This stuff all comes from China originally. I'm Chinese so I know. It's because Chinese characters use to be written with brushes and with brushes the stroke o

This stuff all comes from China originally. I'm Chinese so I know. It's because Chinese characters use to be written with brushes and with brushes the stroke order of the lines is very important for legibility and beauty. See the pictures in the link, you'll understand: https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+calligraphy&rlz=1C5CHFA_enUS853US861&sxsrf=ALeKk01o4JfJypS26y5fXiwNiWbv7c7hUQ:1591677103390&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjvzuCi8_PpAhWTsp4KHc8cAyEQ_AUoAXoECBgQAw&biw=840&bih=906 https://www.google.com/search?q=chinese+calligraphy&rlz=1C5C... Just imagine what those characters will look like if you did strokes out of order... This stroke order carried over to pen and pencil and also to japan after they adopted Chinese characters as Kanji and invented their own unique scripts called hiragana and katakana. Even with a pencil, stroke order is still very important to Chinese characters, it's kind of like an accent in your writing. People can sense something is off with your writing if you wrote strokes out of order. It's still legible and can even be neat but people can sense something off with stroke order. Japanese people are just taking stroke order and applying it to English.