8 ms·

> Even as an elementary school student, I didn't understand why two scripts were taught. If you need to write by hand a lot, cursive is vastly more efficient a

• derekp7 4y ago
  This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down. Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at all, that is because they evolved to be written fast. Whereas you can learn to do fast printing. My writing speed improved later in life once I convinced myself to switch back over to print characters -- I can speed up the process without losing legibility. Also some people do a mixture of the two, which really is writing out ligatures for common character pairings. I don't really do that, and it seams everyone sort of figures out their own stile, but it would be nice if written ligatures were taught as an in-between style. Edit: To see examples, do a search for "fast printing", I know there were several good posts on one of the fountain pen forums. The style I liked referenced "bookhand", and to get good/legible at it you start by practicing writing small circles (both clockwise and counter-clockwise) and small straight lines (horizontal, vertical, diagonal with various starting positions). This also helps with general technical drawing, things like writing circles and making them larger and smaller. And learning to draw a straight line across a page freehand will help with character alignment.
  • loloquwowndueo 4y ago
    Also If you want to write fast and don’t care about legibility, learn shorthand writing :)
    • supersrdjan 4y ago
      Word. I learned Orthic recently. It's easy to pick up, unlike the other system (at least that's my impression after a day of investigating)
    • LorenPechtel 4y ago
      I considered doing that in college--decided against it because overall I decided it wouldn't be worthwhile. Yes, I could have taken notes faster but it's not a skill I expected to have much use for later in life. I could already see that the computer was going to pretty much kill handwriting.
  • AnonymousPlanet 4y ago
    My experience is exactly the opposite. I used to do printed characters. My writing speed and legibility (especially for quick notes) improved significantly after switching to cursive. Once you realise that cursive is basically just a way to write printed characters in one flowing motion, it's weird to go back to printed. But maybe we're talking differnt cursive systems, and that might explain our difference in experience.
    • jakzurr 4y ago
      My guess is the biggest difference is how much you use cursive. However, just like most skills, some people may be naturally better, so I suppose I could be wrong.
  • jakzurr 4y ago
    Yes, I think that's pretty much all true, now. 100 years ago, when accounting and bookkeeping were all done by hand, writing cursive was probably quite a bit faster, and with all the practice you got, just as legible. In high school, I wrote almost everything in cursive, but over the next 10 years, computers replaced so much writing that I fell out of practice. I'm not sorry it's gone.
    • bee_rider 4y ago
      Still waiting for a really good stylus driven computer ecosystem. :(
    • koheripbal 4y ago
      Even 35 years ago when I wrote exclusively in cursive, it was significantly faster than printing. Everyone wrote in cursive. It's odd to even see people make the argument that cursive isn't faster. Literally no one wrote in print except young children.
  • Yizahi 4y ago
    Cursive is definitely faster while maintaining legibility. It's just that no schools in my country has taught us how to actually write it efficiently. For example when I'm writing cursive I'm holding pen incorrectly (yes, there are more efficient and less efficient ways to hold it), I'm moving my fingers incorrectly, I'm moving my hand incorrectly, and in the end certain muscles required for the efficient writing weren't properly developed. I've learned all this well after graduating from the university, so there is zero reason to train that skill today. But I do know that my shitty cursive is 100% caused by my own lack of proper training to write. I've switched to the writing print characters nowadays, but only out of necessity, not due to efficiency.
    • boomboomsubban 4y ago
      I don't know what your country is but in a few US public schools we had fairly strict teachers trying to get us to correctly hold our pencils. They'd wander around class correcting people holding their pencil wrong, give out special grips that were supposed to force correct holding, and we were penalized on tests for holding our pencil wrong. Not saying it worked that well, as it was only a handful of teachers who cared so maybe you'd have one year where it mattered. However they did try.
      • Yizahi 4y ago
        Ukraine. We were taught extensively how to write cursive, for whole elementary school, we were writing in special workbooks which reinforced the correct shape of the cursive letters, teachers were looking at us and helping us write correctly. Only it appears they didn't teach us the writing movement itself. Quick question - do you hold your pen in the hand parallel to the middle and outer phalanxes or your pen lies between thumb and index finger? Apparently the former position is optimal, while I hold it between fingers. Also my palm is always touching the table with a wrist so I move the pen mostly with my fingers (which a) strains them when writing a lot and b) produces wavy cursive, less legible that it should be), and the correct way is to move pen mostly with whole arm movement, don't touch wrist on a table and don't move fingers too much, only correct movements with fingers, not do all the work with them.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    Signatures have almost nothing to do with normal written script, they are a special mark that 1) is ideally hard to replicate and unique 2) may be performed by somebody who doesn't write much Fast printing doesn't return anything useful to me (google searches are personalized so I guess we're just seeing different things). I get printshops nearby. I think cursive it taught very formally in elementary school, possibly to the detriment of adoption, just for the same reason everything is -- grammar is given hard-and-fast rules, math is route memorization or totally algorithmic -- because it is easier to grade that way, and also because people will find their shortcuts as they age. Switching between cursive and print seems fine to me (it can also be used for emphasis). Cursive (interspersed with print as convenient) is sort of nice because it is a fairly "normal" way of writing that still goes quickly enough. I can write cursive anywhere on the spectrum of nice and formal to quick and sloppy, in one system. Quick and sloppy basically keeps up with by brain, maybe if I was taking lots of meeting notes I'd want to switch, but it is good enough for my current applications.
  • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    In practice it works out great, this is yet another example of the whole "contrarian-means-im-smart" thing that's entirely too prevalent here on HN. Cursive is there for exactly what the other person said, it's much faster to write than print. There are generations of people who have successfully written and read large swathes of cursive, yet somehow this person thinks they know better, and their explanation for it is akin to a new way of writing (which is what cursive is) and recommendations on practicing it. queue xkcd reference about standards.
    • usrusr 4y ago
      It might be much faster to write when you spend many hours per week writing on paper. I don't even spend spend many hours writing on paper per year! Abandoning cursive should habe been put up for debate already back when phones displaced letters in personal communication.
      • layer8 4y ago
        It doesn’t need to be on paper, taking notes with a tablet and stylus is a use-case as well.
      • P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
        Cursive is dying, at least in the US it's not taught in school anymore. I was responding to the idea that it's slower to write put forth by the other poster.
  • ekianjo 4y ago
    > Think of how most people's signatures aren't readable at al Signatures are not cursive.
  • stakkur 4y ago
    * In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down* And right there is one of the crucial cognitive and proprioceptive benefits of handwriting over ‘keyboarding’.
  • autocorr 4y ago
    I don't think cursive is necessarily faster. But I do recall studies that showing what you're talking about: that a person's developed hybrid printing (printing with personal ligatures) are just as fast if not faster than full cursive. What cursive does appear to be useful for historically is writing for long periods without tiring. Cursive written in the older Spencerian script fashion is written with big movements of the wrist and arm along the main diagonal path with little finger movement. The wrist and arms tire less quickly than fingers. Some professions in the 1800s like had to write all day, so it was quite useful and worth the significant training costs of learning such penmanship skills. They also had to write with pens that didn't write equally well in all directions. And of course other fancy scripts likely just signalled class status similar to being able to recite Homer (in Greek) on command.
    • halpagg 4y ago
      I grew up on cursive, and it always tired my arm so badly. When I learned it took far, far, far less effort for people back in fountain pen days, I felt somewhat cheated. Although they were all forced to use their right hands, never mind their brain lateralization, and that’s unfortunate.
  • croes 4y ago
    >This sounds good in theory, but in practice doesn't work out so well. In order to write cursive legibly, you need to slow down. I know many people who can write cursive both fast and beautiful, most of them women. The problem seems to be rather a lack of training due to a lack of interest. Writing on the keyboard with ten fingers slows me down, but not because the ten-finger system is slow, but because I haven't trained it.
  • LorenPechtel 4y ago
    No, you can write cursive faster than printing--that's why it was invented. It's just that it takes enough practice doing it that it becomes muscle memory--it's not something that can be done well as a conscious act because the reaction cycle is too short. It's like driving stick, you can't consciously operate the clutch and gearshift smoothly. When you're trying to start the system is very sensitive to the amount of pressure, balancing it for maximum power transfer without slowing the engine too much requires a feedback loop shorter than you can consciously do. Shifting gears is a lot more forgiving but if you're going to simply take your foot off the clutch you must have a reasonable match between the RPM of each side--and even if you have both a speedometer and tachometer you can't actively be looking at them while you're trying to drive.
• upsidesinclude 4y ago
  Agreed. Looks better, polished. All caps in drawings and technical documentation is appropriate though. It's just profesional.. writing legible cursive is also part of the skill.
  • josefx 4y ago
    Are you also still using an ink pen that will smear all over the place unless you are pointlessly neat? As a left handed child learning cursive in school was an exercise in frustration since the school system mandated that it had to be done using the most outdated and counterproductive tools they could find. So instead of "properly" mastering it I noped the fuck out the moment it was an option. > It just profesional Most professional texts I am dealing with are digital and cursive is not the default anywhere as far as I can tell.
    • upsidesinclude 4y ago
      Being left handed is a disadvantage, but it really isn't something that changes whether you can write well. I've seen the nicest script written by a left handed person, dramatic because the stroke curvature is inverted. Yeah, technical drawings, systems architecture, as I mentioned elsewhere, block letters are best. Mostly the cursive is for notes, requests, thanks - there are a lot of 'professional' arenas
    • Terretta 4y ago
      "pointlessly" neat?
