10 ms·

Penmanship

89 points by jaredgorski 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
twobitshifter 4y ago
Handwriting has also been shown to improve thinking versus typing https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/ I wonder if there is a way to produce a “keyboard” with the same effect on the mind?
aplc0r 4y ago
Eric Reinholdt has some worksheets for practicing architectural handwriting available for pay what you want: https://30x40.gumroad.com/l/VUsKl https://30x40.gumroad.com/l/VUsKl
Vladimof 4y ago
> Practicing penmanship unlocks neat handwriting. Practicing speed-writing unlocks fast handwriting....
- jaredgorski 4y ago
  Maybe you should write a web blog post nobody will read about it
  - Vladimof 4y ago
    sure?
    - jaredgorski 4y ago
      I was being tongue-in-cheek. Didn't mean to sound like a smartass. Thanks for reading!
- mrpotato 4y ago
  I've never really looked into speed-writing before now and after a quick google, it looks like you have to learn a whole new alphabet! I wonder how long it takes to learn and be productive with one of the systems.
IceMetalPunk 4y ago
Fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact: my 15-year-old nephew recently had to sign a document for some volunteer work, and he didn't know how. Apparently, schools no longer teach cursive, not even enough for kids to learn how to sign their own names for legal documents. The secretary was just like, "Yeah, we get that a lot; he can just print his name instead, that's fine." I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.
- xboxnolifes 4y ago
  It's weird that a signature is expected to be in cursive in so many places anyway. It's not like cursive is some unforgeable method whereas as printed writing looks exactly the same no matter who writes it. Hell, nobody even cares what it says, so my "signature" is just a scribble that is somewhat consistent.
- bmj 4y ago
  Given my age, I learned cursive in school, and spent my college years taking handwritten notes. My cursive was pretty terrible, much like my father's. However, he spent years working as a draftsman, and then as an estimator (before the days of personal computers), so his printing was very similar to the form described in the linked article. So, I taught myself to write in the same form. I still handwrite a lot (journalling, drafts of papers), because I find it easier to "think out loud" with a pencil in my hand.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  Part of the reason I'm so cynical about the teaching profession is that I had a string of two or three elementary teachers who insisted that cursive was the only acceptable method of handwriting in educational settings. Immediately after—and for every single other teacher or professor—no one cared whether the letters were connected or block-printed so long as they were legible. The other reason was the far-longer string of "you had better shape up now because if you don't get your act together, you'll never pass next year" and then continually passing next year with flying colors.
trey-jones 4y ago
Covid 19 is going to have introduced a generation with the worst handwriting we've seen so far. By worst I mean both incorrect and illegible, and I'm basing this observations of my daughters who were in 1st and 4th grade during the first lockdown. Admittedly, they already had what I would call "poor" handwriting. I have no problem with the idea that legible is the primary criterium for handwriting. Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Correctness was already on the way out by the time I came along anyway. There was a uniformity to my mother's and grandmothers' handwritings that was not present among my peers and me in school. The only experience that I have that says someone must continue to learn cursive is that there are lots of historically important (or at least interesting) documents that are difficult to read even for me, and my kids would have a harder time still. Reading is not the same as writing of course, so merely practice reading these types of things is probably enough. I guess it's similar to Fraktur, which is difficult to read if you've never seen it, but not that bad with just a little practice.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  > Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Fucking weird angle on that imo. It's a skill with broad application but low impact for most people. The actual techniques for good handwriting aren't taught in school anymore, so people will have to decide to value it, seek it out, and practice it themselves. You might think they should, but if they disagree it doesn't indicate that they lack self-respect. An almost infinite number of skills fit into this honestly. Kitchen knife work, drawing, whistle or sing a tune, phonetic alphabet, advanced mental arithmetic, basic carpentry, sewing, plant care, orienteering, bread baking, small engine repair, knot tying, etc etc etc etc. Anyone can learn a bunch of these to varying degrees and they'll be frequently valuable through life, and potentially contribute significantly to identity and yes self respect. Which specific ones someone ends up with is pretty much meaningless though. I mean this kindly but there's nothing special about penmanship just because you value it.
  - trey-jones 4y ago
    If I indicated that I value penmanship especially or expressed some disdain for those who don't, that was not my intention. We are on the same page.
gilleain 4y ago
Oddly enough I used to write my '0' like an 'O', until I started writing down a lot of chemical structures with numbered atoms. I had to distinguish between the 0 label and the 'O' of an oxygen. I've now adopted the 0 as the way to do it :) edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...
- ludwigschubert 4y ago
  I’m not sure how good rendering support is, but you can try explicitly specifying in Unicode that you want a zero with a "combining long solidus overlay": 0̸ (May render as 0 ̸, but should look like a single slashed zero. Wikipedia seems to think this is the way to get a slashed zero in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  I picked up the wild ass french numeral 1 from living there in my youth. I still think it's more ambiguous than the english variants but I had so much trouble with people misinterpreting mine I switched and have never been able to shake it. If you look up examples online they seem fairly reasonable. But in actual daily handwriting they are very extreme. It looks more like a stylized capital A than a number honestly.
  - gilleain 4y ago
    Oh I see, from looking at some examples it's the one without the bar on the bottom? I use the the more French/European '1' to distinguish from a lowercase 'l' (so that C1 does not look like Cl = chlorine).
    - giraffe_lady 4y ago
      Yeah the way I originally learned to do it is with no bottom bar and a short, 45º, straight serif. The french way has a lloooooong curving serif, at least as long as the downstroke. Or at least I think of it as french since that's where I ran into it. Maybe that's the norm in europe?
hospadar 4y ago
