7 ms·
What Killed Penmanship?
- CharlieDigital 4y agoPenmenship's importance for a child's development of fine motor skills is highly underrated. Like many things in education, the actual objective is often not obvious and sometimes the neurological benefit is a side effect.
- PaulHoule 4y agoI remember really (1) intense pain in my hands from doing it and (2) teachers being really indifferent to my complaints it. It fit in with bullying in the curriculum in that they could hurt you all they wanted and you had no recourse.
- TexanFeller 4y agoI remember my 4th grade teacher and I literally screaming at each other because when I wrote in cursive it hurt my hand, but school policy was all work had to be in cursive.
- wccrawford 4y agoI remember my parents being upset at my awful handwriting (and yeah, it hurts my hand, too) and them making me practice a lot during the summer between 4th and 5th grade. My writing got worse. And then in 5th grade, one of the teachers decided that I needed more practice, and did the same thing. And guess what? I got even worse. It turns out that you can't actually force someone to write better, you can just cause them more pain.
- CharlieDigital 4y agoI'm a strong believer that we're not all wired the same way and thus we can't all learn the same way. Unfortunately, unless one is born with the resources to pursue a truly individualized education, our education system is designed to benefit the most number of students with the lowest cost to implement. A classroom with 12:1 student to teacher ratio will surely be more effective than a classroom with 24:1, but are you willing to increase your property taxes to hire 2x the number of teachers? Indeed, many students like yourself will not progress optimally in such a system, but perhaps until AI develops to the extent that we can have a fully individual educational experience that kids can actually adhere to (having seen my 4 year old on Zoom lessons, I think we're a ways off even if AI can build a personalized curricula), there will be students that cannot grow optimally under a "normalized" education system designed for mass efficiency,
- PaulHoule 4y agoIt would be cheap, however, to let kids opt out of painful activities. I was always happy to read a book and entertain myself as I was reading at an adult level at age 6. It's expensive, on the other hand, for the teacher to pick a fight about it.
- CharlieDigital 4y agoYou can't really develop fine motor skills and dexterity in your wrist and fingers from reading a book. They are two different types of neurological engagement. I hear you: not every child develops dexterity and control of their musculature at the same time and same pace. In fact, some people may have musculoskeletal structures that simply will not allow them to develop high levels of fine motor control. But our education system is designed to train as many students as practical with the least amount of cost.
- everdrive 4y agoCursive has got to be the most annoying trend ever. It's not faster to write, it's not clearer to read. The introduced complexity has zero benefit whatsoever. It reminds me of one of those corporate presentations where they declare "science _proves_ that X system is better!" Except it's not better. It's just something that the people in charge prefer.
- mcphage 4y agoThere have been articles on this site in the past about cursive—basically that it was better. When we wrote with fountain pens. Once we switched to ballpoint pens, it stopped being better.
- falcolas 4y agoIronically, writing with a stylus has many of the same issues as fountain pens, making cursive useful for writing on tablets. The issues I notice: the stylus must be lifted far off the screen to deregister the touch. It’s also bad at registering where a pen down motion touches the screen if it’s in motion. Cursive writing makes the results neater.
- tomjen3 4y agoI haven't had issues with the deregistering on either of my iPads (both first and second generation pencil) but I did notice that I started to write in cursive. Which for whatever reason the iPad cannot recognize as text.
