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.
Cursive as taught in schools today is useless at best and dangerous for your health at worst.
The cursive that made the world run between 1850 and 1925 was called business penmanship and it lets you write at 40 words per minute for 14 hours every day for decades on end without pain or injury.
>following lessons will make of you a good penman, if you follow instructions implicitly. The average time to acquire such a handwriting is from four to six months, practicing an hour or so a day. Practice regularly every day, if you want the best results. Two practice periods of thirty minutes each are better than one period of sixty minutes.
After two months I can comfortably write at 20 words per minute for four hours without stopping.
I was sternly told by a nun that, with my handwriting, I would never get a job.
The only thing in my entire career I've ever been asked to write something in cursive is my signature, which I reduced to a squiggle for efficiency reasons. (The history of signatures is fascinating, BTW. Illiterate Charlemagne "signed" documents with a single horizontal stroke of the pen, inside of a premade 99%-completed "signature".)
Isn't handwriting just the activity of writing by hand as opposed to typing a keyboard? Whether it's cursive or block/print, as long as it's written by hand it still has benefits. Many studies link handwriting to better brain connectivity and learning compared to typing.
The act of writing is the one that brings the benefits, not the looks of the result. I don't see a drawback to learning to write by hand even if nobody will ever read it or if it doesn't look good.
Teaching cursive seems like a weirdly American obsession, because during school in Australia it just...wasn't a thing. Like teachers did take you through what "running writing" was, but we were never required to actually master it the accomplishments level was just "can you write? Good let's move on to how sentences are structured".
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.
I'd argue that if cursive was useful, it wouldn't be dying. It did used to be useful, but there's plenty of other skills that were too, died long ago and rightly are not taught to everyone anymore.
I don't remember being punished for bad handwriting, but I know I got chided for it a lot. And I know we spent a lot of time on it. It definitely sucked, at every level of the experience.
I also find it odd that people have some off assertions on why we learn cursive. I'm sure there is a multitude of reasons, but I find it hard to think it has any strong advantage over other ways.
I do get a kick out of my kids being baffled that I write in cursive. At this point, I think I get as much fun out of that as I do anything else.
Almost the same here. Could read everything fluently before school, or even kindergarden, which I've skipped, because 'too playful'.
Whatever, I didn't learn it by reading cursive, but reading printed stuff. So that never really made sense to me, though depending on who is writing, it can look nice.
So I do a few fast strokes of lines and/or curves or dots to form a letter, and hop to the next. I wasn't slower than the cursive writers. Which works better with ball pens, than fountain pens, btw. Cursive is a fountain pen thing, IMO.
But my writing doesn't look bad at all. Just block letters leaning slightly to the right. I can even do "DIN-Schrift" like in technical drawings freehanded, slower though.
> 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.)
There are ancient (e.g., Roman) and medieval cursive scripts, so I'm not sure what you mean by it being a couple hundred years old. Unless you just mean the current script we use now? (As for whether it should still be taught or not I'm impartial.)
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.
As a left handed person, fountain pens are basically a no-go. What actually helped improve my handwriting was not doing cursive, but writing each letter individually, which forces me to pause between each letter. Still using the lower case forms (though I did try all caps for a while), but just forcing myself to slow down. Still have problems with 9 vs 4 though
> 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.
In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).
As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.
I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.
I agree. The thing with fountain pens that many sibling commenters miss is that they run the ink so much more smoothly, which means you can use much less force when guiding the pen. It's not just pining for the old ways but that the writing feels completely different with a different class of tool.
No, fountain pens have a "cool" factor and can be made for decorative stuff, but that's it.
Sure the super cheap bic pens that come in boxes of 100 aren't great, but that's because they're cheap (besides being inexpensive). Something like those G2 gel pens that are also available everywhere for not very much (fairly inexpensive, but not pejorative-cheap) these days work just fine.
I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, but those smeared, so I eventually switched to pilot v5 or muji pens.
But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.
I we had the same here in the Netherlands. Never helped me one bit. I even had to go to after-school handwriting coaching. My handwriting is still horrible.
I think my main problem is that handwriting is so slow. I get impatient and rush it turning it into a mess. Reading it is also slow, even when written by someone with good handwriting it's a PITA to read cursive. I hope it dies out sooner rather than later.
As I am mainly left-handed, I learned to like writing with a nice wooden pencil, like Faber-Castell, and a sharpener. Then, if it is something serious and if it is possible to use a felt pen, I use Staedtler or Faber-Castell felt pens in different sizes. I hate ballpoint pens.
> Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).
I love fountain pens. Well-made ones are elegant and feel good to write with. I love the look and feel of certain kinds of permanent black and blue-black ink that you can’t find for ballpoint.