I've been really leaning into handwriting - and good penmanship in general as a fun creative activity. I started writing all my notes/journal entries/etc in cursive during covid just for something to do and I've become very enamored of the process. Often I find myself wanting to write just to do it (I imagine if I was in to needlepoint, this is the time I'd do needlepoint). I end up writing a lot of journal entries and letters to friends (it usually starts with "I want to write" and my own thoughts and doings are an easy subject) which has a nice personal and social effect. I acquired some fancy pens and sewed myself a fancy leather journal that are a pleasure to write with and that have really accelerated and sustained the habit. I wouldn't make any claims that writing has somehow made me magically smarter or better at anything else, I just find it fun to do (and I believe that pleasure is vastly more important than "productivity" so that's a win for me). It seems probable that my composition skills are better (or at least different in some hard-to-define way) due to the slower speed and non-editability of handwritten text. I rarely find myself at a loss for what sentence to write next when I'm handwriting because my thoughts are already buffered up since it takes them a bit longer to get onto the page. Another angle for me is that I recently picked up a chronic disease which has changed my energy levels a lot and many old hobbies are no longer feasible as often as they used to be. I can write even when I feel like there's a mountain of tires on fire inside my head.
yodon 4y ago
Every couple years, I'll adjust my doodling habits to a set of patterns based on a simplification of the Palmer method. This simple doodling practice has given me the best handwriting at just about every place I've worked in the past ten years. Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of: + continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a slinky) + continuous counterclockwise version of the above + continuous line mountains/valleys (draw an N that becomes an M that keeps going and has tons of peaks) Repeat. The first time trying it, most people will find it freakishly difficult to do smoothly and consistently. That's because your fine-motor eye/hand control circuits aren't tuned for these motions which are are the basis functions for all western language penmanship. If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve, not because you learned penmanship but because you enabled your fingers to do what your brain is telling them to do. This will also help you have better penmanship on a whiteboard, but in-office whiteboard writing involves more large muscles as well, so it doesn't hurt to also doodle on a whiteboard this way once you have the fine-motor controls tuned up (the fine-motor remains the most important, even on a whiteboard, so starting with pen and paper doodling will get you where you want to go fastest for either format).
- sanj 4y ago
  Can you link to a pic or vid of this? I think a visual aid would help.
  - yodon 4y ago
    Something like this [0], but don't worry about the counting, just doodle the patterns [0]https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg
    - albert_e 4y ago
      is the "italic" style slanting deliberate and required?
doingtheiroming 4y ago
Cursive is still taught with ferocity in Dutch primary schools. When done well it's pretty, enables rapid writing and note taking, and at least part of learning to write that way is to learn how to read it. Since everyone older than you will still write that way, it's useful to be able to read it.
jevgeni 4y ago
I only write by hand, when I need to quickly note down something for myself. For that purpose cursive is by *orders of magnitude* better than "typesetting by hand".
NoGravitas 4y ago
> In penmanship class, we learned a standard cursive font. I think it’s the standard cursive font, in fact. He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly. Cursive Italic handwriting is much more legible, if slightly slower. There are popular systems including Getty-Dubay Italic and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting. Both of those are fine, and should be strongly preferred to 19th-20th century cursive.
- dwringer 4y ago
  A few years ago I made a conscious effort to improve my handwriting and got a few fountain pens, to me transitioning from D'Nealian to a Spencerian variant was pretty easy and I think the latter is faster, more legible, and more comfortable to write. Although the differences are more significant IMHO if using a fountain pen.
  - slowmovintarget 4y ago
    I'd toyed with fountain pens on and off for twenty years. In 2019, I dug an old Waterman Expert out of my closet, watched some videos for how to use bottled ink and converters and off I went into the hobby. I still use traditional late 20th century American cursive (D'Nealian, I think), but all the practice with fountain pens has made my handwriting more legible than it's been in a long time. Cursive came about because writing with quill and dip pens required you keep the nib on the paper for as long as possible, lest it dry out, or the ink drop to the page. Fountain pens aren't as bad in this regard, but still do better when the ink is flowing than just waving about in the air. I happily take work notes all day long with fountain pens (today I have a Pilot Custom 74 inked up). I wouldn't want to give them up.
    - throwanem 4y ago
      Likewise! And if you've yet to try a Vanishing Point or a Decimo, you've got a pleasant surprise in store, I think - I've found them nearly perfect for work notes in particular thanks to their speed and ease of one-handed operation. (The Vanishing Point was admittedly a little too big and heavy for comfort, but a Decimo has the same nib and mechanism in a lighter, narrower body. Looks a lot more elegant, too, with the smoother rounding of the shoulder.)
traceroute66 4y ago
One of the most spectacular examples of penmanship I ever saw was sitting in a meeting with a lady who could effortlessly write phrases and paragraphs in italics... cursive italics ! It was perfect in every possible measurement. (And no this wasn't decades ago, this is 21st century). But I digress! I did also want to state that I disagree with the author's statement "Nobody writes it anymore". Clearly the author has not met many doctors or lawyers or spent much time in Europe. Cursive is very much still in use by all three of the above.
- usrn 4y ago
  They taught millennials to write in cursive. I only stopped because some of my teachers couldn't read it. It took work to write in print as effortlessly.
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    > I only stopped because some of my teachers couldn't read it. Unlikely you'd get away with that in a European school, irrespective of how bad your writing is ! Here's a French newspaper article from 2012 bemoaning the fact that Calefornians are barely taught cursive. ;-) [1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/11/28/01003-20121128ARTFIG00462-en-californie-l-ecriture-cursive-appartient-au-passe.php https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/11/28/01003-20121...
    - xboxnolifes 4y ago
      It's not like there aren't American outcries about how schooling changing decade to decade. But like everything, it's just an outcry from people who worry about the most minor of things that change.
  - zeroego 4y ago
    Just my experience, but as a millennial growing up in the US, when I was in say 3rd grade or so we had a short unit on cursive and then I never used it again. When it came time to start signing things as an adult I had forgotten almost all of it. Years later someone commented that I signed the first letter of my last name in lowercase, oops... Another tidbit someone may find interesting, going through elementary school in the early 90s I was forced to write right handed, despite being a natural lefty. This was due to the teachers religious leanings. I grew up in a major metro area as well. I can write with both hands now, but prefer right handed writing so the spirals of notebooks don't push up against my hand. Anytime I pick up a new hobby I have a weird decision to make about what hand I want to use. Still haven't figured out if I bowl left or right handed!
