away with schooling or testing understanding in school in general, which is entirely my fault as my post was a bit unclear. But I agree with you that one should learn to read and write in school!

OP used the phrasing "force them", which I read as a stronger statement than "it'll be on the exam", and more "there will be an exam or entire course on this topic that must be passed or else". My point, more or less, was that there are many other more fundamental topics we already do this with other than cursive, and that adding another has a steep cost with uncertain payoff that is heavily dependent on the implementation.

i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy.

i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.

and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.

i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.

I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.

These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive

As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example.

What is the downside of learning cursive?

I learned cursive in elementary school. For me the downside is that it's a waste of time and attention that could be spent on something else.

Developing fine motor control for cursive is actually improving cerebellar function. It turns out that the cerebellum is a general "organ" for fine control and synchronization of neural function across the brain. It is implicated in:

* Reading and responding to other people's emotions. * Emotional regulation. * Generalized sequencing. * Musical ability. * Counting. * Following patterns.

While you may see it as a waste, you may very well have benefited in significant ways from learning it at a young age.

It's hard for me to imagine how fine motor control applies to cursive in a way that doesn't apply to block writing.

One kid in my school didn't write cursive, but wrote block letters so beautifully, it looked near printed. And he was probably faster than most. He also played the piano since young age and is a professional pianist now, so yeah :)

So I would totally put it on the same level, theoretically. That is, you can write block letters with just as much skill and care as you can cursive, I think. Just like you can write cursive by just doing squiggly lines (as doctors write prescriptions).

I'm definitely not a pro, but I've been actively playing piano for forty years now for whatever that might be worth.

Sounds like you remember that person because they were exceptional. That doesn't make them a good argument for the general case.

Smooth curving lines connecting into each other are very different from intersecting straight lines with clear stopping and starting points.

If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.

It's a matter of spending 200 to 300 hours of practice on it.

Learning cursive (and other skills) in school is about trying to make sure opportunities for professions are not excluded.

While cursive is not a foundational skill (compare math and reading), it is a way to train fine motor control.

And it's not only the dental surgeons, but also dental hygienists... and doctors and surgeons (anyone who uses a scalpel). One could also look at various craftsmen such as jewelers and watchmakers.

Learning cursive is a way to make sure that we don't exclude people at an early age from professions that they might want to go into.

If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...

I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.

Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.

Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.

That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.

I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.

And I strongly disagree.

The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.

And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.

Different strokes

Do you acknowledge you're a minority?

I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.

But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.

Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22

Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?

I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.

Same here, apparently it’s a major ADHD thing. I can take notes or I can pay attention and try to understand, but I can’t do both, you have to pick one (a calculus teacher in high school was very insistent that constant note taking for her rapid-fire example-heaving lectures was required, so… yeah I didn’t have a clue WTF we’d even been covering after each of those classes, though I’d have lots of notes!)

It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.

For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.

I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?

If I say "people have two legs", someone is bound to reply "My friend Bob has only one leg."

On average, people have slightly less than two legs.

However the average person has exactly two.

That's because "average" can mean either median, mean or mode depending on context.

I might just be stretching my point... but if I remember Treasure Island (1883) correctly, the mean person had only one leg.

Sorry! I'll see myself out.

I just like it, the same way you hate it. If disliking it is valid, surely so is liking it?

Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question:

The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.

The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.

BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.

Couldn't you make the argument that training the hands for more lifting and tiny movements has better long-term payoffs as that is also beneficial to many other tasks?

There are studies showing that cursive is better for some purposes: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... But the results are quite weak.

What's really important is handwriting itself. Block letters are honestly fine.

Writing in a good cursive (like the Spencerian script) is a bit faster and much easier on your hands, as you don't have to lift the pen as often. But that matters only when you need to write pages and pages of text.

My native language is Russian, and in Russian schools cursive was mandatory. Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy.

I started learning English as a foreign language, and we didn't bother with cursive. So I kept writing in block letters for quite a while. I then started learning German, and our teacher taught us German cursive handwriting. I'm now using it for English as well :)

> Writing in block letters was seen as a sign of illiteracy

How interesting. I've always thought the cyrillic block letters look beautiful, whereas the cursive variant not so much. I learnt some russian and I've never bothered writing cursive because of this perception. Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!

Cyrillic block letters are mostly the same as Latin letters :)

> Odd to realise now that the average russian seeing my writing would be dismissive instead of impressed!

There's a HUGE difference between learning Russian as a native and as a foreign language. Especially if you can write! Russian spelling rules are quite opaque.

People will absolutely be impressed by your writing.

I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper.

I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?

When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.

No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.

This is not true outside of the United States

Where are you thinking? Everyone I know who speaks a language written with Latin characters doesn't use cursive. I know very little about other character sets - I believe nearly all Arabic is cursive for instance - but this has been my experience across countries.

As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.

Most French people write cursive.

In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything.

In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.

When each word is a smooth continuous line I can write faster and with less effort. The short up and down motions of printed letters tires out my hand.

What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy.

Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(

I was taught cursive in elementary school along with everyone else. It was always slower than normal block letters for me. I always kind of resented having to learn it.

The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.

BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.

(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)

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