- CharlieDigital 4y agoThe benefit is that it is an educational method that is cheap to administer, widely available, low risk of danger, and easy to grade if you are trying to train young students to improve their fine motor skills. Same with cutting shapes, posing toy figures, and applying glue. I have a 12 y/o and a 7 y/o and it's amazing to see their arts and crafts development over time as they develop their fine motor skills and dexterity through a variety of teaching methods. These fine motor skills are precursors to uplevel skills like touch typing. Why not start with touch typing? I couldn't train my daughter to touch type until her hands were big enough (around first grade, but still too small TBH). A 4 year old has an awful hard time using a mouse because they lack the motor controls to precisely manipulate with accuracy (I observed this first hand as my pre-schooler did virtual school during lockdowns -- we switched her to a touch device). How do you develop those neuromuscular pathways? Through seemingly useless and repetitive training like correctly holding a pencil or crayon, tracing letters with precision, cutting various shapes out of card stock, coloring within the lines, etc. Kids start with gross motor skills that use their whole limbs and then slowly build fine motor skills that involve complex wrist and finger movements through practice of various techniques. If you observe children with developmental disabilities, they have a hard time performing seemingly basic tasks like coloring within the lines. In many cases they cannot even "correctly" hold a crayon or pencil in a way that allows precise control. Their movements rely far more on gross motor skills because they cannot develop the neuro pathways required for fine control of their muscles [0]. Fine motor skills were perhaps more important in the days of manufacturing (e.g. sewing, parts assembly, wood working, metal smithing) and maybe why Asia seems to be particularly good at manufacturing and assembly of electronics. But I see such skills as still relevant today: touch typing, surgery, digital arts. Perhaps that's a contributing reason to why we don't seen as much precision manufacturing in the West even when cheap labor is available in Central and South America. [0] My spouse was a teacher for many years, transitioned into special education first as a learning disabilities teacher consultant and now as a special services supervisor.
- ht_th 4y agoI wonder, wouldn't it be better to focus on fine motor skills in (primary) education rather than penmanship? I mean, penmanship is becoming an anachronistic skill, and children see that too. I'd rather focus on fine motor skills with fine arts, calligraphy, practical tool use, and the like. That seems more fun and useful than penmanship.
- CharlieDigital 4y agoI have kids so I've seen them develop their fine motor skills over time. You're right: there are many ways to achieve it. Some that you mentioned are already used in schools. For example, one thing they focus on it holding a crayon the right way (e.g. not in a fist). Playing with building blocks, dressing up dolls or setting scenes with small toy figurines. This is also why young kids bring home so many arts and crafts as they learn to use scissors (tool use), apply glue with precision, and manipulate small objects. Penmenship is perhaps easier to administer en mass and easier to grade objectively rather than tool use though. I do think that there's room for change in the curriculum, but not all solutions are practical and cheap. For example, why not 3D pens? It is easy to objectively grade the result. But it's not practical and difficult to deploy compared to pen and paper which are cheaply available, easy to distribute, have low risk of injury, and equitable.
- cafard 4y agoPenmanship was a reliable U for me most of the way from second grade on until it dropped off the report card. I did try, I can write a legible cursive now, if I take time, but my grade-school opinion was the the objective was the persecution of little boys. My fine motor skills qualify me to be a ditch digger, so perhaps the use of cursive did not so much develop my fine motor skills as evaluate them.
- not_knuth 4y agohttps://archive.is/6mm4j https://archive.is/6mm4j
- vintermann 4y agoSpeaking as someone who has gotten into genealogy lately: There was plenty of outrageously bad penmanship in the past too.
- sseagull 4y ago100% agree. And I have said before, doing genealogy will cure people of their love of cursive. Every once in a while I find a census where the census taker printed, and I weep with joy. Bad print is so much easier to read than bad cursive.
- vr46 4y agoNice. My handwriting is said to be beautiful, and friends crane their necks when I'm writing to see. However, it's too small for people to read, and somewhat old-fashioned cursive which makes it hard to read again. This is good for me, to some extent, as I consider my writing only for me! This is backfiring somewhat as my eyesight ages. I don't write to read it again, though, so it's fine for now. When I write letters to friends, I always include a typed-up printout so friends have the pleasure of receiving a hand-written missive, but they can also read it! When I write on tablets and boards, I use a much simpler handwriting style, usually neat capitals, so I have writing for me and writing for others. The main thing that kills penmanship is a lack of practice, like playing guitar. I think Nile Rodgers said, if I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my band knows it, and if I don't practice for three days, the audience knows it. Maybe it was Pat Metheny, but the point holds for me. If I don't write in my diary for a few days, the writing isn't as smooth and fluid. But when I have been writing like a beast, the words flow like anything onto the paper. Hard to find time to pick up a pen for pleasure.