dfxm12 4y ago
Penmanship and calligraphy, I think, are important to develop manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination & give you a way to express your individuality. The author talks about the standard font in cursive, but I learned many ways to make the letters F, X, M and more, that I felt made my writing unique among others. I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well. Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem. I've got no architectural training, but I make my p's in two strokes (and my n's, for that matter, too).
- JackFr 4y ago
  I make my eights with two circles rather than a 'figure-eight'. I always wonder how prevalent either method is, or rather more bluntly, am I weird?
  - fluctor 4y ago
    I do this too, but trying to change it. I learned as a figure-eight, then switched to two-circles in grad school (for some reason), but now learning Morse code and copying 8's takes too long if you don't write them as one motion.
  - kayodelycaon 4y ago
    I do the two circle method of writing 8s
  - potta_coffee 4y ago
    I do this because they just look better and they're easier to read. Figure-eights start to get sloppy when I do them and quickly become unreadable.
lvl102 4y ago
I have a theory that our brain is tied to hand muscles. Handwriting is one way to exercise them. Playing an instrument is another.
foobarian 4y ago
Couple of my favorite handwriting activities are writing in architectural font letters, and some bastard "gothic" I made up. With architectural fonts, the shapes slant diagonally a bit, so letter like P the half-circle points about 20 degrees up which makes it easer to separate it from the next letter and hence more legible. The gothic font (along the lines what you get image searching "fraktur" or "gothic font") is good for some cards or signs or something, it's a bit slow to write, but because of the corners being so discontinuous it has a very distinct look to it. It doesn't really need a calligraphy pen either.
gizajob 4y ago
"I never write cursive these days. Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway. And I honestly couldn’t write it neatly anymore even if I tried. Cursive is obsolete." This is a rediculous inference - I don't do it, therefore nobody does it and it's obsolete. I for one, write in cursive every day, taking notes in a notebook/journal, and carry a fountain pen to do so. It's just such a nicer experience than writing in biro, which I refuse to do except when it's utterly unavoidable. I can appreciate I might be an outlier, but handwriting in fountain pen is a superior experience to even using an iPad, and this way I don't have to "print" my notes, they already exist in hard copy, and are resistant to bit-rot (save a deluge). I think writing by hand also engages a different part of me to the one that is engaged by typing on a computer. I'd recommend it to anyone.
- sray 4y ago
  “Nobody [does thing] anymore” is a common euphemism for “very few people [do thing] now, compared to in the past”. The author is correct about this with respect to cursive, at least in the US. I think you know this as well, as you acknowledge your outlier status.
- jaredgorski 4y ago
  For clarity, this post was more creative writing exercise than technical treatise. Thanks for reading!
jrootabega 4y ago
I was taught cursive when all kids were still being taught it, and I also switched back to block letters when we all stopped using paper. The act of writing cursive is so fluid, like written parkour, that I think when we finally master it, it bonds with the flow of our thoughts. When I write in block letters I get impatient and frustrated; my thinking writing energy is scraped out in chunks. It's like violence against the wrists. I never feel like I'm writing down my thoughts, and I can almost sense my train of thought disappearing while I'm still capturing the earlies pieces of it. Cursive lets that energy flow continuously, guided into shapes rather than forced.
SwanandK 4y ago
I have always written cursive (in Indian schools in the 70's, teachers yelled at you if you wrote block), and with a fountain pen, no less. One of my English teachers threw away my favorite ballpoint pen and gave me her fountain pen to write notes that day in school. My grandfather, who was a school teacher, insisted that we write copy of at least 1 page everyday in a 4-line ruled handwriting practice notebook. I still write all my notes in cursive with a fountain pen. According to graphology, handwriting is brain-writing and improves as you write more.
ubermonkey 4y ago
I have essentially abandoned normalized cursive in writing. My letters often connect but it's nothing a elementary martinet would recognize as Palmer or whatever. That said, I do write by hand (with a fountain pen! it's more fun, and slows me down a little which improves legibility) every day. I plan my day and take notes longhand, and often journal in the evening. I've done this all my working life, because writing seems to connect to my brain in a way that just typing doesn't, and I've increased in the pandemic because the more years I spend at the keyboard (I'm 52) the worse my handwriting seems to get. Doing it more seems like a good way to try and reverse that trend.
agentultra 4y ago
"Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway." I think the author is mistaking their self for everyone. I have rows of my bookshelf dedicated to all my journals. Written by hand. In cursive (for the most part, some technical journals I used standard print for diagrams and annotations). I use a reMarkable2 as well for ephemeral notes, bullet journalling, and reading/sharing documents from my computer. I like being able to hand-write a note and email it as plain text to myself. Process it with a script and boom, new draft post. While I sit at my desk, no computer in sight. Bonus, character recognition of my cursive writing is pretty accurate.
- bombcar 4y ago
  It’s poetic license - like saying that nobody reads or writes Latin anymore; there are small groups that still can and do; but it is no longer assumed that every college graduate can.
emehrkay 4y ago
I studied architectural engineering and hand to take a handwriting course. It is the exact opposite of cursive, youre never supposed to let your pen(cil) connect letters, not even parts of the letter (as the post describes how to write a P). you always lift up the pen and start a new point of connection because it gives you more control of the output. it was an interesting class and changed the way that I write (all caps that basically look like the image in that book) and also anyone I teach to write.
daneel_w 4y ago
I "practiced" penmanship every day for 9 years in primary school, but my handwriting is still the sad squiggly sort stereotypically associated with doctors. It really didn't change much from age 12 and onwards.
k__ 4y ago
Interesting. Where I come from, writing cursive is taught in the first few grades.
iamben 4y ago
Semi related aside - it was a good post day today. I've been after a book called "Flip The Script" for ~10 years, but being out of print the prices are crazy. It's recently been reprinted, arrived today, and it's absolutely wonderful - https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript As it says on the back "Graffiti is one of the last strongholds of highly refined penmanship." Anyway, beautiful book, highly recommended.
