12 ms·

The End of Handwriting

141 points by beardyw 1y ago

tnvmadhav 1y ago
https://archive.ph/is4BJ https://archive.ph/is4BJ
- linuxguy2 1y ago
  Thank you for providing this. In my firefox this article rendered as only the first paragraph then went straight to the comment section and I was very confused about why this was worthy of HN unless to talk about such a short content section!
- NooneAtAll3 1y ago
  Usually archive link is at the top of the comments I wonder what broke in this case
cafard 1y ago
I just dropped a thank-you note in the mail this morning, not only handwritten, but in cursive. Now, it is true that I am old.
- card_zero 1y ago
  I do most of my handwriting in a cypher. I've done it so long, it's become more natural than writing legibly. Just now I wrote a shopping list in code. Nobody will know that I'm buying milk and tomatoes.
  - R_D_Olivaw 1y ago
    Oh that takes me back to uni. I was trying to learn Greek at the time. So all of my grocery lists and to-do's were just English, transliterated with Greek letters.
alexjplant 1y ago
> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad? Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
- Spartan-S63 1y ago
  I understand your opinion and I'm curious as to your reasoning why it would be bad.
  - hopelite 1y ago
    [dead]
- samename 1y ago
  It's a subtitle so it doesn't count /s
- Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
  Betteridge's law still stands. That wouldn't be bad. (If it would be bad, we wouldn't stop writing by hand)
IT4MD 1y ago
I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill". Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day. I believe this is trying to judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, in a lot of regards. YMMV.
- hopelite 1y ago
  [dead]
- skirge 1y ago
  If you don't want to be replaced by machine you need a skill which machine can't replicate and train that skill somehow. Or become a very good machine operator.
  - n0tquitehere 1y ago
    Machines that can hand write already exist: https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw
  - bluGill 1y ago
    Machines have been writing with pens for longer than I've been alive - since 1958 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter#History. For that matters, pens are a type of machine. if you use a pen you are a machine operator.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      A pen is a tool not a machine, or does your pen have a motor?
      - bluGill 1y ago
armchairhacker 1y ago
My handwriting was especially bad even before smartphones, so I'm glad I rarely need to write anymore.
elros 1y ago
PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example). Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup. In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.
- ternaryoperator 1y ago
  I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.
  - skirge 1y ago
    it seems there are two kinds of people
  - elros 1y ago
    Well it's not magic, you still need to learn the skill of how to use the pen properly to write cursive. My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool. Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.
  - spankibalt 1y ago
    That's probably because YOU use a cheap fountain pen. ;)
    - n0tquitehere 1y ago
jerrysievert 1y ago
for me, the end of handwriting wasn't where/when I learned it, I learned cursive in kindergarten, and continued it for many years. it wasn't until I ran into teachers who valued time over accuracy that I faulted (it's not defaulted) and started writing scratch (which I can't even read!), and then typing. now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".
- al_borland 1y ago
  I hate seeing teachers destroy a child’s good handwriting. I still think about a kid who transferred into my class in elementary school sometimes, over 40 years later. Our school taught D'Nealian handwriting. When this kid came in he didn’t write this way, but his handwriting was incredibly clean and looked really good; I was jealous and wanted to write like him. The teacher told him he was writing wrong and forced him to change and learn the D'Nealian way. He struggled a lot and I felt really bad for him. Sorry you had a similar experience.
zzo38computer 1y ago
I do a lot of writing by hand, and I have books and loose papers to write in, and several pencils and erasers. I also use the computer for writing, but perhaps just as often I write by hand.
- skirge 1y ago
  what is your profession?
  - neom 1y ago
    Not OP but I write by hand daily, I take all my meeting notes by hand and all my personal notes by hand too actually. Over a full day I probably do an hour or so of writing. I also often lug quite a few different notebooks around with me (agenda, customer notes, meeting scratch, brainstorming/abstracting): https://s.h4x.club/8LuKkvpP https://s.h4x.club/8LuKkvpP - I'm a bizniz person on the strategy/growth side of things.
BLKNSLVR 1y ago
I love writing cursive, there's a zen to it. I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think. I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw. It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.
xarope 1y ago
I don't write often anymore (since I can touchtype much faster), but on the occasions when I do, the "trick" I've found is to write big (like, think of how you'd want to write, then enlarge 2x2 or even bigger). This allows me some latitude when lines or curves go awry (which on smaller writing would be too obvious), and also visually dampens (since the "font" is so big) the amount of off-alignment of the letters.
chakspak 1y ago
I'm a software developer, so I type a lot. Typing is very practical for throughput and speed. But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook. Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems. I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.
- trylist 1y ago
  I hate writing by hand the same way I hate walking through deep sand. It's extra effort for the same distance and I'm mentally way ahead of where I am physically.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    Why not try to refine what you have in your mind for a couple of cycles before putting it down to paper, or typing it out? Mind likes to run in circles with scissors at both hands and hurt itself while trying to think fast. Teaching it to walk slowly results in clearer and more refined results.
    - watwut 1y ago
      Not that person, but because there is an option to use a keyboard and easily edit, reread, reedir and again. As why go in circles in own head when I can be moving forward with keyboard.
      - bayindirh 1y ago
        In this age of keyboards, cloud computing and AI, we think being fast is better. We lost our patience, and want everything instantly. However, there are some processes which needs time. Life is same everywhere. It makes the same trade-offs. Fast growing plants have less mass, they are less dense, and if they are edible, they're less delicious and nutritious. However, hard woods, strong plants and nutritiously dense foods grow slowly. It's the same for ideas, and human mind. When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts. When you put a speed limiter with a pen, you force your brain to reconsider what it just said to you, and as a result, you get better, more refined ideas in less time actually. I have written elsewhere. I design my programs, their architecture and algorithms on paper, with a fountain pen. I keep lab notebooks. This allows me to refine everything before hitting my first key on the keyboard. I iterate less, produce more. The algorithms I design come out already refined to a certain degree, and when combined with architectural knowledge, their first iteration come out performant and efficient. Let me ask you the same question: Why bang my hands and head to a keyboard while trying to solve a problem while I can solve it with a cup of tea, a nice pen and paper and create elegant code in one go and enjoy all parts of the process, and spend less time as a result?
medhir 1y ago
While I do a lot of typing, I still tremendously value hand writing. Whether that be journaling on a (somewhat) regular basis or sitting down to flesh out a concept and do some deeper thinking, I find nothing quite matches the experience of putting pen to paper. Perhaps ironically, back in college studying data structures and algorithms, the best way I found to really grok the concepts was to write the code out by hand. Sample size of 1, but there's something about that process of having to slow down that really benefits my brain in a way that typing / dictating can't reproduce.
picafrost 1y ago
Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to fully delete things from the internet make us feel digital materials are well protected. The persistence of this data basically boils down to magnetic fields. Without power, these will degrade much faster than even papyrus. Assuming civilization as we know it today does not persist, how much of the knowledge and culture we've created will be recoverable in the future? We have more books than ever, but what about first-hand materials, journals, notes? I can't help but to feel that digital sieves like Google and the Internet Archive are our Library of Alexandria moments in waiting.
- mysite124 1y ago
  yeah sadly both things can be true, the data we value for privacy is incredibly sticky, and the data with sentimental value to us is incredibly fragile.
- bluGill 1y ago