They were extremely useful in dealing with hand cramps at a time I was doing a lot of mathy stuff for work (tens of pages of derivation a day for a while). They retrained my hand to not push on the page so hard and not grip the pen so hard. That eliminated most of the problem.
That said, they have had no effect on my handwriting. Which was bad-to-mediocre before and remains bad-to-mediocre now.
As an alternative, for people who dislike fountain pens -or stained hands-, I'd suggest a Tombow Fudenosuke marker pen. There're two variants, with a softer or harder tip, and there's a pack with both so it's easy to try both. The softer one produces a heavier result.
There are other brands, of course; Pentel has a similar marker and some other smaller brands too. I just think the Tombow is very nice and easy enough to find.
These pens are sort of the modern version of the Japanese calligraphy brush, so they're nice for writing but much more practical.
Any tips for lefties? I find in very difficult to avoid complete smudgification of everything I write with a fountain pen, since it takes so much longer for the ink to dry.
I disagree about the thicker paper part. It's the "sizing" of the paper that's important, that's the preparation of the paper that makes it more or less absorbent. Moleskine/Lechturn and similar notebooks have a sizing on the paper that makes it less absorbent and easier for a fountain pen to glide over. Printer paper is way more absorbent and creates more drag causing you to use more effort. Source: I use a cheapish but decent Lamy fountain pen on both kinds of paper, and I write cursive and shorthand for speed, but print for long term legibility.
Went through school in France too, was forced to use a fountain pen too, had my hands soaked in ink at the end of every day too. Except it never went away, and my handwriting is still awful.
Years of every teacher I had writing in red at the top of every test or homework "Applique-toi!", as if this injunction was all that was required for me to finally realize I had been holding the pen wrong for over 15 years. Fuck that, I'm glad it's over.
I will gladly celebrate the death of handwriting when it comes, that we may focus on more important matters and stop judging books by their covers.
I grade my university students' work with Herbin Violette Pensée ink and a Platinum Plaisir fountain pen. The symmetry of using a student's ink to grade students' work tickles me.
For other people who grade big stacks of papers, nota bene: fountain pens with a soft nib are a lifesaver! They require almost no writing pressure, which is so much more comfortable. You also get to use fun ink colors.
In Poland you started with a pencil, but as you got more proficient you could switch to a fountain pen.
I never did.
As a leftie I was forced to do exercised designed for "normal" children, that were just painful. Thinking about using "normal" scissors with my left hand makes me sad and angry almost 40 years later. But I do enjoy a nice fountain pen and a thick paper - it's relaxing.
I understand liking fountain pens for their "old school steam punk" factor, but I think recommending them to improve your cursive is a little nutty.
I love writing by hand, and for years I was looking for the ideal instrument. Frankly, all the big "pen enthusiast" websites gave awful advice IMO. I essentially wanted something with the tactile feel of a good pencil, but with the permanence of ink. Finally I stumbled across fine line markers at an arts supply store (I like the prismacolor ones but I'm sure there are others). They come in various widths (some as thin as a thin mechanical pencil), and they don't smudge, bleed, or need to be refilled. They have a great tactile feel and an extremely sharp, crisp line. I'll never understand why pen forums never seem to recommend them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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 >_<.
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.
"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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[+] [-] cyocum|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] noosphr|6 months ago|reply
The cursive that made the world run between 1850 and 1925 was called business penmanship and it lets you write at 40 words per minute for 14 hours every day for decades on end without pain or injury.
If you're interested here's the best book about it: https://archive.org/details/tamblyns-home-instructor-in-penm...
Note the advice given:
>following lessons will make of you a good penman, if you follow instructions implicitly. The average time to acquire such a handwriting is from four to six months, practicing an hour or so a day. Practice regularly every day, if you want the best results. Two practice periods of thirty minutes each are better than one period of sixty minutes.
After two months I can comfortably write at 20 words per minute for four hours without stopping.
[+] [-] IAmBroom|6 months ago|reply
The only thing in my entire career I've ever been asked to write something in cursive is my signature, which I reduced to a squiggle for efficiency reasons. (The history of signatures is fascinating, BTW. Illiterate Charlemagne "signed" documents with a single horizontal stroke of the pen, inside of a premade 99%-completed "signature".)
I am employed, and she's long-dead.
[+] [-] close04|6 months ago|reply
The act of writing is the one that brings the benefits, not the looks of the result. I don't see a drawback to learning to write by hand even if nobody will ever read it or if it doesn't look good.
[+] [-] XorNot|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] giancarlostoro|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nancyminusone|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|6 months ago|reply
I also find it odd that people have some off assertions on why we learn cursive. I'm sure there is a multitude of reasons, but I find it hard to think it has any strong advantage over other ways.