benazzi 4y ago
[dead]
Chirael 4y ago
I hated learning cursive as a child, and as soon as I could get away with it, switched to writing printed non-cursive letters. BUT, I'm glad I did learn it, as just an alternate way of writing, and if I ever have a child/ren will probably try to teach them if it's not being taught in their school (which it doesn't sound like is common these days).
- PopAlongKid 4y ago
  I don't recall that I hated cursive, but by the late 1960s (no consumer electronic keyboards anywhere) I switched to printing for all my middle-school homework. I also started omitting uppercase letters most of the time, especially at the beginning of sentences. I dont' recall any of my public school teachers trying to force me back to cursive, surprisingly. Nowadays, all-lower-case printed proper names of various advertised products is quite common, which was not the case at all fifty years ago.
secretsatan 4y ago
I was taught to write in cursive in France, a quick google seems to show it has it's own style. But I always remember, I moved back to the UK when I was 8, my literacy skills were far higher than my peers in my new primary school. My new teacher did not like my writing, said it was too small, took away my pen and told me start writing with a pencil. I was pretty good at cursive (so I thought), I still use it on the rare times I write but sometimes feel I need to print letters in case someone has to actually try and read it, so I pretty much just use cursive for my own notes, and it is messy as hell now. I forgot how to do all the nice capital letters they had too.
mobiuscog 4y ago
> Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem. An architectural hand-writer writes the letter “P” using two independent strokes: draw a small circle, lift the pen, and then draw a vertical line tangent to the left-side of that circle, extending downward. The resulting glyph is neat, deliberate, and replicable. What about those of us who draw the stem first, and then the loop ?
- jaredgorski 4y ago
  Oddly enough, I just realized I do both
hammock 4y ago
> Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem. An architectural hand-writer writes the letter “P” using two independent strokes: draw a small circle, lift the pen, and then draw a vertical line tangent to the left-side of that circle, extending downward. Am I the only one who draws the downstroke first, then back up and draw the loop (without raising the pen)?
- throwanem 4y ago
  No, I do that too. But having seen how it comes out when I'm writing quickly to capture a thought, I can certainly respect the intent of the architectural method. Might try it out just for fun, even if my days of block-printing everything for the sake of it are long behind me.
- robocat 4y ago
  Anyone taught cursive does the downstroke stem before the loop. https://www.google.com/search?q=cursive+p+lowercase https://www.google.com/search?q=cursive+p+lowercase
mgas 4y ago
Here's my take: The author was born in the 90s, and was in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, when keyboarding was already seen as a primary skill. His take that "nobody writes cursive anymore" is true, given that for him, "everyone" is under the age of 30. Those of us who grew up prior to personal computers and phone touchscreens being ubiquitous can scream all we want "I learned cursive and I still write it!", but it doesn't change all that much. Some of us learned and it and can't do it any longer. Some of learned it and still do it, for whatever personal or professional reason. Here's the hotter take: Skills like handwriting are (hold on to your hankerchiefs graphologists!) pseudo-sciences. They are vestiges of elitist education systems, whereby a bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence, students who paid for elite education, hired private instructors to help them become members of the "learned class". It doesn't take any special intelligence to teach or to learn, and can be used as a signal to others that you "belong" to the upper class. Fast forward to the 90s, in rural North Carolina, to a grossly underfunded school system that can't afford specialized training for teachers or students. What do we get? Over insistence on out-dated markers of education: cursive, Cotillion, woodshop for boys and home ec for girls. What don't we get? Computer science, math beyond algebra and geometry, science beyond basic earth science, and US history that stops at WWII! 1600 students with excellent penmanship, who know how to waltz, but none of us is even aware that computers can be programmed or that people get paid money to do it. And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities (I'm looking at you France), you are just as wrong as the author who claims "I don't use cursive, so nobody uses it either". NB: This is not an attack on the hobbyists, or on the aesthetics of cursive in general. Well-written cursive is marvelous. I just think we had too much emphasis on it it school, and likely it was due to our schools not having the wherewithall to teach us anything else of value.
- jaredgorski 4y ago
  For clarity, this post was more creative writing exercise than technical treatise.
  - mgas 4y ago
    That's cool. This type of thing just sparks something in my brain. I learned cursive because it was beat into me. As soon as I could abandon it I did, and for good reason too. My cursive was terrible and dyslexic, and block text was much easier to write and to read. The other stuff I wrote is secondary to your post, and just a hot take. Thanks for the stimulating article though!
ryanianian 4y ago
This focuses on writing that will be legible to others. More often I want notes that I can read without ambiguity and in a form that I can write about as fast as I can type. Not mentioned in the convo so far is shorthand commonly used by legal secretaries and journalists. Mastering this is akin to switching from Qwerty to Colemak rather than just trying to improve your qwerty. For anyone who's considering investing more in hand-written notes, look into various shorthand notations. I like Pitman but there are others depending on handedness, pen preferences, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand I'm still learning, but I now use it interspersed with my cursive script and find I can read my shorthand more easily than my cursive. (Either way: invent your own symbols for words/phrases you write a lot. Text shorthand, foreign languages, and math symbols all find their way into my notes. U for you, y for and, o for or, ∀ for all/each, etc.)
- argiopetech 4y ago
  Gregg shorthand is often contrasted with Pitman, an earlier system. The 1922 edition of Gregg's book is available on archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20131101115345/http://gregg.angelfishy.net/principles.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20131101115345/http://gregg.ange...
rightisleft 4y ago
I switched to all caps after undergrad. Whatever i had before was essentially illegible. I think the act of learning something by choice, as opposed to having it forced on me through public school, allowed me to embrace that artistic aspect of it and see handwriting as something other than purely utilitarian.
hacknewslogin 4y ago
Here's a link to a PDF of the book referenced in the article: https://archive.org/details/FrancisD.K.ChingArchitecturalGraphics6thEd2015/page/n211/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/FrancisD.K.ChingArchitecturalGra...