  The vast majority of written works did not survive. Paper will rot, and inks fade - in the typical case you only get a couple hundred years (deserts like Egypt give you thousands - which is why archaeology is so interested in Egypt, there is a lot more remaining to study but we have no idea how Egypt reflects people elsewhere). Before the printing press, books had to be copied by hand each copy separately - this is a lot of labor. I'm told (I can't find prices online, just contact us...) that you can buy a hand copied of the Torah (first 5 books of the bible) for prices starting at $50,000, and if you want a known scribes' work the cost can go up to $200,000 - this is a bit of an outlier as the Torah is a sacred work and so they will start over if there is even one mistake (not cross out the mistake), but still that gives you the idea of why you would choose not to copy a book if it wasn't extremely important. Many of the written works we have remain because Christian monks choose to copy it again and again - we mostly have no idea what works they choose not to copy (there is evidence they choose not to copy some works, but you have to be careful as there were multiple monasteries and one choose not to copy something doesn't mean a different didn't copy it thus it survives anyway). We also don't know which works don't survive because some per-christian civilization didn't copy it - folklore tries to blame Christians but many things didn't survive for them to make a choice. (in other parts of the world it wasn't Christians of course, but same considerations applied to them)
willemlaurentz 1y ago
I don't think handwriting will go away, it might become a "proof of work" in an age of artificially generated texts. I recently started including the manually written manuscripts (that I make on my reMarkable) with my blog posts to show folks I actually wrote them. See https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/ https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/ When everybody is jumping towards AI and digital texts, what remains may become more valuable. I don't know, but am keen on finding out.
tgbugs 1y ago
Given that blue books are likely to make a comeback in college as one solution to AI based cheating, I think that rumors of handwriting's death are somewhat exaggerated. Unfortunately that means that the ability to write in cursive might become a class marker, but given that being literate is likely to also become a class marker, not sure it is worth worry about >_<.
- nabla9 1y ago
  Writes and Writes-Nots https://paulgraham.com/writes.html https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
- BlackjackCF 1y ago
  I guess I've been out of college for a decade now. Did they get rid of blue books or something? I was forced to always sit with handwritten exams, including some CS ones.
russellbeattie 1y ago
There's a thing in China where younger generations have to write out the pinyin for certain words when writing notes by hand. (I'm not sure if it's because they've forgotten the characters, or just how to write them. Maybe a little of both?) So for example, if someone is jotting down a grocery list, they'll write common words like rice or milk in Hanzi, but then struggle to remember the characters for deodorant, and just write it out using pinyin. There's a lot of hand-wringing about it there as well. Kids these days!
woodpanel 1y ago
As someone who values fast typing, and optimizing it as a way to minimizing the gap between thought and implementing it (e.g. from smart auto-completes to vim mode, etc ) I can hardly fathom how any like minded person can willingly throw away this amazing tool called hand-writing. Sure, it doesn’t „scale“ into large texts as good as a keyboard, but beats „the digital“ still when it comes to immediacy, expressiveness and intimacy. hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun. This whole discussion seems to be driven by modern intelligentsia dismissing that they themselves most likely used cognitive foundations built by their hand-writing as a starting point into their own current skill-realm. For the vast majority of people (the non-intelligentsia) hand writing is an essential tool, and we shouldn’t deprive them and our kids of developing the cognitive links that come with using it. In short: You don’t use keyboards for small or quick amounts of texts, just like you wouldn’t handwrite a code-base. IMO The bigger „threat“ to hand-writing is proper voice assistants.
- 2b3a51 1y ago
  > "hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun." I'd add that you can shift sideways into drawing diagrams, or mathematical notation, or devise your own symbols on the fly in the blink of an eye without any friction, apart from the overall manual experience. So a way of capturing thoughts quickly before they evapourate. Then these notations can be rendered into electronic texts at leisure.
mysite124 1y ago
I thought about this idea a while ago: handwritting is also important for ideographic system like CJK, because that's how new character are invented and circulate.
wraptile 1y ago
I haven't written cursive for years and inspired by this article just tried it out and it still works! I never had a pretty hand writting and it's still just as ugly but very much functional. Generally, I still do hand writing in terms of visualizing software with pen and paper but not in cursive but print letters as glace value is much more important here than information density and speed of cursive. I find these fears really unfounded tbh. If we really need to hand write I think anyone can learn this skill in couple of days as we still have great hand dexterity, maybe even better than previous generations.
jiehong 1y ago
Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0]. [0]: https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/ https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/
- bluGill 1y ago
  The Japanese are famiously behind everyone else in dropping hand writing. In part because their script is really hard to type (or so I'm given to understand), in part just culture. We can debate if hand writing is good or bad, but an outlier example is not part of any useful debate.
  - Philpax 1y ago
    The script is not hard to type; in fact, a similar problem is happening there as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
p0w3n3d 1y ago
handwriting will never end because it develops the brain by the sole action of writing. We should write and learn to think by writing
KaiserPro 1y ago
I fucking hate hand writing. It stems from a formally diagnosed issue (no not dyslexia.) It held me back during school, Nobody could read my writing, therefore I was thick as shit. All my exams were hand written, so they needed to have my exams transcribed by someone who could read my writing. (I could dictate my answers, but that required a different "statement", and dictation was expensive so the local authority said no. [its also a very hard skill to pic up on your own]) For normal school work I had access to an emate 300 which was great, but it was down to me to learn to type at any speed. I got mediocre grades. Had my mum not been middle class and frankly karen like in pursuing all of the options, I'd probably be in jail right now. That being said, had I not learnt to hand write, it would have fucked me even more, as my fine motor skills would have been non existent. (I also now use a wacom tablet as my main pointing device, which is ironic.)
odyssey7 1y ago
As a CS student, the way I learned things I needed to memorize was by writing it down / copying / summarizing on paper and studying from that. It’s a little ridiculous to reframe that a significant part of my education was an exercise in copying information over by hand, but it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me. Also: my reading speed was ungodly slow. I think I considered it typical to spend 3 hours on 10 textbook pages. Sometimes it took longer. But the information stuck, and I knew it well.
- logifail 1y ago
  > it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me It's not just you. My kids didn't want to hear it, but they're coming round to the benefits of writing notes during their learning. Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha... Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/
  - eviks 1y ago
    The studies you linked are garbage not related to the only part that matters - learning. What they measured is that if you ride a bike while listening your legs will have higher muscle activity, and so will your brain that managed those legs. There is only downside in distracting yourself to have to copy everything verbatim instead of, you know, actually focusing on the material being presented
    - IAmBroom 1y ago
      Cite?
      - 1y ago
voidUpdate 1y ago
I generally dont handwrite large amounts anymore, however I have begun writing sentimental letters to family members by hand on occasion, but they are fully drafted out digitally first. I will keep going back and editing what I've previously written, which you can't really do on fancy paper. Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I keep a notepad at the side of my desk specifically for that, so I can just pull it over and work out the coordinates of cube vertices yet again, or how to generate a triangle strip, or to rearrange an equation
- delusional 1y ago
  > Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I am so glad I'm not alone there. It's hard to not feel stupid when you have to work out the winding order of some triangles for the 10th time.
  - phrotoma 1y ago
    When I find myself coding in circles (admittedly, I spend less time coding these days so fairly infrequent) I know it's time to get a big piece of graph paper and start drawing boxes and arrows.
  - voidUpdate 1y ago
    A lot of my doodlings are remembering which trig operator I have to use. It's usually tan
  - yencabulator 1y ago
    I scribble about programming because nothing digital has so far allowed me to use spatial arrangement, arrows and such to organize my thoughts as conveniently. I very rarely write on paper anything more than a short sentence at a time. For me, paper is less about writing and more about laying out my thoughts. (So far writing on digital tablets has been a less than great experience and I really like the real world arrangeability and simultaneous viewing of multiple pieces of paper.)
pfdietz 1y ago
I was horrified to learn that almost no one now knows how to sharpen a goose feather to use as a pen. Very few people know how to tack a horse either. And don't get me started on cuneiform. The world is certainly in a dark state and the end is nigh. /s
skeezyboy 1y ago
silicon valley resident assumes rest of world is like silicon valley and that everyone has a smartphone
- bluGill 1y ago
  Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. More than half the world population has smart phones, and even some very poor countries have surprisingly high penetration.
