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If your handwriting looks good and gives satisfaction you will do it more. It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (
by jmkd 3y ago
If your handwriting looks good and gives satisfaction you will do it more. It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas, and provides another significant layer (like flavour in a recipe) of learning and understanding.
I was fortunate to be taught Marion Richardson [0] style handwriting aged 8 or so, and decades years later my handwriting is still universally complimented. I hand write letters for pleasure and take notes by hand for more profound impact.
If you look after a young person or are willing to go relearn it yourself I highly recommend the discipline and style that Marion Richardson demands. While learning it at first it looks childish, but it provides a foundation that you will immediately adapt with your own flavour. It got dropped in UK schools in the 1980s for being too old fashioned, for which I read 'difficult'.
Sadly I cannot recommend any modern books or worksheets (through my own contemporary ignorance) but her original books from 1935 still stand up [1]
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo13173116.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/M/bo13...
[1] https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1326657/writing-and-writing-patterns-educational-booklets-marion-richardson/ https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1326657/writing-and-writ...
- chromatin 3y agoThe link at the V&A museum shows excerpts from a few pages. This looks incredible. It seems unlikely, but perhaps someone somewhere has scanned in a copy of an instructional book.
- Aeolun 3y agoThis doesn’t look particularly special? This is just a form of cursive right?
- jmkd 3y agoIt was the first time a system was developed that took note of how the hand moved ergonomically in order to create a natural way of writing (drawing) unnatural letters, and linking them together. This system allows you to write cursive with exceptional flow and - if you wish - flair, rather than simply copying complicated shapes and then having that body memory inevitably degrade over the years.
- Aeolun 3y agoAh, I imagine it’s what I learned, without anyone saying it was special, so it’s just what I consider the default. I never got any good at it, but after 28 years my ability hasn’t degraded either. I thought I lost my touch, but all my remaining writings from 28 years ago show exactly the same level of suck xD. So at least the part about body memory seem to be completely correct.
- nuancebydefault 3y agoIt is weird, it feels backward. When I look at the writing in the scans in the pdf, it looks less fluent and more typewriter styled than how we learned to write at school. For example, the h has no loop, the capitals seem not to have extra loops wrt their non-capital counterpart. This means that you will lift your pen more often. That said, I think it reads easier than fully cursive, because it is less dense.
- lgrebe 3y agoMarion Richardson Handwriting was first published in 1935 and continued to be used in schools until the 1980s. It consists of five copy books, each with a different level of difficulty, and a teacher's book that explains the methods and materials to be used. You can download the copy books for free from this link: [Writing and Writing Patterns](https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007.)
- EdwardCoffin 3y agoI only see the teacher's book at that link. Were the copy books elsewhere?
- edgyquant 3y agoThis seems very clearly a bot post. This is a non-sequitur to the other comment and the way it redescribes the context seems fishy and too artificial.
- blululu 3y agoIt is a very bot level post, but the link goes to a real book (a scan so not that accessible) and it does at least give a bit of relevant summary on the topic to save a Google search (assuming you trust it). It could be better but I don’t totally hate it.
- EdwardCoffin 3y agoI'm wondering what value you think has been lost through the book being a scan? Virtually all of the pages contain little more than handwriting, so a scan is the appropriate representation.
- zellyn 3y agoI don't see any evidence that this is a bot post. It's the only post in the thread that actually points to scans of the Marion Richardson source materials mentioned in the parent comment. I guess it doesn't matter now, since it's been flagged… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoI recall my mother writing a personal letter to sooth a family dispute. It was long. She wrote it on the computer, so she could edit it and arrange her words to fit her meaning, printed it, and copied it out longhand for the personal touch.
- tines 3y ago> to sooth a family dispute I think you want the word "soothe" which means to calm. "Sooth" means "truth" as in "sooth-sayer."
- dbtc 3y agosoothe from Old English soðian ... from soð "true" (see sooth). The sense of "quiet, comfort, restore to tranquility," in reference to a person or animal, is by 1690s, via the notion of "to assuage one by asserting that what he says is true," https://www.etymonline.com/word/soothe https://www.etymonline.com/word/soothe
- tines 3y agoSure, but we're speaking English, not Old English. In English, the (archaic) word sooth is a noun, and soothe is a verb.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y agoEtymology is often fascinating.