89 points by jaredgorski 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Handwriting has also been shown to improve thinking versus typing https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/ https://bigthink.com/the-present/handwriting-memory/ I wonder if there is a way to produce a “keyboard” with the same effect on the mind?

aplc0r 4y ago

Eric Reinholdt has some worksheets for practicing architectural handwriting available for pay what you want: https://30x40.gumroad.com/l/VUsKl https://30x40.gumroad.com/l/VUsKl

Vladimof 4y ago

> Practicing penmanship unlocks neat handwriting. Practicing speed-writing unlocks fast handwriting....

jaredgorski 4y ago
Maybe you should write a web blog post nobody will read about it
- Vladimof 4y ago
  sure?
  - jaredgorski 4y ago
    I was being tongue-in-cheek. Didn't mean to sound like a smartass. Thanks for reading!
mrpotato 4y ago
I've never really looked into speed-writing before now and after a quick google, it looks like you have to learn a whole new alphabet! I wonder how long it takes to learn and be productive with one of the systems.

IceMetalPunk 4y ago

Fun (or maybe not-so-fun) fact: my 15-year-old nephew recently had to sign a document for some volunteer work, and he didn't know how. Apparently, schools no longer teach cursive, not even enough for kids to learn how to sign their own names for legal documents. The secretary was just like, "Yeah, we get that a lot; he can just print his name instead, that's fine." I've always had shitty handwriting, and when I was in first grade, my teacher told my mom, "Don't worry about it; when he grows up, he'll probably be typing everything anyway." Turns out that was far more accurate and generalizable than we knew.

xboxnolifes 4y ago
It's weird that a signature is expected to be in cursive in so many places anyway. It's not like cursive is some unforgeable method whereas as printed writing looks exactly the same no matter who writes it. Hell, nobody even cares what it says, so my "signature" is just a scribble that is somewhat consistent.
bmj 4y ago
Given my age, I learned cursive in school, and spent my college years taking handwritten notes. My cursive was pretty terrible, much like my father's. However, he spent years working as a draftsman, and then as an estimator (before the days of personal computers), so his printing was very similar to the form described in the linked article. So, I taught myself to write in the same form. I still handwrite a lot (journalling, drafts of papers), because I find it easier to "think out loud" with a pencil in my hand.
BeFlatXIII 4y ago
Part of the reason I'm so cynical about the teaching profession is that I had a string of two or three elementary teachers who insisted that cursive was the only acceptable method of handwriting in educational settings. Immediately after—and for every single other teacher or professor—no one cared whether the letters were connected or block-printed so long as they were legible. The other reason was the far-longer string of "you had better shape up now because if you don't get your act together, you'll never pass next year" and then continually passing next year with flying colors.

trey-jones 4y ago

Covid 19 is going to have introduced a generation with the worst handwriting we've seen so far. By worst I mean both incorrect and illegible, and I'm basing this observations of my daughters who were in 1st and 4th grade during the first lockdown. Admittedly, they already had what I would call "poor" handwriting. I have no problem with the idea that legible is the primary criterium for handwriting. Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Correctness was already on the way out by the time I came along anyway. There was a uniformity to my mother's and grandmothers' handwritings that was not present among my peers and me in school. The only experience that I have that says someone must continue to learn cursive is that there are lots of historically important (or at least interesting) documents that are difficult to read even for me, and my kids would have a harder time still. Reading is not the same as writing of course, so merely practice reading these types of things is probably enough. I guess it's similar to Fraktur, which is difficult to read if you've never seen it, but not that bad with just a little practice.

giraffe_lady 4y ago
> Correctness as I and my parents and grandparents learned is really just a matter of self-respect, I think. Fucking weird angle on that imo. It's a skill with broad application but low impact for most people. The actual techniques for good handwriting aren't taught in school anymore, so people will have to decide to value it, seek it out, and practice it themselves. You might think they should, but if they disagree it doesn't indicate that they lack self-respect. An almost infinite number of skills fit into this honestly. Kitchen knife work, drawing, whistle or sing a tune, phonetic alphabet, advanced mental arithmetic, basic carpentry, sewing, plant care, orienteering, bread baking, small engine repair, knot tying, etc etc etc etc. Anyone can learn a bunch of these to varying degrees and they'll be frequently valuable through life, and potentially contribute significantly to identity and yes self respect. Which specific ones someone ends up with is pretty much meaningless though. I mean this kindly but there's nothing special about penmanship just because you value it.
- trey-jones 4y ago
  If I indicated that I value penmanship especially or expressed some disdain for those who don't, that was not my intention. We are on the same page.

gilleain 4y ago

Oddly enough I used to write my '0' like an 'O', until I started writing down a lot of chemical structures with numbered atoms. I had to distinguish between the 0 label and the 'O' of an oxygen. I've now adopted the 0 as the way to do it :) edit: Ok, so HN font as displayed does not show the bar across the 0, even though the editor does ...

ludwigschubert 4y ago
I’m not sure how good rendering support is, but you can try explicitly specifying in Unicode that you want a zero with a "combining long solidus overlay": 0̸ (May render as 0 ̸, but should look like a single slashed zero. Wikipedia seems to think this is the way to get a slashed zero in Unicode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashed_zero)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
giraffe_lady 4y ago
I picked up the wild ass french numeral 1 from living there in my youth. I still think it's more ambiguous than the english variants but I had so much trouble with people misinterpreting mine I switched and have never been able to shake it. If you look up examples online they seem fairly reasonable. But in actual daily handwriting they are very extreme. It looks more like a stylized capital A than a number honestly.
- gilleain 4y ago
  Oh I see, from looking at some examples it's the one without the bar on the bottom? I use the the more French/European '1' to distinguish from a lowercase 'l' (so that C1 does not look like Cl = chlorine).
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Yeah the way I originally learned to do it is with no bottom bar and a short, 45º, straight serif. The french way has a lloooooong curving serif, at least as long as the downstroke. Or at least I think of it as french since that's where I ran into it. Maybe that's the norm in europe?

hospadar 4y ago

I've been really leaning into handwriting - and good penmanship in general as a fun creative activity. I started writing all my notes/journal entries/etc in cursive during covid just for something to do and I've become very enamored of the process. Often I find myself wanting to write just to do it (I imagine if I was in to needlepoint, this is the time I'd do needlepoint). I end up writing a lot of journal entries and letters to friends (it usually starts with "I want to write" and my own thoughts and doings are an easy subject) which has a nice personal and social effect. I acquired some fancy pens and sewed myself a fancy leather journal that are a pleasure to write with and that have really accelerated and sustained the habit. I wouldn't make any claims that writing has somehow made me magically smarter or better at anything else, I just find it fun to do (and I believe that pleasure is vastly more important than "productivity" so that's a win for me). It seems probable that my composition skills are better (or at least different in some hard-to-define way) due to the slower speed and non-editability of handwritten text. I rarely find myself at a loss for what sentence to write next when I'm handwriting because my thoughts are already buffered up since it takes them a bit longer to get onto the page. Another angle for me is that I recently picked up a chronic disease which has changed my energy levels a lot and many old hobbies are no longer feasible as often as they used to be. I can write even when I feel like there's a mountain of tires on fire inside my head.