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    >There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. How are they charging it and what network serves mud-huts?
    - bluGill 1y ago
      I'm not sure, I'm guessing solar. Perhaps a community charger or something. Whatever network serves their country would serve them.
  - skeezyboy 1y ago
    >Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. Again, youre dreaming. Not even close to 6/7 billion smartphone owners. https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owners-are-now-the-global-majority-new-gsma-report-reveals/ https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owner...
    - bluGill 1y ago
      World population is in the 8 billion range last I checked, while smart phone owners are over 5 billion. That is most, and close enough to everyone for discussion.
zarzavat 1y ago
My father has dozens of notebooks in which he writes prose. I couldn't imagine doing the same. I want my writing to be searchable and digitalized. It's easier to edit text when it's not committed to ink. Nevertheless, I still handwrite an awful lot, but it is annotated drawings, mathematics, the things that can't be done easily with a QWERTY keyboard. I don't want to input LaTeX on a keyboard, I want to handwrite on an iPad and have AI transform that into LaTeX for me. Technology therefore is killing handwriting in some contexts and enabling it in others.
- gyomu 1y ago
  This would actually be a cool use case for AR glasses- digitize everything as you write it, tie it to the physical notebook it’s in, so that you can later search it, or have the system tell you things like “you wrote your thoughts on your summer 2032 London trip in pages 34-39 of the red muji notebook that should currently be in your desk’s bottom drawer”.
meander_water 1y ago
I've tried for years to keep a regular journal. But everytime I stare at a blank screen I can't summon up enough activation energy to write anything. On a whim, I tried writing in a physical journal, and to my surprise I found it a lot easier to be consistent and write down my thoughts before they disappear. It also improved my handwriting over time, and also your hands hurt less the more you write. One theory I have is that writing is just slow enough for me to buffer my thoughts in memory. Typing is too fast, and by the time I've written a sentence I've lost track of my train of thought.
- kccqzy 1y ago
  I feel completely opposite. When I write, I find that my brain is overflowing with different ideas and different sentence structures. If I write by hand, by the time I finish writing out the first idea the second is gone from my brain. When I type on a keyboard I actually can finish typing out the first idea without forgetting the second.
jmclnx 1y ago
For me, cursive ended decades ago when I started college. Printing I can still do and do it rather quickly. But as always, I am the only one who can read it. This devolution started will before Email became a thing. But I wonder how many young people are comfortable with writing in general, printing or cursive.
- aaronbaugher 1y ago
  I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things like that. Forty years later, I'm trying to go back to cursive because it's faster, but it's a whole lot harder now.
pjmlp 1y ago
I still write lots of stuff by hand, and I am still looking forward to tablet user experience where the pen suffices as input, instead of worrying about having to carry an external keyboard. This is what would be a great use of AI, not stuff like Recall.
LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago
I write tons of stuff by hand. I journal and take pages of notes every day. Handwriting certainly won't die until I do, at the very least.
richardvsu 1y ago
I recently picked up my fountain pens after a 5 year hiatus. I used to collect them in my college years and continued using them in grad school. I loved the feeling of writing formulas on blank sheets of paper and pretending to look like a Physicist. But it all stopped after I began working with a computer. I started to collect HHKBs instead. I find it much easier to gather my thoughts and think logically and remember stuff when I’m writing with my hands. There’s a running theme in my life that I prefer manual things. I enjoy practicing Olympic weightlifting, driving my 14 year old manual transmission and inking paper and tying with my HHKBs in Vim. To me, tools are the best when they feel like an extension of my physical body.
ACCount37 1y ago
Good fucking riddance. Not every skill is worthwhile. Trying to justify clinging to this obsolete practice simply reeks of sunk cost.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  This is an interesting comment. Esp. when there's concrete and mounting evidence for the benefits of it.
  - ACCount37 1y ago
    There is also "concrete and mounting evidence" for the unacceptable dangers of mass vaccination - according to anti-vaxxers. If you set out on a mission to find evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find it. The quality of that "evidence" is another matter entirely. If handwriting is increasingly useless by itself - and we are already in a world where the vast majority of writing is digital - then for it to be worthwhile, the "side benefits" of learning and practicing handwriting must outweigh the benefits of literally any other thing you could be doing instead. That's a very high bar to clear - and I don't think that the janky evidence we have supports this.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      I understand. In the comments there are already links to high quality research, plus experiences of the users. But as you say, if you set out on a mission to find (or equally ignore) evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find (or ignore) it. So good luck. What you think might be very different from the reality. I'll leave it here because it's pretty evident that even if I lie tomes in front of you on that particular subject, your mind is already set in stone on that matter.
  - nancyminusone 1y ago
    I continue to argue that if it were actually, practically useful, it would not be dying. People would just use it all the time because it is so useful. That's not the world we live in.
ubermonkey 1y ago
It's been shown, repeatedly, the writing things down by hand aids both retention and understanding. I didn't know this was a Thing generally through school, but I also definitely took copious notes in classes that I never actually studied, and good excellent grades anyway, so I guess I was living it. I still do this professionally; in meetings I take notes longhand, and then summarize back into orgmode for a searchable record. It feels like a superpower. (Protip: if you're at all curious, experiment with fountain pens. Super fun, and if -- like me -- your handwriting is terrible, the imposed slowdown and added intentionality may help your penmanship.) Also, and not for nothing, but I just moved cross-country and as a part of that did a big sift and purge of 25 years worth of STUFF in our Houston house. This turned up a box of the first 5 years of WIRED, which made me sad, because back then the magazine was doing interesting long-form journalism and not clickbaity crap like this piece. Sic transit gloria mundi & all that.
throw0101a 1y ago
A few years ago the province of Ontario (Canada) put it back on the curriculum: > Cursive writing has been added to the Ontario curriculum because research shows fluent handwriting ”provides students with more opportunities to express their thinking,” the Education Ministry says. It also helps to develop fine motor skills, increases word retention and a child’s ability to understand words. As well, it increases the speed at which a child can write, says Bill Tucker, a professor in the education faculty at Western University and a former director of education for the Thames Valley board. * https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting-is-back-in-ontario-classrooms https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting... * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontario-1.6885628 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...
cyocum 1y ago
I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time. I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved. Additionally, I have only ever used cursive for signing my name to documents. I find it baffling because I have an advanced degree in medieval Celtic Studies. I study manuscripts in depth and I have seen some of the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine on the very expensive vellum manuscript page. In some cases worse than mine. Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old. Compared to the history of manuscript writing, cursive is very young so I am baffled that people are worried about it. I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something so I understand if we continue to teach that. Cursive, however, should only be done by those who want to use it. If you want to have an after school cursive club, great, have fun! Otherwise, leave the rest of us alone and let us have recess.
- spacechild1 1y ago
  > I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something Agree 100%! I still regularly write things by hand, but I already stopped using cursive during high school, like most of my classmates. (I think cursive was only mandatory in elementary school and maybe also in junior high school.)
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Lol I have a friend whose handwriting was so bad, his mom found the leading expert in teaching how to write correctly (at the time / wherever he lived at the time), that eventually broke him and he gave up. We are all very unique and different. What's funny is I gave up on cursive as long as I hit the internet in the mid 2000s because I instinctively knew it was fruitless.
  - deadbabe 1y ago
    You must know how to at least read cursive, otherwise you will see a word like minimum written in cursive and think it’s just a scribble.
nathell 1y ago
