Yes, it would. This is the first time I've seen Betteridge's law of headlines [1] violated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
(If it would be bad, we wouldn't stop writing by hand)
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.
For that matters, pens are a type of machine. if you use a pen you are a machine operator.
tool + drive = machine
machine + sensor = automaton
automaton + decision = robotIf writing was so important for motor skills then it is very weird that kids only needs this single exercise.
Why don't we have many different things to do with hands then?
Like gym lessions which teaches many different sports/exercises instead of doing many years of the same exercise.
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.
My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool.
Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.
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.
That's an exam cramming technique regardless of handwriting quality :)
I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!
I assumed this was for child friendliness - you just know kids are going to get ink on their fingers etc while changing cartridges from time to time.
I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.
The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.
Fountain pens or ballpoint pens?
(I do believe it was a fountain of pain either way :)
Should I:
- Write in mirror image form?
- Learn to predict my line length so I can write right to left, but have the text read left to right?
- Learn arabic or herbrew?
I'm leaning towards all three personally.
Counting line length before writing it seems harder to get fluent in than arabic or hebrew scripts...
For what it’s worth, personally, I don’t like it so much, but I know people who swear by it; and had fast, clear, legible notes to back it up.
This advice is not just for lefties. Although I'm right-handed myself, I like to use a tissue paper under my palm when scribing Wedding Cards, to avoid smudges.
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.
Deliberate practice is the #1 way to get better at most skills, and making the activity feel good will encourage that: if it feels good to write, you'll probably be more deliberate when doing it and really think about the strokes you're making.
Then you have a few "oh hey, if I do this with this part of the letter it looks really nice" moments, and people start commenting on the quality of your handwriting
You left out paper. I have fountain pens that I love to use on particular types of paper. However, on the paper I mostly use (cheap paper) fountain pens aren't great...
That, and I keep a written log of what I do during a day. Helps with annual performance reviews and to answer the question of "wait didn't I do X a week ago?" I guess I could migrate to a text file or something, but that's a lot more restrictive of a format than just writing.
Plus, my notebook isn't going to suddenly run out of battery in the middle of a string of meetings. And if my pen goes dry - just find whatever ballpoint or pencil is around, nbd.
That said, nobody's forcing you to write or whatever. People enjoy different things, and that's okay.
I would not disagree more. A fountain pen writes with zero pressure. In contrast modern rollerballs and gel pens have a little spring to prevent contact leaking. Uni might have a patent on that. Famously Pilot's Hi-Techpoint pens doesn't have that and it stains the place where it touches.
A fountain pen can outlast any disposable pen, allows you to write 5x longer without any strain, promote better writing quality and writing habits, and lives with you and becomes tuned to your handwriting in a couple of months to a year.
Moreover, hand writing is better for your brain and concentration than typing on a glowing box which strains your eyes, hands and brain with constant distractions.
I didn't know that, what's the noticeable difference?
Some manufacturers have their own formulations and grinding characteristics, and some manufacturers use "default" versions supplied by the nib vendor.
As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished. This can take from a couple of months (e.g. Lamy) to years (e.g. Pilot, Sailor). Since the user keeps the pen at a certain angle, the same area gets polished a lot.
This makes the pen write smoother when held "correctly" (i.e. the way the user holds), reduces contact pressure (pen starts writing almost before touching the paper) and makes the pen a little wetter in some cases, making it more reliable and enjoyable to use.
After some point you can write without ever thinking about the pen, because it never skips (even like gels, rollerballs and ballpoints), and becomes an extension of you. It's hard to precisely and accurately describe though.
For example, I have an old Lamy Safari which writes slightly broader than its Medium designation because of this. I can understand whether my Pilot Metropolitan is happy with the ink or not from how it feels on paper. I have another Pilot which feels like glass on paper due to the same effect (it was already a smooth grind but it got even smoother over time).
Another advantage of fountain pens is the writing characteristics is a constant. Since you don't change the nib with every refill, you don't get the frustration of a bad writing pen when you replace your disposable pen or refill. You only refill the ink.
The feed buffers enough ink allowing you to change the cartridge or refill the pen before it runs completely dry though.
Also, I tend to use a small cartridge between three weeks and a month depending on the nib size. Considering I fill my notepad in six months, this is plenty of ink. When I write with a gel pen, the ink level is visibly different when I finish the day, so there's that.
If you use a Lamy or use long international cartridges, these durations are at least doubled (6-8 weeks of writing per cartridge).
If you fancy to see the ink level, some pens have windows, and demonstrators are clear all over already. :)
> This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.
> As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished.
"Polish" is making a surface more even than before either by [a] filling it in with substance so that the depressions in the surface becomes level with the peaks or [b] filing away (i.e., introducing wear) at the surface so that the peaks become level with the depressions.
