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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

I’m surprised, as the whole points of it are speed and duration (less cramping, less energy when moving the wrist). Discrete lettering is simply slower because it requires more motion.

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The point of cursive was make writing efficient with a quill pen. With a quill pen you run the risk of ink dropping off the tip if you lift it from the paper. Therefore cursive tries to keep the pen in contact with the paper most of the time. I've never thought of cursive as a speed tool. My printing has always been much faster than my cursive.

I’m with andreyvit on this one. Maybe I’d feel differently if I had read a subject involving a lot more essay-writing at university. In subjects like the mathematics and computer science that I studied, where you need to be very clear about legibility and you are often writing intricate notations and using a wide variety of symbols, I’ve seen little evidence that not using cursive for the longer text blocks has ever slowed me down. On the other hand, I’ve seen a great deal of evidence that cursive is harder to read generally and can lead to significant mistakes as a result.

Personally, I’m content being a dinosaur who writes one letter at a time (in handwriting that has been praised for its neatness and clarity ever since I was at school myself) or uses computers to render the text for me (where I have long had an interest in typography and quite enjoy making pretty text using elaborate cursive fonts, but for special effects and interest, not for body text and legibility).

I find I get significantly more cramping with cursive since there are fewer "rest" periods between the letters than with engineering block gothic lettering. Gothic lettering is much slower than cursive, but much more readable and (IMO) easier to write.

I'm dysgraphic, which probably plays some part in this.

They were most likely taught it badly.

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