I keep a handwritten diary and a handwritten blog. Not that my penmanship is particularly exquisite – in fact it’s pretty mediocre – but handwriting by its nature is a very focusing activity for me. It’s one of the life hacks for my ADHD.
spicyusername 1y ago
"Good" handwriting is just not a skill that is needed by everyone. Legible handwriting, sure, but it's not some social tragedy that kids don't learn cursive or that most adults communicate through keyboard. The kids who grow into adults who need handwriting as a skill, whether they become architects or just like to write their thoughts down, will learn to write legibly by virtue of the fact that they need the skill. Simple as.
- WillAdams 1y ago
  Tell that to the folks in Türkiye who have to hire scribes to transcribe their parents' letters. Not offering the class from the beginning to all is a lost opportunity, and moreover, robs children of a connection with their parents and grandparents.
WillAdams 1y ago
One person who has been hoeing this row hard is Kate Gladstone: https://handwritingrepair.info/ https://handwritingrepair.info/ Certainly, requiring that folks write things out legibly is one way to address cheating using AI.
southernplaces7 1y ago
As someone who despite all attempts at improvement has always had handwriting that looks more like what a chicken might create on paper if you inked its feet and fed it meth, good riddance. Being left-handed too, think smeared chicken scratches.
Upvoter33 1y ago
I like printing (it's clear and easy to read and write) and don't like cursive (it's less so imho) - so may cursive rest in peace
ourmandave 1y ago
Overheard a bank teller the other day saying they're teaching cursive in school again. And she makes her kids hand write thank notes for b'day gifts. Back In My Day we did cuneiform on stone tablets, and were grateful. Postage was a lot less back then too.
- 4gotunameagain 1y ago
  This is a false equivalence. One is a tedious and deprecated way of writing, the other is a complete dependence in technology. Imagine if the power goes down. The kids won't be able to write anymore.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    A typewriter wouldn't need power.
    - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
      Okay great. One in 10.000 that has a typewriter will be able to write.
      - 1718627440 1y ago
        While they are definitely not in common use and probably have some defects, I don't think they are that seldom. Most are probably rotting in the cellar/attic.
- Podrod 1y ago
  Back in my day we didn't bother with this new fangled "writing" nonsense, we just remembered things.
- CRConrad 1y ago
  Cuneiform? Bah, fancy-pants! Soot from torches onto the stone walls of our cave was good enough for us, shoulda been good enough for you too.
bachmeier 1y ago
For me, it's the opposite. I had been steadily moving from writing by hand to writing on a computer/device, even though it's so much easier to think clearly when writing by hand, due to search, reminders, etc. Now I write as much as I want by hand, have Gemini convert it to markdown, and I have the best of both worlds.
Brajeshwar 1y ago
My Handwriting is, actually, not bad at all. During school days, we four friends used to kinda compete on many things, including Handwriting. We tried a lot, from cursive to type-like to stick, to cowboy’s rope, to queen’s drape, and all sorts. After high-school, I settled on a mix between a curvy to type-ish Handwriting, which I carry to this day. A few years back, my daughters complained that my Handwriting is “too stylish” for this day-n-age. Even their teachers had to decode why I write some letters the way I write. So, about a year back, I decided to dedicate a blank Notebook (not ruled or dotted) and I’ve been practicing a simplified version, mostly by removing the curves so they and the younger generations can read it easier. I’m taking it slow - write once a week or so. For me, it is therapeutic to feel the tactile feedback and listen to the subtle scratchy sound made when the fountain pen writes on well-made paper. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/handwriting/ https://brajeshwar.com/2025/handwriting/
gaowanliang 1y ago
I agree with the common sentiment that handwriting is a great tool for thinking. I prefer paperless studying, but I'm always looking for good tools for writing on my electronic devices. Although formal typesetting is beautiful, my long-standing habit of handwriting always makes me want to add my own notes. That's why I really like using OneNote, as it allows me to combine both typing and handwriting.
sydbarrett74 1y ago
I actually write more quickly in block print than I do cursive. My left-handedness and the various accommodations I’ve adopted might have something to do with it.
rickreynoldssf 1y ago
I was an artistic kid and essentially came up with my own distinct handwriting "font". It was beautiful. 35 years later, all typing, I've lost most of it. Now my handwriting is illegible especially because that "font" is still the way I write but I don't have the muscle memory to execute it any more. The whole use it or lose it is very real.
riffic 1y ago
Handwriting is an embodied form of thought. Its indirect utility isn't easily replaced by board-keying or tippy-tapping on a screen. there are at least one or two enlightened comments in this thread saying their memory retention improves if they write stuff down on paper. try it, it can't hurt.
precompute 1y ago
You are no longer your handwriting.
randcraw 1y ago
I'm reading "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous book on the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things"), a Roman-era scroll on Epicurus' philosophy, by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. The work was copied by hand repeatedly since 50 BCE by monks and other scripturae, despite its essential refutation of both faith and religion. In his day, Poggio, like Petrarch, was famous for the elegant beauty of his penmanship. Like the best of his craft, Poggio wrote not for speed but for beauty and timeless legibility. While I have no plans to write in latin, this has convinced me that I want to learn how to write (and print) with style. (My cursive has always been horrific.) Since reading-to-learn is best done by taking notes by hand of whatever you want to remember, I'm hoping this pursuit will not only improve my retention but also my attention to detail since it will give me time to think out more fully what I think is important and how best to say it.
NoGravitas 1y ago
In the late 1970s to early 80s, I learned a more or less standard cursive for the time. My high school, college, and even graduate school education relied a lot on "blue book" exams, short essays written in class, in cursive. Over that period, my cursive declined into an illegible scrawl simply because I was optimizing for speed. I did develop a 100wpm typing speed, but that probably wasn't a major contributing factor. Years later (early 2000s) I decided my handwriting was unacceptable (was still using it for note-taking), and taught myself cursive Italic, which I still use today. Both prettier and less fussy than the cursive I was taught, works well with fountain pens, which in turn reduces muscle cramps.
deleted 1y ago
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ErigmolCt 1y ago
The death of handwriting has been forecasted for decades, but like most "ends of" narratives, it's more evolution than extinction
TomMasz 1y ago
I've been keeping a journal since the '90s, handwritten in cursive. Other than my signature, it's the only cursive writing I do. Everything else I use block capitals. Writing by hand helps you remember things in a way that typing does not (though taking notes of any kind helps). You can have my Japanese fountain pen and mechanical pencil when you pry them from my cold, dead hand.
xrd 1y ago
When I lived in Japan my method of study was to write down all the kanji I didn't know. I don't really think you can learn a language like Japanese without writing it down. There is something magical about writing that locks information into your brain in a way very different from just reading it on a smart phone. Full disclosure: I'm making a site that allows you to read books and then practice kanji by hand and then save to flashcards for later review. Example: https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-paragraph-19/14119 https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag... Click on the "kanji" at the bottom to expand and show the kanji in the page. Click on a kanji to see the animated strokes and practice it right there by hand.
estimator7292 1y ago
While good handwriting is a skill that can be taught and learned, not everyone can learn it. Like art, some people have an innate ability, and some have no ability and never will. For me, I have poor motor control in my hands. I physically cannot make the kind of precise motions that good handwriting requires. The act of writing is painful and physically and mentally fatiguing. I can't even do basic geometric engineering drawings. My hands just can't make consistent lines. On the other hand (heh), anything I write longhand may as well be encrypted to anyone but me. Good for keeping notes private, I guess. I will say that memory retention through writing does still work for me. It seems to be a truly universal mechanism in the human brain. This is also partly an autistic thing. Lots of us have poor fine motor control, and thus terrible handwriting. It's also one of those things that doesn't seem terribly important: good handwriting is mostly a performance for the exclusive benefit of others. There's nothing intrinsically good or valuable about it and our time would be better spent learning about trains. That's not an objective thing, just how the autistic mind sorts priorities.
m463 1y ago
I wonder if slide to type has any overlap with cursive writing. I do know I unlearned a bunch of my handwriting hardwiring when I learned to use a palm pilot. It had a system called graffiti that "simplified" some letters... which ended up replacing them in my handwriting habits after a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29
yogeshkantule 1y ago
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141 points by beardyw 1y ago