Either way, I don't see how it can be achieved with writing. Paper and ink doesn't have anything that can achieve [a] nor is it enough to achieve [b]---even over time---otherwise the nib isn't made of alloy that can resist wear and tear.
I'm prepared to wager that a well-used but well-cared for nib isn't gonna exhibit a more polished angle. It could tarnish. It could build-up a patina. Maybe it could have some chemical residues from previous inks. But to have a significant and highly-localized deviation from when it was brand-new, I highly doubt it.
Another part of my hypothesis is that you don't actually keep the pen at the same angle everytime you write. You still produce the same(ish) handwriting but writing angle is easily affected by external factors. In other words, the writer compensates for these external factors subconsciously in order to produce the same handwriting. E.g., I write differently on my journal vs. if I'm filling out a form. I write differently when I'm jotting down notes in a meeting vs. something more deliberate. I might adjust angles if the paper has a different texture, or if the ink isn't drying as quickly. I would write differently on my desk at home vs. a hotel room desk. Heck, I write differently at the start, middle, and end of a journal.
I'm just saying this because I think people could stress over fountain pens over what is basically superstition and there's already plenty to think of when using fountain pens. It won't change your pen's "attunement" if you lend it for friends to try occasionally. Conversely, don't be afraid to give second-hand pens a try just because the previous owner's writing style might be too different from yours.
I'm using fountain pens as my primary writing instrument for more than 15 years now. My familiarity with these marvelous things go back even longer than that. So, I believe I know a couple of things, probably not much as you, about them.
First let me start with the polishing issue. Not all paper is same, and even smooth paper is very abrasive in its nature. You can actually slowly polish a fountain pen nib with a coarse brown bag. If you want to do it faster, you can use a micromesh (which I'm too coward to use). If you search Fountain Pen Network, there are tons of resources how to work with both.
If I understood it correctly, you said that the nib is not made of an alloy that can resist wear and tear. Yes, that's true. Today's nibs are mostly steel or gold alloys. However tips of said nibs are different. If you want to watch how Lamy's nibs are made in house, you can watch [0]. The link I shared starts right at the nib production and finishing process.
I'll politely counter your wager about nib polishing with another anecdote. My father gave all his fountain pens to me since he's not using them anymore. One of them is used everyday for years, and he uses his pens at a slight angle. The well used pen writes scratchy when I hold it like my other pens, but writes buttery smooth when I hold like him. Another pen also exhibits this but to a lesser degree. Interestingly, when my father tries my pens, they write a bit scratchy because of his holding angle. The seldom used pens write smooth regardless of the holding angle (they are essentially new old stock).
Another interesting anecdote is between me and another pen enthusiast. I have a particular Lamy Safari which I use every day. Also, Lamy's tipping material is a bit softer than other manufacturers, so they polish faster. We tried a couple dozen pens that day. He took that Safari, wrote with it and said "this is a well tamed nib. did you polish it?". He didn't know that it was my EDC pen.
You said that your pen holding angle changes depending on what you write. Mine don't. I keep my pens at a very particular angle independent of what/how I write. So much that, my Metropolitan writes a little scratchy if I hold it too close to the nib, near the front end of the finger rest, and I don't even use pressure. But that pen is with me every day for more than six years (or more? IDK).
Another thing about nibs is flex (not like a flex nib, much more subtle) or breaking in, which is very apparent in Kaweco pens. That little, stubby bastards' nibs always start a little dry. After a couple pen flushes and with some writing, they start to break in. They start to write the way it should after a couple of weeks generally. When they find their tune, they write pretty dependable though. Lastly, Montblanc says their nibs need a couple of weeks before reaching their true performance. I want to experience this some time in the future, but I can't today.
A well-used nib doesn't exhibit a Lamy 2000 like "narrow sweet spot", the angle doesn't get narrower, but that sweet spot develops a sweeter spot if you write at the same angle after some point, depending on the tipping material and geometry.
I mean, I have a lot of pens, and I can distinguish between an unused nib and a well used one on the same body and same ink just from the feel for it.
I'd love to continue this friendly discussion. Heck if I had a macro lens, I'd happily share close up photos of the said nibs, so we can learn together, but alas.
I'm not afraid of fountain pens, or second hand pens in general. I got myself a nice Pilot Elite from a pen show this year. I need to fix its nib (it's a bit loose), but it's a well used buddy with a buttery smooth gold nib.
While I love these pens as well, they require a little bit more pressure than a fountain pen, and their difference becomes very apparent in long writing sessions.