- progbits 3y ago> It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas I agree the act of writing things out helps. But I strongly disagree this is specific to handwriting. Typing things out has the same effect.
- binaryprimate 3y agohttps://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-athletes-way/202107/why-does-writing-hand-promote-better-and-faster-learning?amp https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-athletes-way/2... "New research from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) suggests that handwriting practice refines fine-tuned motor skills and creates a perceptual-motor experience that appears to help adults learn generalized literacy-related skills "surprisingly faster and significantly better" than if they tried to learn the same material by typing on a keyboard or watching videos."
- almostnormal 3y agoFrom that same link: "After six learning sessions, everyone in the video watching and type-writing group had learned the Arabic alphabet and could identify each of its 28 letters. However, people in the handwriting group—who used pen and paper to write each letter during their learning sessions—gained the same level of proficiency after just two learning sessions." Replace handwriting with any other activity. It is probably the same. Doing something helps learning faster than just watching.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tomjakubowski 3y agoNo, according to the link the hand-writers learned Arabic much faster than the learners typing on keyboards. Handwriting Arabic facilitated faster learning of the language than typing it out. This comports with my personal language learning experience, for what that's worth. I couldn't say whether it translates to other subjects. Full article is here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641140/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8641140/
- taeric 3y agoIs that true, though? I'm happy with my handwriting, but rarely ever get to write anything. Far more time spent at a keyboard. I'll try adding this to my routine. Curious if I can track an increase in my mood and general happiness if I'm writing more.
- bayindirh 3y agoYes, I keep notes by writing them and, it reduces stress and makes me remember them more easily. Keeping them on the computer doesn't have the easier to remember component. I can only search them easier.
- zellyn 3y agoFor some reason, a perfectly cromulent comment [1] on this thread was commented upon as being “bot-like” and then flagged to death. It linked to a scan of the Marion Richardson “Teacher's Book” hosted on the internet archive [2]. The actual booklets are strangely absent from the internet (if indeed these were used into the 1980s). I suppose things that aren't old enough to be exempt from mickey-mouse copyright extension are a grey area? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37913649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37913649 [2] https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007
- _fdsfs12123 3y agoWhat writing tool is this system designed for? Does it work well with "regular" ball pens and pencils?
- heresie-dabord 3y ago> It truly helps embodying thoughts and ideas The act of writing imposes structure and optimisation on the language to convey (transfer) an idea. Structure, because of grammar and notation. Optimisation, because we don't wish to exhaust ourselves in writing or the readers in reading. But knowledge of grammar is essential.
- 0_____0 3y agoVery much agree with your observation on the satisfaction gleaned from handwriting well. About 5 years ago I "installed a font" on myself - I sat down with a sheet of letter forms and taught myself a variant of architectural lettering, which has a nice balance of legibility and aesthetics, and less rigid than engineering lettering. I'm still working on some of my cursive forms, but I definitely enjoy writing more (and the rhythm!! It's like music or dance, and almost meditative) now that I've started using it again as an adult.
- fouc 3y agoMy cursive is terrible so I resort to print handwriting, which was never pretty either. And then I get super annoyed at how slow handwriting is, so I try to speed it up. It quickly becomes an illegible mess. I need the fastest & most legible writing system. Legible. Fast. Can we design a hand writing system that hits 30 wpm? 40wpm? Without resorting to shorthand. I'd rather redesign the alphabet from the ground up instead of bothering with shorthand. I actually find most cursive is hard to read, and yet I grew up with some exposure to cursive. I imagine many people younger than me would have less exposure to cursive altogether. Cursive is kind of dying off, except in terms of writing speed.
- imoverclocked 3y agoCursive is nice because it limits the speed at which you can read it; Sometimes “faster” cognitively translates to “careless.”
- leobg 3y agoPDF: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007 https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.54007
- taffronaut 3y agoI learned that style pre 1980 in the UK. My writing still looks pretty childish and I don't get any compliments. I can take longhand notes at speed though.