tnvmadhav 1y ago

https://archive.ph/is4BJ https://archive.ph/is4BJ

linuxguy2 1y ago
Thank you for providing this. In my firefox this article rendered as only the first paragraph then went straight to the comment section and I was very confused about why this was worthy of HN unless to talk about such a short content section!
NooneAtAll3 1y ago
Usually archive link is at the top of the comments I wonder what broke in this case

cafard 1y ago

I just dropped a thank-you note in the mail this morning, not only handwritten, but in cursive. Now, it is true that I am old.

card_zero 1y ago
I do most of my handwriting in a cypher. I've done it so long, it's become more natural than writing legibly. Just now I wrote a shopping list in code. Nobody will know that I'm buying milk and tomatoes.
- R_D_Olivaw 1y ago
  Oh that takes me back to uni. I was trying to learn Greek at the time. So all of my grocery lists and to-do's were just English, transliterated with Greek letters.

alexjplant 1y ago

> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad? Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Spartan-S63 1y ago
I understand your opinion and I'm curious as to your reasoning why it would be bad.
- hopelite 1y ago
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samename 1y ago
It's a subtitle so it doesn't count /s
Andrew_nenakhov 1y ago
Betteridge's law still stands. That wouldn't be bad. (If it would be bad, we wouldn't stop writing by hand)

IT4MD 1y ago

I don't see a lot of people still writing with quills, and there's a reason for that, yet there have been no catastrophic consequences, excepting maybe for "Big Quill". Personally, I think this veers into hyperbole a bit. The degradation in motor skills is barely measurable when compared to common tasks required of people today and we're talking about a skill that has less and less use cases every day. I believe this is trying to judge a fish by how well it climbs a tree, in a lot of regards. YMMV.

hopelite 1y ago
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skirge 1y ago
If you don't want to be replaced by machine you need a skill which machine can't replicate and train that skill somehow. Or become a very good machine operator.
- n0tquitehere 1y ago
  Machines that can hand write already exist: https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw
- bluGill 1y ago
  Machines have been writing with pens for longer than I've been alive - since 1958 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter#History. For that matters, pens are a type of machine. if you use a pen you are a machine operator.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    A pen is a tool not a machine, or does your pen have a motor?
    - bluGill 1y ago

armchairhacker 1y ago

My handwriting was especially bad even before smartphones, so I'm glad I rarely need to write anymore.

elros 1y ago

PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example). Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup. In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

ternaryoperator 1y ago
I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.
- skirge 1y ago
  it seems there are two kinds of people
- elros 1y ago
  Well it's not magic, you still need to learn the skill of how to use the pen properly to write cursive. My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool. Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.
- spankibalt 1y ago
  That's probably because YOU use a cheap fountain pen. ;)
  - n0tquitehere 1y ago

jerrysievert 1y ago

for me, the end of handwriting wasn't where/when I learned it, I learned cursive in kindergarten, and continued it for many years. it wasn't until I ran into teachers who valued time over accuracy that I faulted (it's not defaulted) and started writing scratch (which I can't even read!), and then typing. now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".

al_borland 1y ago
I hate seeing teachers destroy a child’s good handwriting. I still think about a kid who transferred into my class in elementary school sometimes, over 40 years later. Our school taught D'Nealian handwriting. When this kid came in he didn’t write this way, but his handwriting was incredibly clean and looked really good; I was jealous and wanted to write like him. The teacher told him he was writing wrong and forced him to change and learn the D'Nealian way. He struggled a lot and I felt really bad for him. Sorry you had a similar experience.

zzo38computer 1y ago

I do a lot of writing by hand, and I have books and loose papers to write in, and several pencils and erasers. I also use the computer for writing, but perhaps just as often I write by hand.

skirge 1y ago
what is your profession?
- neom 1y ago
  Not OP but I write by hand daily, I take all my meeting notes by hand and all my personal notes by hand too actually. Over a full day I probably do an hour or so of writing. I also often lug quite a few different notebooks around with me (agenda, customer notes, meeting scratch, brainstorming/abstracting): https://s.h4x.club/8LuKkvpP https://s.h4x.club/8LuKkvpP - I'm a bizniz person on the strategy/growth side of things.

BLKNSLVR 1y ago

I love writing cursive, there's a zen to it. I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think. I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw. It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.

xarope 1y ago

I don't write often anymore (since I can touchtype much faster), but on the occasions when I do, the "trick" I've found is to write big (like, think of how you'd want to write, then enlarge 2x2 or even bigger). This allows me some latitude when lines or curves go awry (which on smaller writing would be too obvious), and also visually dampens (since the "font" is so big) the amount of off-alignment of the letters.

chakspak 1y ago

I'm a software developer, so I type a lot. Typing is very practical for throughput and speed. But I still make time for writing by hand. I find it to be very valuable, because it forces me to think differently about things and sit with ideas longer. I also find journaling almost impossible to do on a computer but very accessible in a notebook. Writing by hand is also portable and adaptable. You can write on paper, surfaces, and signs. You can write when there's no power. No subscription is required, it doesn't require firmware updates, and it never has connectivity problems. I can understand why some people would be willing to say goodbye to handwriting, but it's a skill that I'm extremely grateful for and I would be very sad to see it disappear from the world.

trylist 1y ago
I hate writing by hand the same way I hate walking through deep sand. It's extra effort for the same distance and I'm mentally way ahead of where I am physically.
- bayindirh 1y ago
  Why not try to refine what you have in your mind for a couple of cycles before putting it down to paper, or typing it out? Mind likes to run in circles with scissors at both hands and hurt itself while trying to think fast. Teaching it to walk slowly results in clearer and more refined results.
  - watwut 1y ago
    Not that person, but because there is an option to use a keyboard and easily edit, reread, reedir and again. As why go in circles in own head when I can be moving forward with keyboard.
    - bayindirh 1y ago
      In this age of keyboards, cloud computing and AI, we think being fast is better. We lost our patience, and want everything instantly. However, there are some processes which needs time. Life is same everywhere. It makes the same trade-offs. Fast growing plants have less mass, they are less dense, and if they are edible, they're less delicious and nutritious. However, hard woods, strong plants and nutritiously dense foods grow slowly. It's the same for ideas, and human mind. When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts. When you put a speed limiter with a pen, you force your brain to reconsider what it just said to you, and as a result, you get better, more refined ideas in less time actually. I have written elsewhere. I design my programs, their architecture and algorithms on paper, with a fountain pen. I keep lab notebooks. This allows me to refine everything before hitting my first key on the keyboard. I iterate less, produce more. The algorithms I design come out already refined to a certain degree, and when combined with architectural knowledge, their first iteration come out performant and efficient. Let me ask you the same question: Why bang my hands and head to a keyboard while trying to solve a problem while I can solve it with a cup of tea, a nice pen and paper and create elegant code in one go and enjoy all parts of the process, and spend less time as a result?

medhir 1y ago

While I do a lot of typing, I still tremendously value hand writing. Whether that be journaling on a (somewhat) regular basis or sitting down to flesh out a concept and do some deeper thinking, I find nothing quite matches the experience of putting pen to paper. Perhaps ironically, back in college studying data structures and algorithms, the best way I found to really grok the concepts was to write the code out by hand. Sample size of 1, but there's something about that process of having to slow down that really benefits my brain in a way that typing / dictating can't reproduce.

picafrost 1y ago

Physically written materials are such a huge part of our archaeological understanding of the human past. In my mind digital materials are always dangerously close to non-existence, even if cloud redundancy and our apparent inability to fully delete things from the internet make us feel digital materials are well protected. The persistence of this data basically boils down to magnetic fields. Without power, these will degrade much faster than even papyrus. Assuming civilization as we know it today does not persist, how much of the knowledge and culture we've created will be recoverable in the future? We have more books than ever, but what about first-hand materials, journals, notes? I can't help but to feel that digital sieves like Google and the Internet Archive are our Library of Alexandria moments in waiting.