yodon 4y ago

Every couple years, I'll adjust my doodling habits to a set of patterns based on a simplification of the Palmer method. This simple doodling practice has given me the best handwriting at just about every place I've worked in the past ten years. Draw two horizontal lines about half an inch apart and in the space between them doodle one of: + continuous clockwise stream of overlapping circles (imagine you flattened a slinky) + continuous counterclockwise version of the above + continuous line mountains/valleys (draw an N that becomes an M that keeps going and has tons of peaks) Repeat. The first time trying it, most people will find it freakishly difficult to do smoothly and consistently. That's because your fine-motor eye/hand control circuits aren't tuned for these motions which are are the basis functions for all western language penmanship. If you start doodling these figures when you're bored on zoom, your penmanship will magically improve, not because you learned penmanship but because you enabled your fingers to do what your brain is telling them to do. This will also help you have better penmanship on a whiteboard, but in-office whiteboard writing involves more large muscles as well, so it doesn't hurt to also doodle on a whiteboard this way once you have the fine-motor controls tuned up (the fine-motor remains the most important, even on a whiteboard, so starting with pen and paper doodling will get you where you want to go fastest for either format).

sanj 4y ago
Can you link to a pic or vid of this? I think a visual aid would help.
- yodon 4y ago
  Something like this [0], but don't worry about the counting, just doodle the patterns [0]https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg https://fcmdsc.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/exercises.jpg
  - albert_e 4y ago
    is the "italic" style slanting deliberate and required?

doingtheiroming 4y ago

Cursive is still taught with ferocity in Dutch primary schools. When done well it's pretty, enables rapid writing and note taking, and at least part of learning to write that way is to learn how to read it. Since everyone older than you will still write that way, it's useful to be able to read it.

jevgeni 4y ago

I only write by hand, when I need to quickly note down something for myself. For that purpose cursive is by *orders of magnitude* better than "typesetting by hand".

NoGravitas 4y ago

> In penmanship class, we learned a standard cursive font. I think it’s the standard cursive font, in fact. He's wrong that there's a standard cursive. Different countries and different centuries have used a variety of different cursives. Most Americans who were taught cursive in school learned either Zaner-Bloser or D'Nealian, which both derive from Palmer. Both of them are terrible. They have indistinct letter shapes that degrade horribly when written quickly. Cursive Italic handwriting is much more legible, if slightly slower. There are popular systems including Getty-Dubay Italic and Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting. Both of those are fine, and should be strongly preferred to 19th-20th century cursive.

dwringer 4y ago
A few years ago I made a conscious effort to improve my handwriting and got a few fountain pens, to me transitioning from D'Nealian to a Spencerian variant was pretty easy and I think the latter is faster, more legible, and more comfortable to write. Although the differences are more significant IMHO if using a fountain pen.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  I'd toyed with fountain pens on and off for twenty years. In 2019, I dug an old Waterman Expert out of my closet, watched some videos for how to use bottled ink and converters and off I went into the hobby. I still use traditional late 20th century American cursive (D'Nealian, I think), but all the practice with fountain pens has made my handwriting more legible than it's been in a long time. Cursive came about because writing with quill and dip pens required you keep the nib on the paper for as long as possible, lest it dry out, or the ink drop to the page. Fountain pens aren't as bad in this regard, but still do better when the ink is flowing than just waving about in the air. I happily take work notes all day long with fountain pens (today I have a Pilot Custom 74 inked up). I wouldn't want to give them up.
  - throwanem 4y ago
    Likewise! And if you've yet to try a Vanishing Point or a Decimo, you've got a pleasant surprise in store, I think - I've found them nearly perfect for work notes in particular thanks to their speed and ease of one-handed operation. (The Vanishing Point was admittedly a little too big and heavy for comfort, but a Decimo has the same nib and mechanism in a lighter, narrower body. Looks a lot more elegant, too, with the smoother rounding of the shoulder.)

traceroute66 4y ago

One of the most spectacular examples of penmanship I ever saw was sitting in a meeting with a lady who could effortlessly write phrases and paragraphs in italics... cursive italics ! It was perfect in every possible measurement. (And no this wasn't decades ago, this is 21st century). But I digress! I did also want to state that I disagree with the author's statement "Nobody writes it anymore". Clearly the author has not met many doctors or lawyers or spent much time in Europe. Cursive is very much still in use by all three of the above.

usrn 4y ago
They taught millennials to write in cursive. I only stopped because some of my teachers couldn't read it. It took work to write in print as effortlessly.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  > I only stopped because some of my teachers couldn't read it. Unlikely you'd get away with that in a European school, irrespective of how bad your writing is ! Here's a French newspaper article from 2012 bemoaning the fact that Calefornians are barely taught cursive. ;-) [1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/11/28/01003-20121128ARTFIG00462-en-californie-l-ecriture-cursive-appartient-au-passe.php https://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2012/11/28/01003-20121...
  - xboxnolifes 4y ago
    It's not like there aren't American outcries about how schooling changing decade to decade. But like everything, it's just an outcry from people who worry about the most minor of things that change.
- zeroego 4y ago
  Just my experience, but as a millennial growing up in the US, when I was in say 3rd grade or so we had a short unit on cursive and then I never used it again. When it came time to start signing things as an adult I had forgotten almost all of it. Years later someone commented that I signed the first letter of my last name in lowercase, oops... Another tidbit someone may find interesting, going through elementary school in the early 90s I was forced to write right handed, despite being a natural lefty. This was due to the teachers religious leanings. I grew up in a major metro area as well. I can write with both hands now, but prefer right handed writing so the spirals of notebooks don't push up against my hand. Anytime I pick up a new hobby I have a weird decision to make about what hand I want to use. Still haven't figured out if I bowl left or right handed!

dfxm12 4y ago

Penmanship and calligraphy, I think, are important to develop manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination & give you a way to express your individuality. The author talks about the standard font in cursive, but I learned many ways to make the letters F, X, M and more, that I felt made my writing unique among others. I also don't think we've totally moved away from wet signatures, so they do have practical use as well. Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem. I've got no architectural training, but I make my p's in two strokes (and my n's, for that matter, too).