• beebeepka 4y ago
  No. I stopped using cursive years before I had to. Other students mocked me for a while but it was worth it. To this day, I simply refuse to read cursive.
  • Koshkin 4y ago
    Why learn to read at all, when your phone can do it for you.
    • beebeepka 4y ago
      I said nothing about phones
• Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  Are you sure about that? I am under the impression that this was only true before modern ballpoint pens.
• feet 4y ago
  >need to write by hand a lot There are less and less needs for this, so I think this is a good development
  • tsimionescu 4y ago
    You still have to take notes and do homework all throughout >12 years of your early education, so learning how to do it efficiently is fairly useful.
    • feet 4y ago
      Which is all increasingly done on computers
      • tsimionescu 4y ago
        I doubt that many people are taking notes in any mathy class at least on computers (without stylus input). Even in non-math classes, notes often include diagrams and other drawings that are much harder to do real-time in computers than on paper.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• rootlocus 4y ago
  > as you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often Except for crossing your Ts and dotting your Is and depending on your language's alphabet, other diacritics which breaks the flow since you're switching from gliding over the paper to pattern matching letters and words from the start of the sentence.
• CasualSuperman 4y ago
  If this is the goal, wouldn't it be better to teach a form of shorthand rather than cursive?
  • Terretta 4y ago
    Indeed, and in the USA, stenographer's notebooks only disappeared from craft aisle of supermarket and drug stores during my adult lifetime. // They're the pads with spiral at top, stiff cardboard back, Gregg Ruled with horizontal lines and one differently colored vertical line down the middle of the page.
• sidewndr46 4y ago
  Except this isn't the 12th century and we aren't all working as scribes in a monastery or whatever. I'm not paid by the volume of what I write, nor is anyone nowadays. If we need volume, we have this 19th century invention called a printer.
• NikolaNovak 4y ago
  I think it's true in principle. It may be true for most. It was not true for me - one day I finally acknowledged that all my fast paced noted ended up as a squiqqly unreadable line, and went back to block printing my notes. I think of cursive as an art or craft - not to say it's not a valid thing to learn, but also not a particularly practical or needed thing for most people today. I'm 44 and last time I did cursive was about 23 years ago. I certainly don't think it's a necessary gate for my kids to go through. Things change. Life changes. Other than inertia, I feel cursive should go the way of logarithmic tables etc.
  • rjsw 4y ago
    I did the same as you, switched to block printing notes, but then found I was out of practice at writing quickly for exams.
    • NikolaNovak 4y ago
      For me, the need for professor to actually be able to read what the heck I wrote continued out weighing the speed factor :). Legibly, I was faster block printing.
• PopAlongKid 4y ago
  > you don't need to lift the pen/pencil from the paper as often. But you are contact with the paper far longer, which incurs friction and uses more ink/graphite. Moving the writing tip through the air is far easier and faster than dragging it along the paper. With cursive, not only do many letters require twice as much drawing, such as letter "l" (ell) -- with cursive you have to draw twice as long a line (up and down again) compared with printing (a single stroke). But they also require drawing across the gap between letters, again slowing you down and not contributing to actually forming any letters. I am old enough that cursive was taught and used throughout my entire educational period, but around age 11 or 12 I decided to start printing instead, and I was easily able to write as fast as my peers on in-class exams, etc. And far more legibly.
  • alfnor 4y ago
    I learned my own version of cursive through trial and error, and I found that the most efficient method is to just barely lift the tip off the paper between characters, in a manner that provides little resistance from the paper. Usually, you'll see a light trace of the tip between the characters, but not as strong as some examples of cursive you might've seen.
• BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  If you're right-handed, yes. Those claims never proved true for southpaws like me.
• ajot 4y ago
  I think most people here are only looking at cursive as a writing method only. When you're a kid, you're not only learning how to write (or history, or multiplication tables, or playing a recorder, etc.), you're always meta-learning. Cursive also helps you develop fine motion; history helps you train your learning of boring topics, retain them and link them; and so on. I must concur, I dreaded cursive as a kid. My writing was never "tidy" though it was always very readable, and my teacher bugged to the point I asked my mother for a laptop to do my homework (this was in early 00s, in Argentina, so this was never a real option). I kept using cursive through university, as it was the fastest way to handwrite for me, and I keep using it nowadays, although not handwriting every day. I believe (although this is a counterfactual) I would be even more clumsy today if I hadn't learnt cursive.
• overgard 4y ago
  Shorthand is better for this
• cwbrandsma 4y ago
  Doesn’t matter. Either way you can only write as fast as you can spell…which has always been my primary limiter.