mysite124 1y ago
yeah sadly both things can be true, the data we value for privacy is incredibly sticky, and the data with sentimental value to us is incredibly fragile.
bluGill 1y ago
The vast majority of written works did not survive. Paper will rot, and inks fade - in the typical case you only get a couple hundred years (deserts like Egypt give you thousands - which is why archaeology is so interested in Egypt, there is a lot more remaining to study but we have no idea how Egypt reflects people elsewhere). Before the printing press, books had to be copied by hand each copy separately - this is a lot of labor. I'm told (I can't find prices online, just contact us...) that you can buy a hand copied of the Torah (first 5 books of the bible) for prices starting at $50,000, and if you want a known scribes' work the cost can go up to $200,000 - this is a bit of an outlier as the Torah is a sacred work and so they will start over if there is even one mistake (not cross out the mistake), but still that gives you the idea of why you would choose not to copy a book if it wasn't extremely important. Many of the written works we have remain because Christian monks choose to copy it again and again - we mostly have no idea what works they choose not to copy (there is evidence they choose not to copy some works, but you have to be careful as there were multiple monasteries and one choose not to copy something doesn't mean a different didn't copy it thus it survives anyway). We also don't know which works don't survive because some per-christian civilization didn't copy it - folklore tries to blame Christians but many things didn't survive for them to make a choice. (in other parts of the world it wasn't Christians of course, but same considerations applied to them)

willemlaurentz 1y ago

I don't think handwriting will go away, it might become a "proof of work" in an age of artificially generated texts. I recently started including the manually written manuscripts (that I make on my reMarkable) with my blog posts to show folks I actually wrote them. See https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/ https://willem.com/en/2025-08-19_android-photo-library-app/ When everybody is jumping towards AI and digital texts, what remains may become more valuable. I don't know, but am keen on finding out.

tgbugs 1y ago

Given that blue books are likely to make a comeback in college as one solution to AI based cheating, I think that rumors of handwriting's death are somewhat exaggerated. Unfortunately that means that the ability to write in cursive might become a class marker, but given that being literate is likely to also become a class marker, not sure it is worth worry about >_<.

nabla9 1y ago
Writes and Writes-Nots https://paulgraham.com/writes.html https://paulgraham.com/writes.html
BlackjackCF 1y ago
I guess I've been out of college for a decade now. Did they get rid of blue books or something? I was forced to always sit with handwritten exams, including some CS ones.

russellbeattie 1y ago

There's a thing in China where younger generations have to write out the pinyin for certain words when writing notes by hand. (I'm not sure if it's because they've forgotten the characters, or just how to write them. Maybe a little of both?) So for example, if someone is jotting down a grocery list, they'll write common words like rice or milk in Hanzi, but then struggle to remember the characters for deodorant, and just write it out using pinyin. There's a lot of hand-wringing about it there as well. Kids these days!

woodpanel 1y ago

As someone who values fast typing, and optimizing it as a way to minimizing the gap between thought and implementing it (e.g. from smart auto-completes to vim mode, etc ) I can hardly fathom how any like minded person can willingly throw away this amazing tool called hand-writing. Sure, it doesn’t „scale“ into large texts as good as a keyboard, but beats „the digital“ still when it comes to immediacy, expressiveness and intimacy. hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun. This whole discussion seems to be driven by modern intelligentsia dismissing that they themselves most likely used cognitive foundations built by their hand-writing as a starting point into their own current skill-realm. For the vast majority of people (the non-intelligentsia) hand writing is an essential tool, and we shouldn’t deprive them and our kids of developing the cognitive links that come with using it. In short: You don’t use keyboards for small or quick amounts of texts, just like you wouldn’t handwrite a code-base. IMO The bigger „threat“ to hand-writing is proper voice assistants.

2b3a51 1y ago
> "hand writing comes with close to zero dependencies: no software, no os, no booting time, no charging - just hand, surface, and optionally an instrument. It is offline first, offers great privacy, and fun." I'd add that you can shift sideways into drawing diagrams, or mathematical notation, or devise your own symbols on the fly in the blink of an eye without any friction, apart from the overall manual experience. So a way of capturing thoughts quickly before they evapourate. Then these notations can be rendered into electronic texts at leisure.

mysite124 1y ago

I thought about this idea a while ago: handwritting is also important for ideographic system like CJK, because that's how new character are invented and circulate.

wraptile 1y ago

I haven't written cursive for years and inspired by this article just tried it out and it still works! I never had a pretty hand writting and it's still just as ugly but very much functional. Generally, I still do hand writing in terms of visualizing software with pen and paper but not in cursive but print letters as glace value is much more important here than information density and speed of cursive. I find these fears really unfounded tbh. If we really need to hand write I think anyone can learn this skill in couple of days as we still have great hand dexterity, maybe even better than previous generations.

jiehong 1y ago

Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0]. [0]: https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/ https://www.fusosha.co.jp/special/bunbougu/

bluGill 1y ago
The Japanese are famiously behind everyone else in dropping hand writing. In part because their script is really hard to type (or so I'm given to understand), in part just culture. We can debate if hand writing is good or bad, but an outlier example is not part of any useful debate.
- Philpax 1y ago
  The script is not hard to type; in fact, a similar problem is happening there as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

p0w3n3d 1y ago

handwriting will never end because it develops the brain by the sole action of writing. We should write and learn to think by writing

KaiserPro 1y ago

I fucking hate hand writing. It stems from a formally diagnosed issue (no not dyslexia.) It held me back during school, Nobody could read my writing, therefore I was thick as shit. All my exams were hand written, so they needed to have my exams transcribed by someone who could read my writing. (I could dictate my answers, but that required a different "statement", and dictation was expensive so the local authority said no. [its also a very hard skill to pic up on your own]) For normal school work I had access to an emate 300 which was great, but it was down to me to learn to type at any speed. I got mediocre grades. Had my mum not been middle class and frankly karen like in pursuing all of the options, I'd probably be in jail right now. That being said, had I not learnt to hand write, it would have fucked me even more, as my fine motor skills would have been non existent. (I also now use a wacom tablet as my main pointing device, which is ironic.)

odyssey7 1y ago

As a CS student, the way I learned things I needed to memorize was by writing it down / copying / summarizing on paper and studying from that. It’s a little ridiculous to reframe that a significant part of my education was an exercise in copying information over by hand, but it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me. Also: my reading speed was ungodly slow. I think I considered it typical to spend 3 hours on 10 textbook pages. Sometimes it took longer. But the information stuck, and I knew it well.

logifail 1y ago
> it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me It's not just you. My kids didn't want to hear it, but they're coming round to the benefits of writing notes during their learning. Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-hand-is-better-for-memory-and-learning/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha... Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529661/handwriting-cursive-typing-schools-learning-brain https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529... Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/
- eviks 1y ago
  The studies you linked are garbage not related to the only part that matters - learning. What they measured is that if you ride a bike while listening your legs will have higher muscle activity, and so will your brain that managed those legs. There is only downside in distracting yourself to have to copy everything verbatim instead of, you know, actually focusing on the material being presented
  - IAmBroom 1y ago
    Cite?
    - 1y ago

voidUpdate 1y ago

I generally dont handwrite large amounts anymore, however I have begun writing sentimental letters to family members by hand on occasion, but they are fully drafted out digitally first. I will keep going back and editing what I've previously written, which you can't really do on fancy paper. Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I keep a notepad at the side of my desk specifically for that, so I can just pull it over and work out the coordinates of cube vertices yet again, or how to generate a triangle strip, or to rearrange an equation

delusional 1y ago
> Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code. I am so glad I'm not alone there. It's hard to not feel stupid when you have to work out the winding order of some triangles for the 10th time.
- phrotoma 1y ago
  When I find myself coding in circles (admittedly, I spend less time coding these days so fairly infrequent) I know it's time to get a big piece of graph paper and start drawing boxes and arrows.
- voidUpdate 1y ago
  A lot of my doodlings are remembering which trig operator I have to use. It's usually tan
- yencabulator 1y ago
  I scribble about programming because nothing digital has so far allowed me to use spatial arrangement, arrows and such to organize my thoughts as conveniently. I very rarely write on paper anything more than a short sentence at a time. For me, paper is less about writing and more about laying out my thoughts. (So far writing on digital tablets has been a less than great experience and I really like the real world arrangeability and simultaneous viewing of multiple pieces of paper.)

pfdietz 1y ago

I was horrified to learn that almost no one now knows how to sharpen a goose feather to use as a pen. Very few people know how to tack a horse either. And don't get me started on cuneiform. The world is certainly in a dark state and the end is nigh. /s

skeezyboy 1y ago

silicon valley resident assumes rest of world is like silicon valley and that everyone has a smartphone

bluGill 1y ago
Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. More than half the world population has smart phones, and even some very poor countries have surprisingly high penetration.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  >There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. How are they charging it and what network serves mud-huts?
  - bluGill 1y ago
    I'm not sure, I'm guessing solar. Perhaps a community charger or something. Whatever network serves their country would serve them.
- skeezyboy 1y ago
  >Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. Again, youre dreaming. Not even close to 6/7 billion smartphone owners. https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owners-are-now-the-global-majority-new-gsma-report-reveals/ https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owner...
  - bluGill 1y ago
    World population is in the 8 billion range last I checked, while smart phone owners are over 5 billion. That is most, and close enough to everyone for discussion.