JackFr 4y ago
I make my eights with two circles rather than a 'figure-eight'. I always wonder how prevalent either method is, or rather more bluntly, am I weird?
- fluctor 4y ago
  I do this too, but trying to change it. I learned as a figure-eight, then switched to two-circles in grad school (for some reason), but now learning Morse code and copying 8's takes too long if you don't write them as one motion.
- kayodelycaon 4y ago
  I do the two circle method of writing 8s
- potta_coffee 4y ago
  I do this because they just look better and they're easier to read. Figure-eights start to get sloppy when I do them and quickly become unreadable.

lvl102 4y ago

I have a theory that our brain is tied to hand muscles. Handwriting is one way to exercise them. Playing an instrument is another.

foobarian 4y ago

Couple of my favorite handwriting activities are writing in architectural font letters, and some bastard "gothic" I made up. With architectural fonts, the shapes slant diagonally a bit, so letter like P the half-circle points about 20 degrees up which makes it easer to separate it from the next letter and hence more legible. The gothic font (along the lines what you get image searching "fraktur" or "gothic font") is good for some cards or signs or something, it's a bit slow to write, but because of the corners being so discontinuous it has a very distinct look to it. It doesn't really need a calligraphy pen either.

gizajob 4y ago

"I never write cursive these days. Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway. And I honestly couldn’t write it neatly anymore even if I tried. Cursive is obsolete." This is a rediculous inference - I don't do it, therefore nobody does it and it's obsolete. I for one, write in cursive every day, taking notes in a notebook/journal, and carry a fountain pen to do so. It's just such a nicer experience than writing in biro, which I refuse to do except when it's utterly unavoidable. I can appreciate I might be an outlier, but handwriting in fountain pen is a superior experience to even using an iPad, and this way I don't have to "print" my notes, they already exist in hard copy, and are resistant to bit-rot (save a deluge). I think writing by hand also engages a different part of me to the one that is engaged by typing on a computer. I'd recommend it to anyone.

sray 4y ago
“Nobody [does thing] anymore” is a common euphemism for “very few people [do thing] now, compared to in the past”. The author is correct about this with respect to cursive, at least in the US. I think you know this as well, as you acknowledge your outlier status.
jaredgorski 4y ago
For clarity, this post was more creative writing exercise than technical treatise. Thanks for reading!

jrootabega 4y ago

I was taught cursive when all kids were still being taught it, and I also switched back to block letters when we all stopped using paper. The act of writing cursive is so fluid, like written parkour, that I think when we finally master it, it bonds with the flow of our thoughts. When I write in block letters I get impatient and frustrated; my thinking writing energy is scraped out in chunks. It's like violence against the wrists. I never feel like I'm writing down my thoughts, and I can almost sense my train of thought disappearing while I'm still capturing the earlies pieces of it. Cursive lets that energy flow continuously, guided into shapes rather than forced.

SwanandK 4y ago

I have always written cursive (in Indian schools in the 70's, teachers yelled at you if you wrote block), and with a fountain pen, no less. One of my English teachers threw away my favorite ballpoint pen and gave me her fountain pen to write notes that day in school. My grandfather, who was a school teacher, insisted that we write copy of at least 1 page everyday in a 4-line ruled handwriting practice notebook. I still write all my notes in cursive with a fountain pen. According to graphology, handwriting is brain-writing and improves as you write more.

ubermonkey 4y ago

I have essentially abandoned normalized cursive in writing. My letters often connect but it's nothing a elementary martinet would recognize as Palmer or whatever. That said, I do write by hand (with a fountain pen! it's more fun, and slows me down a little which improves legibility) every day. I plan my day and take notes longhand, and often journal in the evening. I've done this all my working life, because writing seems to connect to my brain in a way that just typing doesn't, and I've increased in the pandemic because the more years I spend at the keyboard (I'm 52) the worse my handwriting seems to get. Doing it more seems like a good way to try and reverse that trend.

agentultra 4y ago

"Nobody writes it anymore. Nobody can read it, anyway." I think the author is mistaking their self for everyone. I have rows of my bookshelf dedicated to all my journals. Written by hand. In cursive (for the most part, some technical journals I used standard print for diagrams and annotations). I use a reMarkable2 as well for ephemeral notes, bullet journalling, and reading/sharing documents from my computer. I like being able to hand-write a note and email it as plain text to myself. Process it with a script and boom, new draft post. While I sit at my desk, no computer in sight. Bonus, character recognition of my cursive writing is pretty accurate.

bombcar 4y ago
It’s poetic license - like saying that nobody reads or writes Latin anymore; there are small groups that still can and do; but it is no longer assumed that every college graduate can.

emehrkay 4y ago

I studied architectural engineering and hand to take a handwriting course. It is the exact opposite of cursive, youre never supposed to let your pen(cil) connect letters, not even parts of the letter (as the post describes how to write a P). you always lift up the pen and start a new point of connection because it gives you more control of the output. it was an interesting class and changed the way that I write (all caps that basically look like the image in that book) and also anyone I teach to write.

daneel_w 4y ago

I "practiced" penmanship every day for 9 years in primary school, but my handwriting is still the sad squiggly sort stereotypically associated with doctors. It really didn't change much from age 12 and onwards.

k__ 4y ago

Interesting. Where I come from, writing cursive is taught in the first few grades.

iamben 4y ago

Semi related aside - it was a good post day today. I've been after a book called "Flip The Script" for ~10 years, but being out of print the prices are crazy. It's recently been reprinted, arrived today, and it's absolutely wonderful - https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript https://www.handselecta.com/handselecta-flipthescript As it says on the back "Graffiti is one of the last strongholds of highly refined penmanship." Anyway, beautiful book, highly recommended.

benazzi 4y ago

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Chirael 4y ago

I hated learning cursive as a child, and as soon as I could get away with it, switched to writing printed non-cursive letters. BUT, I'm glad I did learn it, as just an alternate way of writing, and if I ever have a child/ren will probably try to teach them if it's not being taught in their school (which it doesn't sound like is common these days).