- secretsatan 4y agoI learned cursive first, but then when I was young, moved country to somewhere that taught printed instead, my pen was taken away as my writing was "too small"and had to write with a pencil again, i was actually far ahead in literacy skills compared to my peers as school started younger in the previous country. I think I've always had a bit of issue with my writing, I never liked printed handwriting and stuck to cursive, but I was forever paranoid it was unreadable to others. So if I have to write in case where others are going to read it, I just write in all caps. I rarely right nowadays, and my cursive has definitely suffered, it's still readable to me, but does not look as neat as it used to.
- vr46 4y agoIt sounds like we have a similar thing going on with writing. Just practice your own writing and try different styles too.
- hillsboroughman 4y ago
- Dalewyn 4y agoKeyboards.
- mattko 4y agoand phones
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago> habitually writing quickly This was my guess. We are all in a big hurry.
- skc 4y agoOne thing I've noticed is that when I write nowadays, I very routinely leave out chunks of letters...almost as if my hand lags my brain. Pretty sure it has to do with the fact that we type much faster than we write
- tomjen3 4y agoWell yes. Thanks to much better input, my mind is operating much faster now than it would have been if my life had been shifted 40 years earlier, so I need a faster way to output too. And yes typing is much faster. I type slowly, maxing out at about 72wpm, but at that speed you have less than 1/3 of a second to write write a letter. Can anyone draw that fast?
- cafard 4y agoThe typewriter winged it, the computer finished the job.
- ht_th 4y agoYes. Before the computer, it wasn't uncommon to write by hand and have dedicated typists type your work. Or have a secretary, assistant, or significant other do it for you. At first sight, there's no reason why this had to change with the introduction of the personal computer. But it did. Why? I assume the answer is more complicated than just pointing to a technological advancement. As usual, social-cultural issues will have been at play as well.
- rietta 4y agoI only know how to sign my name cursive. I think it is because i started learning to type at 5 years old. I also never learned to touch type correctly until I switched to Dvorak as an adult because I had originally learned when my hands were too small. I can only imagine it is worse today with the current kids on phones and tablets.
- ht_th 4y agoWhen I was young, and I had to write with a fountain pen, to write meant to situate yourself to write. A clean desk, sit at it well, have some blotting paper, and make sure the pen is clean. Think about what you're going to write, and once I was prepared, take a sheet of fresh paper and start writing. Nowadays, when I write by hand, it is always in haste, standing awkwardly in front of some flat surface, and using a scrap of paper and a partial dried-out pen I got for free a decade or more ago. No wonder my writing has gotten worse! And it wasn't good to begin with. Now that I'm thinking about it, I've not kept the preparatory aspects of good writing from the past when I am "writing" on my computer. The keyboard is always there, a fresh "sheet of paper" always at hand, and it is so easy to edit and change my writing afterward, that I don't care much about thinking before writing.
- sbaiddn 4y agoSorry, did you mean fountain or dip pen?
- ht_th 4y agoFountain. Although, I've used the dip pen too and that was even more of an hassle to use cleanly as a child.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mewse 4y agoIt's worth noting that if you go fifty years back or so, fountain pens and dip pens were a lot more similar to each other than they are today. Both typically had flexible nibs and the real difference between them was just whether the ink automatically flowed from a reservoir inside the pen or was manually collected from an inkwell once in a while. (okay, yes, also the inks themselves were completely different, with fountain pens having to use dyed water solutions to avoid clogging the pen, whereas dip pen inks actually have solid particles of pigment held in suspension in their ink, giving bolder colors and darker blacks when dry on the page; if you put a dip pen's ink in a fountain pen it would very quickly clog up with those pigment particles. And back in the day, it would probably eat right through the latex bladders the ink was stored in) The fountain pens you get today are very different from the ones back then; they have stiff nibs which can survive the sorts of pressures that ballpoint users are used to inflicting on their pens, and they're equipped with quick-drying ink. They're pretty much indestructable under normal usage. But back in the day a fountain pen required a very light touch and some patience (or blotting paper) to ensure the writing didn't smudge and that you didn't damage the nib. (there's been a mild resurgence in the popularity of flex nibs in fountain pens over the past few years. I haven't seen any which have anything like the flexibility you see in real vintage pens, but it's a lot more than we've seen in fifty years and it's nice to see them making a modest return!)