zarzavat 1y ago

My father has dozens of notebooks in which he writes prose. I couldn't imagine doing the same. I want my writing to be searchable and digitalized. It's easier to edit text when it's not committed to ink. Nevertheless, I still handwrite an awful lot, but it is annotated drawings, mathematics, the things that can't be done easily with a QWERTY keyboard. I don't want to input LaTeX on a keyboard, I want to handwrite on an iPad and have AI transform that into LaTeX for me. Technology therefore is killing handwriting in some contexts and enabling it in others.

gyomu 1y ago
This would actually be a cool use case for AR glasses- digitize everything as you write it, tie it to the physical notebook it’s in, so that you can later search it, or have the system tell you things like “you wrote your thoughts on your summer 2032 London trip in pages 34-39 of the red muji notebook that should currently be in your desk’s bottom drawer”.

meander_water 1y ago

I've tried for years to keep a regular journal. But everytime I stare at a blank screen I can't summon up enough activation energy to write anything. On a whim, I tried writing in a physical journal, and to my surprise I found it a lot easier to be consistent and write down my thoughts before they disappear. It also improved my handwriting over time, and also your hands hurt less the more you write. One theory I have is that writing is just slow enough for me to buffer my thoughts in memory. Typing is too fast, and by the time I've written a sentence I've lost track of my train of thought.

kccqzy 1y ago
I feel completely opposite. When I write, I find that my brain is overflowing with different ideas and different sentence structures. If I write by hand, by the time I finish writing out the first idea the second is gone from my brain. When I type on a keyboard I actually can finish typing out the first idea without forgetting the second.

jmclnx 1y ago

For me, cursive ended decades ago when I started college. Printing I can still do and do it rather quickly. But as always, I am the only one who can read it. This devolution started will before Email became a thing. But I wonder how many young people are comfortable with writing in general, printing or cursive.

aaronbaugher 1y ago
I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things like that. Forty years later, I'm trying to go back to cursive because it's faster, but it's a whole lot harder now.

pjmlp 1y ago

I still write lots of stuff by hand, and I am still looking forward to tablet user experience where the pen suffices as input, instead of worrying about having to carry an external keyboard. This is what would be a great use of AI, not stuff like Recall.

LennyHenrysNuts 1y ago

I write tons of stuff by hand. I journal and take pages of notes every day. Handwriting certainly won't die until I do, at the very least.

richardvsu 1y ago

I recently picked up my fountain pens after a 5 year hiatus. I used to collect them in my college years and continued using them in grad school. I loved the feeling of writing formulas on blank sheets of paper and pretending to look like a Physicist. But it all stopped after I began working with a computer. I started to collect HHKBs instead. I find it much easier to gather my thoughts and think logically and remember stuff when I’m writing with my hands. There’s a running theme in my life that I prefer manual things. I enjoy practicing Olympic weightlifting, driving my 14 year old manual transmission and inking paper and tying with my HHKBs in Vim. To me, tools are the best when they feel like an extension of my physical body.

ACCount37 1y ago

Good fucking riddance. Not every skill is worthwhile. Trying to justify clinging to this obsolete practice simply reeks of sunk cost.

bayindirh 1y ago
This is an interesting comment. Esp. when there's concrete and mounting evidence for the benefits of it.
- ACCount37 1y ago
  There is also "concrete and mounting evidence" for the unacceptable dangers of mass vaccination - according to anti-vaxxers. If you set out on a mission to find evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find it. The quality of that "evidence" is another matter entirely. If handwriting is increasingly useless by itself - and we are already in a world where the vast majority of writing is digital - then for it to be worthwhile, the "side benefits" of learning and practicing handwriting must outweigh the benefits of literally any other thing you could be doing instead. That's a very high bar to clear - and I don't think that the janky evidence we have supports this.
  - bayindirh 1y ago
    I understand. In the comments there are already links to high quality research, plus experiences of the users. But as you say, if you set out on a mission to find (or equally ignore) evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find (or ignore) it. So good luck. What you think might be very different from the reality. I'll leave it here because it's pretty evident that even if I lie tomes in front of you on that particular subject, your mind is already set in stone on that matter.
- nancyminusone 1y ago
  I continue to argue that if it were actually, practically useful, it would not be dying. People would just use it all the time because it is so useful. That's not the world we live in.

ubermonkey 1y ago

It's been shown, repeatedly, the writing things down by hand aids both retention and understanding. I didn't know this was a Thing generally through school, but I also definitely took copious notes in classes that I never actually studied, and good excellent grades anyway, so I guess I was living it. I still do this professionally; in meetings I take notes longhand, and then summarize back into orgmode for a searchable record. It feels like a superpower. (Protip: if you're at all curious, experiment with fountain pens. Super fun, and if -- like me -- your handwriting is terrible, the imposed slowdown and added intentionality may help your penmanship.) Also, and not for nothing, but I just moved cross-country and as a part of that did a big sift and purge of 25 years worth of STUFF in our Houston house. This turned up a box of the first 5 years of WIRED, which made me sad, because back then the magazine was doing interesting long-form journalism and not clickbaity crap like this piece. Sic transit gloria mundi & all that.

throw0101a 1y ago

A few years ago the province of Ontario (Canada) put it back on the curriculum: > Cursive writing has been added to the Ontario curriculum because research shows fluent handwriting ”provides students with more opportunities to express their thinking,” the Education Ministry says. It also helps to develop fine motor skills, increases word retention and a child’s ability to understand words. As well, it increases the speed at which a child can write, says Bill Tucker, a professor in the education faculty at Western University and a former director of education for the Thames Valley board. * https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting-is-back-in-ontario-classrooms https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting... * https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontario-1.6885628 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...

cyocum 1y ago

I find these articles both baffling and frustrating at the same time. I find it frustrating because I spent recess after recess locked inside to practice cursive. After many months of this, my handwriting had not improved. The teachers finally relented and stopped punishing me because the punishment never actually improved my handwriting. My handwriting is now print only and is still horrible and has never improved. Additionally, I have only ever used cursive for signing my name to documents. I find it baffling because I have an advanced degree in medieval Celtic Studies. I study manuscripts in depth and I have seen some of the worst handwriting that you could possibly imagine on the very expensive vellum manuscript page. In some cases worse than mine. Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old. Compared to the history of manuscript writing, cursive is very young so I am baffled that people are worried about it. I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something so I understand if we continue to teach that. Cursive, however, should only be done by those who want to use it. If you want to have an after school cursive club, great, have fun! Otherwise, leave the rest of us alone and let us have recess.

spacechild1 1y ago
> I find printing to be fine for almost all circumstances where I need to hand write something Agree 100%! I still regularly write things by hand, but I already stopped using cursive during high school, like most of my classmates. (I think cursive was only mandatory in elementary school and maybe also in junior high school.)
giancarlostoro 1y ago
Lol I have a friend whose handwriting was so bad, his mom found the leading expert in teaching how to write correctly (at the time / wherever he lived at the time), that eventually broke him and he gave up. We are all very unique and different. What's funny is I gave up on cursive as long as I hit the internet in the mid 2000s because I instinctively knew it was fruitless.
- deadbabe 1y ago
  You must know how to at least read cursive, otherwise you will see a word like minimum written in cursive and think it’s just a scribble.

nathell 1y ago

I keep a handwritten diary and a handwritten blog. Not that my penmanship is particularly exquisite – in fact it’s pretty mediocre – but handwriting by its nature is a very focusing activity for me. It’s one of the life hacks for my ADHD.

spicyusername 1y ago

"Good" handwriting is just not a skill that is needed by everyone. Legible handwriting, sure, but it's not some social tragedy that kids don't learn cursive or that most adults communicate through keyboard. The kids who grow into adults who need handwriting as a skill, whether they become architects or just like to write their thoughts down, will learn to write legibly by virtue of the fact that they need the skill. Simple as.

