3 ms·

Can anyone help me understand why the writings of great authors, theorists of past are barely legible. More examples like, War and Peace[1], or Lord of the Ring

Can anyone help me understand why the writings of great authors, theorists of past are barely legible. More examples like, War and Peace[1], or Lord of the Rings[2]. I can barely comprehend a word, let alone the whole text. [1]:http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Tolstoy_-_War_and_Peace_-_ninth_draft.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Tolstoy_-... [2]:http://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tolkien-manuscript.jpg http://biblioklept.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/tolkien-manus...

tinco 13y ago
I think it's because they write mostly for themselves and mostly as fast as they were thinking of things. It's better to have to interpret something for your publicist, then to lose a thought you had while focusing on writing. There's some notable exceptions by the way, you can't have a post on academic handwriting without mentioning Dijkstra: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF Funny, I hadn't recently read the article I linked before posting it, and in the first paragraph he actually explains why he writes so prettily. Although the context is programming notation: "[..] the underlying idea of which is that, even if you have only 60 readers, it pays to spend an hour if by doing so you can save your average reader a minute."
RamiK 13y ago
Because those writers you've mentioned drafted on paper with the purpose of releasing to print.
lucozade 13y ago
It's an established fact that all highly intelligent people have bad handwriting. I made a note of the reference for this but, unfortunately, I can't read what it says.
arnsholt 13y ago
An important factor is simply time. Handwriting styles change over time, and the cursive styles used in the past are especially hard to read for modern readers, since as we write less and less by hand, cursive writing (which is optimised for speed of writing) is rapidly falling out of use. And since we're not used to them, they're hard to read.

tinco 13y ago

I think it's because they write mostly for themselves and mostly as fast as they were thinking of things. It's better to have to interpret something for your publicist, then to lose a thought you had while focusing on writing. There's some notable exceptions by the way, you can't have a post on academic handwriting without mentioning Dijkstra: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF Funny, I hadn't recently read the article I linked before posting it, and in the first paragraph he actually explains why he writes so prettily. Although the context is programming notation: "[..] the underlying idea of which is that, even if you have only 60 readers, it pays to spend an hour if by doing so you can save your average reader a minute."

RamiK 13y ago

Because those writers you've mentioned drafted on paper with the purpose of releasing to print.

lucozade 13y ago

It's an established fact that all highly intelligent people have bad handwriting. I made a note of the reference for this but, unfortunately, I can't read what it says.

arnsholt 13y ago

An important factor is simply time. Handwriting styles change over time, and the cursive styles used in the past are especially hard to read for modern readers, since as we write less and less by hand, cursive writing (which is optimised for speed of writing) is rapidly falling out of use. And since we're not used to them, they're hard to read.