- olorton 4y agoI have been journaling by hand for a while now, partly in the hope that it might improve my now atrocious handwriting. I thought that time and practice would help me get better, but it's only very recently that I have discovered that my penmanship only improves if I, just, slow, down. I have now come to terms with the fact that I have a maximum speed for handwriting, and it is much slower than my typing speed. The advantage is that I now have more time to think when writing by hand.
- DrBazza 4y agoI've never really stopped writing, but buying a quality fountain pen is a game changer. I'm currently practising Copperplate and also the Palmer method and it's rather fun, unlike writing lines at school. US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method UK: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copperplate_script
- oifjsidjf 4y agoNothing killed it. People just realized that everyone who was telling you that pennmanship mattered was full of shit.
- bovermyer 4y agoI enjoy the irony that you say this and misspell "penmanship" in the same thought. Not judging, mind; I just think it's interesting to note that others have different ideas of what acceptable ranges of communication are.
- phoe-krk 4y agoWell, it never really died for me. If shameless plugs are welcome, then [0] contains an example of the things I keep on doing wrt calligraphy. [0] https://phoe.github.io/codex.html https://phoe.github.io/codex.html
- cannam 4y agoVery nice! For other readers, the link is a lot more relevant to HN than you might guess if you are just skimming by.
- phoe-krk 4y agoOnly if you implicitly associate HN with Lisp, which is kiiiinda right, I guess?
- gglitch 4y agoIncredible. Thanks for your book, and thanks for your art.
- phoe-krk 4y agoThanks, hope that the book serves you well!
- mseepgood 4y agoI think computers killed penmanship.
- rcthompson 4y agoI dunno about other people, but I'm left-handed, so writing too much hurts. I resented my school teachers when they forced me to write out essays by hand instead of typing them. I replace writing with typing at pretty much every opportunity.
- davemp 4y agoI’m left handed as well. I had so much trouble with the penciled, 3 ring binders, and spiral notebooks that were foisted on me. After I switched to pens, loose paper/engineering pads, and manila folders, writing became much more enjoyable.
- rcthompson 4y agoEven without the nearly unavoidable left-side obstructions, just writing on a flat surface is still painful for me (cursive is doubly so).
- butterisgood 4y agoIf you ask my mom - me. I killed penmanship.
- textread 4y agoThe greatest example of penmanship among hackers has to be Edsger W. Dijkstra. Dijkstra was well known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD, his initials, as a prefix. Dijkstra maintained a consistent beautiful handwriting, and was ambidextrous. These EWDs inspired me to pick up a fountain pen for my own writing. PDFs of his EWDs can be found at https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ An example EWD: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF
- FeteCommuniste 4y agoWow, that is some nice handwriting indeed. Almost looks like a font.
- textread 4y agoIndeed, an actual font based on his handwriting can be found here: https://www.fonts101.com/fonts/view/Uncategorized/34398/Dijkstra https://www.fonts101.com/fonts/view/Uncategorized/34398/Dijk...
- Avshalom 4y agoNoticably that handwriting would have gotten me a B at best printing in grade school, maybe failed if I insisted on continuing the f below the base line. Certainly not the copperplate cursive that most of the 'kids these days' usually bemoan the death of.
- red_trumpet 4y agohttps://archive.ph/6mm4j https://archive.ph/6mm4j
- antiherovelo 4y agoHandwriting still has value in certain contexts, but these are so subtle compared to the massive speed/retention/recall advantages of computing that they seem worthless unless you’ve already mastered and use them. I handwrite all of my personal things (journals, drafts of a few novels, todos, etc) and find it both pleasant and more effective than doing so in org-mode or similar digital tools. This is primarily because handwriting triggers a mnemonic effect that allows me to retain information with very little effort, whereas typing does not. I also just enjoy spending time on written art away from the computer, which I otherwise live on all day for work. Sitting down at my laptop for recreation starts to feel like work really fast. Sitting down with a notebook and my favorite fountain pen feels like play.
