6 ms·

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I thi

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary. I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical. It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.

metalcrow 3mo ago
What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?
- cataphract 3mo ago
  What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?
  - encomiast 3mo ago
    When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.
  - Arainach 3mo ago
    No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.
    - bloqs 3mo ago
      This is not true outside of the United States
      - Arainach 3mo ago
        Where are you thinking? Everyone I know who speaks a language written with Latin characters doesn't use cursive. I know very little about other character sets - I believe nearly all Arabic is cursive for instance - but this has been my experience across countries. As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.
        maigret 3mo ago
        Most French people write cursive.
  - Larrikin 3mo ago
    In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything. In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.
- throwaway152321 3mo ago
  When each word is a smooth continuous line I can write faster and with less effort. The short up and down motions of printed letters tires out my hand.
- epihelix 3mo ago
  What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy. Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(
  - recursive 3mo ago
    I was taught cursive in elementary school along with everyone else. It was always slower than normal block letters for me. I always kind of resented having to learn it.
- jdshaffer 3mo ago
  The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice. The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write. BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot. (Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)
encomiast 3mo ago
> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?
- shagie 3mo ago
  It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them. ... And there are jobs that use those skills. Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/ My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.
  - robcohen 3mo ago
    So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?
    - tazard 3mo ago
      Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example. What is the downside of learning cursive?
      - recursive 3mo ago
        I learned cursive in elementary school. For me the downside is that it's a waste of time and attention that could be spent on something else.
        jyounker 3mo ago
        Developing fine motor control for cursive is actually improving cerebellar function. It turns out that the cerebellum is a general "organ" for fine control and synchronization of neural function across the brain. It is implicated in: * Reading and responding to other people's emotions. * Emotional regulation. * Generalized sequencing. * Musical ability. * Counting. * Following patterns. While you may see it as a waste, you may very well have benefited in significant ways from learning it at a young age.
subygan 3mo ago
i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy. i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written. and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged. i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.
- techjamie 3mo ago
  I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s. These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.
vector_spaces 3mo ago
I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class. That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here
- WalterBright 3mo ago
  How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?
  - vector_spaces 3mo ago
    There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters. But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly. To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it. More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.
- customguy 3mo ago
  Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.
zdragnar 3mo ago
I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper. I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.

metalcrow 3mo ago

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

cataphract 3mo ago
What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?
- encomiast 3mo ago
  When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.
- Arainach 3mo ago
  No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.
  - bloqs 3mo ago
    This is not true outside of the United States
    - Arainach 3mo ago
      Where are you thinking? Everyone I know who speaks a language written with Latin characters doesn't use cursive. I know very little about other character sets - I believe nearly all Arabic is cursive for instance - but this has been my experience across countries. As a specific example, all of my friends in Germany - whether born there, in Eastern Europe, or whatever - use print letters, not cursive.
      - maigret 3mo ago
        Most French people write cursive.
- Larrikin 3mo ago
  In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything. In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.
throwaway152321 3mo ago
When each word is a smooth continuous line I can write faster and with less effort. The short up and down motions of printed letters tires out my hand.
epihelix 3mo ago
What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy. Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(
- recursive 3mo ago
  I was taught cursive in elementary school along with everyone else. It was always slower than normal block letters for me. I always kind of resented having to learn it.
jdshaffer 3mo ago
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice. The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write. BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot. (Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)

encomiast 3mo ago

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

shagie 3mo ago
It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them. ... And there are jobs that use those skills. Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/ My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.
- robcohen 3mo ago
  So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?
  - tazard 3mo ago
    Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example. What is the downside of learning cursive?
    - recursive 3mo ago
      I learned cursive in elementary school. For me the downside is that it's a waste of time and attention that could be spent on something else.
      - jyounker 3mo ago
        Developing fine motor control for cursive is actually improving cerebellar function. It turns out that the cerebellum is a general "organ" for fine control and synchronization of neural function across the brain. It is implicated in: * Reading and responding to other people's emotions. * Emotional regulation. * Generalized sequencing. * Musical ability. * Counting. * Following patterns. While you may see it as a waste, you may very well have benefited in significant ways from learning it at a young age.

subygan 3mo ago

i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy. i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written. and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged. i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.

techjamie 3mo ago
I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s. These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.

vector_spaces 3mo ago

I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class. That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here

WalterBright 3mo ago
How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?
- vector_spaces 3mo ago
  There was an enormous volume of material that I never understood in high school because at the time I either didn't care or other things seemed more important -- my mom was dying, for starters. But just having exposure to that material planted it in my mind and, in many cases, I revisited those topics later as an adult and learned them properly. To be clear, I am not advocating for doing away with testing or schooling altogether. I am only pushing back on the idea that a 16 year old who doesn't care about cursive or calculus or Chaucer or whatever today won't ever care about those topics unless we mandate he pass an exam or course on it. More broadly, my point is that there is a cost to "forcing them" as the grandparent advocates with regard to learning cursive. The moment you "force them" you also guarantee that some people won't graduate because of that extra requirement. There are other ways to enrich people's lives without force feeding, e.g., mention it and devote a question on an exam to it.
customguy 3mo ago
Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.

zdragnar 3mo ago

I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper. I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.