I do get a kick out of my kids being baffled that I write in cursive. At this point, I think I get as much fun out of that as I do anything else.
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|6 months ago|reply
Whatever, I didn't learn it by reading cursive, but reading printed stuff. So that never really made sense to me, though depending on who is writing, it can look nice.
So I do a few fast strokes of lines and/or curves or dots to form a letter, and hop to the next. I wasn't slower than the cursive writers. Which works better with ball pens, than fountain pens, btw. Cursive is a fountain pen thing, IMO.
But my writing doesn't look bad at all. Just block letters leaning slightly to the right. I can even do "DIN-Schrift" like in technical drawings freehanded, slower though.
[+] [-] spacechild1|6 months ago|reply
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.)
[+] [-] garciansmith|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] elros|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] voidUpdate|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|6 months ago|reply
In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).
As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.
I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.
[+] [-] endgame|6 months ago|reply
I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.
[+] [-] tbrownaw|6 months ago|reply
Sure the super cheap bic pens that come in boxes of 100 aren't great, but that's because they're cheap (besides being inexpensive). Something like those G2 gel pens that are also available everywhere for not very much (fairly inexpensive, but not pejorative-cheap) these days work just fine.
[+] [-] oddthink|6 months ago|reply
But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.
[+] [-] Aaargh20318|6 months ago|reply
I think my main problem is that handwriting is so slow. I get impatient and rush it turning it into a mess. Reading it is also slow, even when written by someone with good handwriting it's a PITA to read cursive. I hope it dies out sooner rather than later.
[+] [-] ternaryoperator|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] en|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] moregrist|6 months ago|reply
I love fountain pens. Well-made ones are elegant and feel good to write with. I love the look and feel of certain kinds of permanent black and blue-black ink that you can’t find for ballpoint.
They were extremely useful in dealing with hand cramps at a time I was doing a lot of mathy stuff for work (tens of pages of derivation a day for a while). They retrained my hand to not push on the page so hard and not grip the pen so hard. That eliminated most of the problem.
That said, they have had no effect on my handwriting. Which was bad-to-mediocre before and remains bad-to-mediocre now.
[+] [-] genezeta|6 months ago|reply
There are other brands, of course; Pentel has a similar marker and some other smaller brands too. I just think the Tombow is very nice and easy enough to find.
These pens are sort of the modern version of the Japanese calligraphy brush, so they're nice for writing but much more practical.
[+] [-] benrutter|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] cjohnson318|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] thrance|6 months ago|reply
Years of every teacher I had writing in red at the top of every test or homework "Applique-toi!", as if this injunction was all that was required for me to finally realize I had been holding the pen wrong for over 15 years. Fuck that, I'm glad it's over.
I will gladly celebrate the death of handwriting when it comes, that we may focus on more important matters and stop judging books by their covers.
[+] [-] MengerSponge|6 months ago|reply
For other people who grade big stacks of papers, nota bene: fountain pens with a soft nib are a lifesaver! They require almost no writing pressure, which is so much more comfortable. You also get to use fun ink colors.
[+] [-] makeitdouble|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ErigmolCt|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] gizajob|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] adamsilkey|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] postepowanieadm|6 months ago|reply
As a leftie I was forced to do exercised designed for "normal" children, that were just painful. Thinking about using "normal" scissors with my left hand makes me sad and angry almost 40 years later. But I do enjoy a nice fountain pen and a thick paper - it's relaxing.
[+] [-] hn_throwaway_99|6 months ago|reply
I love writing by hand, and for years I was looking for the ideal instrument. Frankly, all the big "pen enthusiast" websites gave awful advice IMO. I essentially wanted something with the tactile feel of a good pencil, but with the permanence of ink. Finally I stumbled across fine line markers at an arts supply store (I like the prismacolor ones but I'm sure there are others). They come in various widths (some as thin as a thin mechanical pencil), and they don't smudge, bleed, or need to be refilled. They have a great tactile feel and an extremely sharp, crisp line. I'll never understand why pen forums never seem to recommend them.
[+] [-] odyssey7|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] chakspak|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] IT4MD|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] woodpanel|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] willemlaurentz|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tnvmadhav|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tgbugs|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] picafrost|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spicyusername|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] voidUpdate|6 months ago|reply
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
[+] [-] meander_water|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] medhir|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ourmandave|6 months ago|reply
Back In My Day we did cuneiform on stone tablets, and were grateful. Postage was a lot less back then too.
[+] [-] throw0101a|6 months ago|reply
> 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...
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...
[+] [-] randcraw|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ubermonkey|6 months ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] cafard|6 months ago|reply
[+] [-] Upvoter33|6 months ago|reply