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Comment by polyfractal | Hacker News Reader

Re handwriting:

If you are still into improving your handwriting, buy yourself a fountain pen. It makes it a lot of fun to experiment with new characters and drastically alter your handwriting.

I've always had meh handwriting. Not horrible, but not pretty either. I've been slowly converting my scratchy characters over to smoother, more flowy characters with embelleshments, since fountain pens make it so easy to play. The process was identical to what you described. Pick a character, play with alternatives until I found one I liked, then slowly retrain myself to use it.

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Hand writing is a big thing here in India. And generally many super intelligent kids lose out to mug pots because of hand writing.

Coming to my case, I consider any one who boasts about great hand writing a loser.

The moment I stopped writing exams I started giving a damn about hand writing. Hand writing improvement initiatives were the biggest things I hated in school. It was a exercise in futility.

Looking back I feel like somebody was forcing a back end engineer into learning HTML.

Interesting. Here in the States (at least, where I grew up), handwriting is a real mixed bag.

When you are learning how to write as a small child, it's a big deal to write clearly (for obvious reason). Then you are forced to learn cursive, and its a big deal to write cursive clearly.

Then it doesn't matter anymore. Literally everyone stops caring as long as it is legible. It's a weird system. While you are learning to read and write, there is an emphasis on penmanship. But once you are literate...no one cares anymore. Most people (like myself) degenerate back to chicken scratch. Especially as typing became more prevalent. I would hazard a guess that children in the States have even worse handwriting nowadays.

I actually find it physically difficult to hand write more then a few words these days. It's pretty sad.

Ha! I'm the same way. It's so damn slow compared to how much I can put down in the same time if I were on my mechanical keyboard instead.

I always hated high school in class essays because all I could think was that I'd be able to write 3x better/more efficiently/produce more content if I were doing it on a keyboard. Plus, it always gave me handcramps. :(

  > big deal to write cursive clearly

The fact that cursive in US is considered some kind of special writing and is uncommon was one ot the biggest "This year I learned". This topic pops up on reddit from time to time, and usually there is a comment from non-US "we just call it writing". AFAIR I learned to write cursive from the very beginning. The first letters we wrote might have been capital ones, but I am pretty sure first words were in cursive.

I think some schools don't even teach cursive any more.

I wonder how those kids write their signatures.

They print them out.

'X'

Haha, so true. I wrote a couple of incoherent rants about this way back in the day:

http://shrik.theswamp.in/2004/03/presentation.html

and

http://shrik.theswamp.in/2004/03/presentation-2.html

>Coming to my case, I consider any one who boasts about great hand writing a loser.

I dedicated a lot during my school days trying to improve my handwriting without anyone's involvement. Naturally, I'm proud of how much my handwriting has improved. Thanks for the 'loser' tag.

I've very seldom used anything else than a fountain pen. It's so nice and pleasurable!

My older kid is 7 and learned to write last year with a fountain pen. His teacher said it prevents kids from pressing too hard on paper, and helps them develop a nicer writing.

And copying characters as they appear on your monitor probably isn't a great idea. You want to see the flow, fonts generally are not cursive, and the letter aren't really how you'd want to write them (less loops and too many serifs). The 'a' in pretty much every font looks completely different to the 'a' I was taught to write.

It's gonna be super weird when we get a generation which has terrible handwriting - it'll probably be soon.

FWIW I have terrible handwriting and have only used it when forced to in high school. For everything else, I type. That was certainly not true of most others in my age group (I'm 27 now), but I think you're correct. It will be soon.

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