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Comment by metalcrow | Hacker News Reader

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

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 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.

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

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

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 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.

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