WillAdams 1y ago
Tell that to the folks in Türkiye who have to hire scribes to transcribe their parents' letters. Not offering the class from the beginning to all is a lost opportunity, and moreover, robs children of a connection with their parents and grandparents.

WillAdams 1y ago

One person who has been hoeing this row hard is Kate Gladstone: https://handwritingrepair.info/ https://handwritingrepair.info/ Certainly, requiring that folks write things out legibly is one way to address cheating using AI.

southernplaces7 1y ago

As someone who despite all attempts at improvement has always had handwriting that looks more like what a chicken might create on paper if you inked its feet and fed it meth, good riddance. Being left-handed too, think smeared chicken scratches.

Upvoter33 1y ago

I like printing (it's clear and easy to read and write) and don't like cursive (it's less so imho) - so may cursive rest in peace

ourmandave 1y ago

Overheard a bank teller the other day saying they're teaching cursive in school again. And she makes her kids hand write thank notes for b'day gifts. Back In My Day we did cuneiform on stone tablets, and were grateful. Postage was a lot less back then too.

4gotunameagain 1y ago
This is a false equivalence. One is a tedious and deprecated way of writing, the other is a complete dependence in technology. Imagine if the power goes down. The kids won't be able to write anymore.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  A typewriter wouldn't need power.
  - 4gotunameagain 1y ago
    Okay great. One in 10.000 that has a typewriter will be able to write.
    - 1718627440 1y ago
      While they are definitely not in common use and probably have some defects, I don't think they are that seldom. Most are probably rotting in the cellar/attic.
Podrod 1y ago
Back in my day we didn't bother with this new fangled "writing" nonsense, we just remembered things.
CRConrad 1y ago
Cuneiform? Bah, fancy-pants! Soot from torches onto the stone walls of our cave was good enough for us, shoulda been good enough for you too.

bachmeier 1y ago

For me, it's the opposite. I had been steadily moving from writing by hand to writing on a computer/device, even though it's so much easier to think clearly when writing by hand, due to search, reminders, etc. Now I write as much as I want by hand, have Gemini convert it to markdown, and I have the best of both worlds.

Brajeshwar 1y ago

My Handwriting is, actually, not bad at all. During school days, we four friends used to kinda compete on many things, including Handwriting. We tried a lot, from cursive to type-like to stick, to cowboy’s rope, to queen’s drape, and all sorts. After high-school, I settled on a mix between a curvy to type-ish Handwriting, which I carry to this day. A few years back, my daughters complained that my Handwriting is “too stylish” for this day-n-age. Even their teachers had to decode why I write some letters the way I write. So, about a year back, I decided to dedicate a blank Notebook (not ruled or dotted) and I’ve been practicing a simplified version, mostly by removing the curves so they and the younger generations can read it easier. I’m taking it slow - write once a week or so. For me, it is therapeutic to feel the tactile feedback and listen to the subtle scratchy sound made when the fountain pen writes on well-made paper. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/handwriting/ https://brajeshwar.com/2025/handwriting/

gaowanliang 1y ago

I agree with the common sentiment that handwriting is a great tool for thinking. I prefer paperless studying, but I'm always looking for good tools for writing on my electronic devices. Although formal typesetting is beautiful, my long-standing habit of handwriting always makes me want to add my own notes. That's why I really like using OneNote, as it allows me to combine both typing and handwriting.

sydbarrett74 1y ago

I actually write more quickly in block print than I do cursive. My left-handedness and the various accommodations I’ve adopted might have something to do with it.

rickreynoldssf 1y ago

I was an artistic kid and essentially came up with my own distinct handwriting "font". It was beautiful. 35 years later, all typing, I've lost most of it. Now my handwriting is illegible especially because that "font" is still the way I write but I don't have the muscle memory to execute it any more. The whole use it or lose it is very real.

riffic 1y ago

Handwriting is an embodied form of thought. Its indirect utility isn't easily replaced by board-keying or tippy-tapping on a screen. there are at least one or two enlightened comments in this thread saying their memory retention improves if they write stuff down on paper. try it, it can't hurt.

precompute 1y ago

You are no longer your handwriting.

randcraw 1y ago

I'm reading "The Swerve", Stephen Greenblatt's marvelous book on the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things"), a Roman-era scroll on Epicurus' philosophy, by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417. The work was copied by hand repeatedly since 50 BCE by monks and other scripturae, despite its essential refutation of both faith and religion. In his day, Poggio, like Petrarch, was famous for the elegant beauty of his penmanship. Like the best of his craft, Poggio wrote not for speed but for beauty and timeless legibility. While I have no plans to write in latin, this has convinced me that I want to learn how to write (and print) with style. (My cursive has always been horrific.) Since reading-to-learn is best done by taking notes by hand of whatever you want to remember, I'm hoping this pursuit will not only improve my retention but also my attention to detail since it will give me time to think out more fully what I think is important and how best to say it.

NoGravitas 1y ago

In the late 1970s to early 80s, I learned a more or less standard cursive for the time. My high school, college, and even graduate school education relied a lot on "blue book" exams, short essays written in class, in cursive. Over that period, my cursive declined into an illegible scrawl simply because I was optimizing for speed. I did develop a 100wpm typing speed, but that probably wasn't a major contributing factor. Years later (early 2000s) I decided my handwriting was unacceptable (was still using it for note-taking), and taught myself cursive Italic, which I still use today. Both prettier and less fussy than the cursive I was taught, works well with fountain pens, which in turn reduces muscle cramps.

deleted 1y ago

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ErigmolCt 1y ago

The death of handwriting has been forecasted for decades, but like most "ends of" narratives, it's more evolution than extinction

TomMasz 1y ago

I've been keeping a journal since the '90s, handwritten in cursive. Other than my signature, it's the only cursive writing I do. Everything else I use block capitals. Writing by hand helps you remember things in a way that typing does not (though taking notes of any kind helps). You can have my Japanese fountain pen and mechanical pencil when you pry them from my cold, dead hand.

xrd 1y ago

When I lived in Japan my method of study was to write down all the kanji I didn't know. I don't really think you can learn a language like Japanese without writing it down. There is something magical about writing that locks information into your brain in a way very different from just reading it on a smart phone. Full disclosure: I'm making a site that allows you to read books and then practice kanji by hand and then save to flashcards for later review. Example: https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-paragraph-19/14119 https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag... Click on the "kanji" at the bottom to expand and show the kanji in the page. Click on a kanji to see the animated strokes and practice it right there by hand.

estimator7292 1y ago

While good handwriting is a skill that can be taught and learned, not everyone can learn it. Like art, some people have an innate ability, and some have no ability and never will. For me, I have poor motor control in my hands. I physically cannot make the kind of precise motions that good handwriting requires. The act of writing is painful and physically and mentally fatiguing. I can't even do basic geometric engineering drawings. My hands just can't make consistent lines. On the other hand (heh), anything I write longhand may as well be encrypted to anyone but me. Good for keeping notes private, I guess. I will say that memory retention through writing does still work for me. It seems to be a truly universal mechanism in the human brain. This is also partly an autistic thing. Lots of us have poor fine motor control, and thus terrible handwriting. It's also one of those things that doesn't seem terribly important: good handwriting is mostly a performance for the exclusive benefit of others. There's nothing intrinsically good or valuable about it and our time would be better spent learning about trains. That's not an objective thing, just how the autistic mind sorts priorities.

m463 1y ago

I wonder if slide to type has any overlap with cursive writing. I do know I unlearned a bunch of my handwriting hardwiring when I learned to use a palm pilot. It had a system called graffiti that "simplified" some letters... which ended up replacing them in my handwriting habits after a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_%28Palm_OS%29

yogeshkantule 1y ago

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