- dusted 4y agoFor me, it was keyboards.. I was a rather future-oriented child, when everyone was learning how to read a dial clock, I refused, because I'd seen LCD watches and I _KNEW_ the round ones would be totally obsolete soon since there was an objectively better alternative (my prediction was wrong, my faith in humanity and reason were yet not dialed down enough). When it came time to learn how to write with a pen, I had the same attitude "I won't need this, ever, there will be computers and nobody will ever touch a pen again, because that's stupid!" That was early 90s.. I once again was a bit on the optimistic side. I've learned to read a dial clock and write a letter using pen and paper, but they're secondary to me.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoThere's nothing objectively better about encoding a continuous value into a series of symbols. The round clock is a gauge for time. A gauge is an awesomely intutive way to show the change of magnitude of a value.
- dopidopHN 4y agoAnd a pen is a robust way to write down information that is easily retrieved on a lot of surfaces.
- ben_w 4y agoThe very continuity can make dial clocks poorer. Exactly which minute is that hand pointing to? Are you sure parallax between the hand and the face isn't messing with you? And that's ignoring the higher drift in most analogue mechanisms, as sufficient technology can continuously correct for that.
- rhn_mk1 4y agoExactness is not the most valuable property of a gauge. It's visual proportionality. If you want exactness, go for symbols, but you will lose the immediate sense of proportion between multiple values.
- flerchin 4y agoSame thing that killed horsemanship. Funny that the words are so similar.
- ben_w 4y agoI was going to suggest "swordsmanship", given the saying about mightiness.
- CTDOCodebases 4y agoPersonally speaking I got into custom keyboards which in turn got me into fountain pens. I don't own anything amazing but have come to appreciate good quality paper and the clarity of thought that writing with pen and paper forces upon me.
- davemp 4y agoPenmanship != Cursive, Cursive may be dead, but for good reason. We don’t need to draw out huge chunks of text quickly anymore. If you don’t need to hand write blisteringly fast, printed letters are imminently more legible/consistent. Cursive also requires a lot more practice that would just be a waste of time. I write beautiful cursive letters on occasion for my wife, but it’s terribly slow because I don’t have much practice. People with good printed penmanship are not rare. In school I recall admiring many classmate’s neat and creative note taking styles in the 2010s. That’s because note taking is where hand writing still offers benefits over typing. The freeform of pen&paper is still faster than typesetting atypical styles.
- basscomm 4y ago> People with good printed penmanship are not rare. Disagree. My anecdata suggests that out in The Real World(tm) legible penmanship is exceptionally rare and finding good penmanship is one step below finding Bigfoot.
- dsr_ 4y agoCalligraphy -- "beautiful writing" -- is an art. It requires time to practice and a desire to do so. I encourage everyone to have an artistic hobby, and you can start on lettering with pens and paper you already have. Ordinary writing is a tool. Your tools should be appropriate to your work. To maximize readability, computers with keyboards are amazingly efficient. When they aren't quite what we want, the good alternatives are: - dry-erase markers on whiteboard. Not conducive to standard handwriting. (There are methods to get artistic results, but they are not the same techniques as ink and paper.) - chalk on chalkboards. Also not suitable for standard handwriting, and increasingly replaced by whiteboards. - small notes on post-its, in notebooks, on forms, and in marginalia. Handwriting works here, but using a drafting letterform is more consistently readable, easier to scale, and you can teach yourself to do it acceptably well in a few scattered ten minute increments over a week.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoThe same thing that killed it every time someone writes an article like this, which is a couple of times a year: keyboards. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.
- coffeedan 4y agoFunny (or maybe not-so) story: My grandmother is in assisted living. She left with my uncle to go to a doctor’s appointment. As per procedure, she signed out - writing her name in cursive. A few hours later, staff came to her room but she wasn’t there. They checked the sign-out log and didn’t see her name because they can’t read cursive. Then they sounded the alarm: calling the police, family, etc because she was “missing”. Good times…