PopAlongKid 4y ago
I don't recall that I hated cursive, but by the late 1960s (no consumer electronic keyboards anywhere) I switched to printing for all my middle-school homework. I also started omitting uppercase letters most of the time, especially at the beginning of sentences. I dont' recall any of my public school teachers trying to force me back to cursive, surprisingly. Nowadays, all-lower-case printed proper names of various advertised products is quite common, which was not the case at all fifty years ago.

secretsatan 4y ago

I was taught to write in cursive in France, a quick google seems to show it has it's own style. But I always remember, I moved back to the UK when I was 8, my literacy skills were far higher than my peers in my new primary school. My new teacher did not like my writing, said it was too small, took away my pen and told me start writing with a pencil. I was pretty good at cursive (so I thought), I still use it on the rare times I write but sometimes feel I need to print letters in case someone has to actually try and read it, so I pretty much just use cursive for my own notes, and it is messy as hell now. I forgot how to do all the nice capital letters they had too.

mobiuscog 4y ago

> Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem. An architectural hand-writer writes the letter “P” using two independent strokes: draw a small circle, lift the pen, and then draw a vertical line tangent to the left-side of that circle, extending downward. The resulting glyph is neat, deliberate, and replicable. What about those of us who draw the stem first, and then the loop ?

jaredgorski 4y ago
Oddly enough, I just realized I do both

hammock 4y ago

> Most non-architectural hand-writers write the letter “P” with a single stroke: draw a small loop and extend the side downward to form the stem. An architectural hand-writer writes the letter “P” using two independent strokes: draw a small circle, lift the pen, and then draw a vertical line tangent to the left-side of that circle, extending downward. Am I the only one who draws the downstroke first, then back up and draw the loop (without raising the pen)?

throwanem 4y ago
No, I do that too. But having seen how it comes out when I'm writing quickly to capture a thought, I can certainly respect the intent of the architectural method. Might try it out just for fun, even if my days of block-printing everything for the sake of it are long behind me.
robocat 4y ago
Anyone taught cursive does the downstroke stem before the loop. https://www.google.com/search?q=cursive+p+lowercase https://www.google.com/search?q=cursive+p+lowercase

mgas 4y ago

Here's my take: The author was born in the 90s, and was in elementary and middle school in the 2000s, when keyboarding was already seen as a primary skill. His take that "nobody writes cursive anymore" is true, given that for him, "everyone" is under the age of 30. Those of us who grew up prior to personal computers and phone touchscreens being ubiquitous can scream all we want "I learned cursive and I still write it!", but it doesn't change all that much. Some of us learned and it and can't do it any longer. Some of learned it and still do it, for whatever personal or professional reason. Here's the hotter take: Skills like handwriting are (hold on to your hankerchiefs graphologists!) pseudo-sciences. They are vestiges of elitist education systems, whereby a bunch of rich, but likely average-intelligence, students who paid for elite education, hired private instructors to help them become members of the "learned class". It doesn't take any special intelligence to teach or to learn, and can be used as a signal to others that you "belong" to the upper class. Fast forward to the 90s, in rural North Carolina, to a grossly underfunded school system that can't afford specialized training for teachers or students. What do we get? Over insistence on out-dated markers of education: cursive, Cotillion, woodshop for boys and home ec for girls. What don't we get? Computer science, math beyond algebra and geometry, science beyond basic earth science, and US history that stops at WWII! 1600 students with excellent penmanship, who know how to waltz, but none of us is even aware that computers can be programmed or that people get paid money to do it. And to the commenters claiming graphology is a thing or that it is in any way useful in sorting candidates for job opportunities (I'm looking at you France), you are just as wrong as the author who claims "I don't use cursive, so nobody uses it either". NB: This is not an attack on the hobbyists, or on the aesthetics of cursive in general. Well-written cursive is marvelous. I just think we had too much emphasis on it it school, and likely it was due to our schools not having the wherewithall to teach us anything else of value.

jaredgorski 4y ago
For clarity, this post was more creative writing exercise than technical treatise.
- mgas 4y ago
  That's cool. This type of thing just sparks something in my brain. I learned cursive because it was beat into me. As soon as I could abandon it I did, and for good reason too. My cursive was terrible and dyslexic, and block text was much easier to write and to read. The other stuff I wrote is secondary to your post, and just a hot take. Thanks for the stimulating article though!

ryanianian 4y ago

This focuses on writing that will be legible to others. More often I want notes that I can read without ambiguity and in a form that I can write about as fast as I can type. Not mentioned in the convo so far is shorthand commonly used by legal secretaries and journalists. Mastering this is akin to switching from Qwerty to Colemak rather than just trying to improve your qwerty. For anyone who's considering investing more in hand-written notes, look into various shorthand notations. I like Pitman but there are others depending on handedness, pen preferences, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitman_shorthand I'm still learning, but I now use it interspersed with my cursive script and find I can read my shorthand more easily than my cursive. (Either way: invent your own symbols for words/phrases you write a lot. Text shorthand, foreign languages, and math symbols all find their way into my notes. U for you, y for and, o for or, ∀ for all/each, etc.)

argiopetech 4y ago
Gregg shorthand is often contrasted with Pitman, an earlier system. The 1922 edition of Gregg's book is available on archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20131101115345/http://gregg.angelfishy.net/principles.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20131101115345/http://gregg.ange...

rightisleft 4y ago

I switched to all caps after undergrad. Whatever i had before was essentially illegible. I think the act of learning something by choice, as opposed to having it forced on me through public school, allowed me to embrace that artistic aspect of it and see handwriting as something other than purely utilitarian.

hacknewslogin 4y ago

Here's a link to a PDF of the book referenced in the article: https://archive.org/details/FrancisD.K.ChingArchitecturalGraphics6thEd2015/page/n211/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/FrancisD.K.ChingArchitecturalGra...