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Northern European here. I don't understand this at all and need an explanation. Maybe someone can provide the context I'm missing. I've heard Americans complai

• mattnewton 4y ago
  American here, I learned cursive in school (what we call our “loop writing”) but it was clear it was going to be phased out to child me. I write about as quickly in block letters and can actually read the resulting words clearly, as opposed to my cursive which turns into a long line of m’s and l’s as I get faster. I find that slowing down to make the cursive legible takes longer than block lettering for my unpracticed hand, and have never needed it enough to justify additional practice. Both methods are about on par with phone typing or dictation, and far far slower than typing on a physical keyboard. I recently tried to switch back to a paper notebook because I found my phone was constantly distracting me when taking notes, but the loss of text search, ease of sharing/editing, and and speed when writing was too great so I abandoned this approach in favor of other methods for controlling distractions.
• wilsonnb3 4y ago
  > In school, we learned something called "loop writing", literally translated Yeah, this is what we call cursive. > What is the alternative; what do Americans do when writing by hand? We write the "printer font" or "capital letters" that you mention. > I still write notes and messages on paper all the time, and I can't imagine bothering to spend twice as long on it. Firstly, most people don't write on paper that much anymore. Secondly, this is sort of like when people on hacker news talk about using a tiling window manager like i3. They can't imagine going back to a regular window manager, they are so much more productive, etc, etc. But at the end of the day, tiling window managers remain niche because swapping between windows isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people. They mainly contribute to making someone feel more productive rather than be more productive. In other words, writing speed isn't a bottleneck in the workflow of 99.9% of people so it just doesn't matter much if we do it inefficiently. If you were a court stenographer required to write by hand or something, then cursive would be a good investment. Otherwise, meh, not much point.
• rrrrrrrrrrrryan 4y ago
  > This technique is much faster than writing out capital letters, or typing letters as they would be written by a printer or printing press. If you forced yourself to write using the "printer font" 100% of the time (we literally call this "printing"), you'd get a lot faster at it. It won't ever be quite as fast as your loop writing / cursive, but the margin would narrow substantially.
  • marvin 4y ago
    It's very weird that I've heard Americans complain about cursive for 20 years, but I have never heard a Norwegian complain about loop writing. There must be additional context we're not discussing. I can't imagine being less than 25% slower and getting significantly faster tired even if I was practiced at writing in printer font -- the number of abrupt fine-motor muscle movements is a lot higher. That probably won't make a difference for someone who very rarely writes by hand, so it doesn't invalidate the point of the article per se, but the cultural difference is striking. And I take a lot of hand-written notes; all through university and regularly at work, for my own reference. Wouldn't make sense to switch. Someone elsewhere in the comments said that cursive has some very non-pragmatic design choices in it, that make it harder both to learn and read. Maybe that's the reason. I think our loop writing is pretty pragmatic. I can't recall anyone in class ever getting corrected on minutiae.