Being said that, they're probably the best rollerballs and gel pens you can use, because of their pigmented inks and archival qualities. Plus their blue black is a nice color, and Vision Elite can actually shade while writing.
i have a mild orthopaedic problem, and i found, in my twenties after years of struggling with disposable pens, that a fountain pen allowed me to write more lightly and fluidly on the page with the result that my words per minute more than doubled. my writing is still ugly, but it is vastly faster and a bit more legible.
fountain pens are not only for "decorative stuff" but have actual functional advantages due to their mechanical dynamics
I've never liked fountain pens because most languages are written left-to-right, which means you will get smudged much more easily than if you were right-handed.
The seemingly best advice I've seen is to learn how to be an "underwriter", aka position your hand north to where you're writing, instead of sideways. I say seemingly because I'm not willing to spend that amount in effort when I can write fine with pens.
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.
For what it's worth, I'm not a big proponent of fountain pens or cursive, but I do think they go hand-in-hand.
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.
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.
If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.
> If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.
I see comments like this occasionally and find it mildly amusing as a lefty who has been writing with a fountain pen for over a decade and doesn't have noticeably different hand position (either compared to righties or compared to my use of a pencil or ballpoint pen). Yes, some lefties do have hand positions that look incredibly uncomfortable and some lefties have trouble with fountain pens, but that doesn't mean it's a general/total non-starter for lefties to successfully/comfortably use a fountain pen.
Pen pushing is a problem if a writer used to a ballpoint pen or a hard pencil and needing to apply pressure to get ink to flow and applies that much pressure to a fountain pen. But once one makes the adjustment to a fountain pen's (low) pressure style, pushing is only a minor annoyance for fountain pen writing until the nib is broken in (at least that was my experience).
As others have said, it's also important to pick the right ink/pen/paper combination so that you're not laying down too much ink and so that it dries reasonably quickly.
It perhaps is a combo of cheap pens and learned pressure from pencils/ballpoints (and let's not forget smudging from hand sliding on paper if the ink takes too long to dry - I will emphatically not levitate my hand).
But I couldn't find a dictionary which supported that definition. Is that your own coinage, or is it a jargon that I didn't know?
I swear by uniball jet stream pens, they feel much nicer than a ball point and dry fast enough for me to use them but would love a true fountain pen setup instead!
I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
now, while I have decent typing skills, I can't write a sentence in cursive, let alone in non-cursive - my goto is "please excuse my handwriting, I can't read it either".
I still think about a kid who transferred into my class in elementary school sometimes, over 40 years later. Our school taught D'Nealian handwriting. When this kid came in he didn’t write this way, but his handwriting was incredibly clean and looked really good; I was jealous and wanted to write like him. The teacher told him he was writing wrong and forced him to change and learn the D'Nealian way. He struggled a lot and I felt really bad for him. Sorry you had a similar experience.
I also take extensive hand-written notes (but rarely refer back to them) just because the process of hand-writing helps me to remember the content - and there's some environment / context / other memory that gets attached to it as well, which helps with recall, I think.
I have a notoriously patchy memory, so handwriting notes helps hide that personal systemic flaw.
It also bothers my daughter that my cursive s's look like r's and that there are sometimes words and sentences that are, to her, unintelligible until she studies it to find a recognisable letter and from there it decodes itself.
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.
Mind likes to run in circles with scissors at both hands and hurt itself while trying to think fast. Teaching it to walk slowly results in clearer and more refined results.
As why go in circles in own head when I can be moving forward with keyboard.
Life is same everywhere. It makes the same trade-offs. Fast growing plants have less mass, they are less dense, and if they are edible, they're less delicious and nutritious.
However, hard woods, strong plants and nutritiously dense foods grow slowly. It's the same for ideas, and human mind.
When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts. When you put a speed limiter with a pen, you force your brain to reconsider what it just said to you, and as a result, you get better, more refined ideas in less time actually.
I have written elsewhere. I design my programs, their architecture and algorithms on paper, with a fountain pen. I keep lab notebooks. This allows me to refine everything before hitting my first key on the keyboard. I iterate less, produce more. The algorithms I design come out already refined to a certain degree, and when combined with architectural knowledge, their first iteration come out performant and efficient.
Let me ask you the same question:
Why bang my hands and head to a keyboard while trying to solve a problem while I can solve it with a cup of tea, a nice pen and paper and create elegant code in one go and enjoy all parts of the process, and spend less time as a result?
I suspect you made that up. Mint grows fast and tastes great. Watermelon grows super fast and tastes super great. And plenty of slow growing plants are plain inedible.
It is not even clear what you mean by "nutritious dense". But, my family used to grow both vegetables, fruits and even potatoes/herbs. Speed of growing and how nutritious or tasty they are does not seem all that much correlated to me.
> When you let your brain draw circles on an idea, you start to prune its illogical parts.
You will prune them even gaster and more reliably when you see own thoughts written.
I find it's beneficial for my memory, concentration and general brain fitness. Also, as a result, I write less code. What I write lands closer to optimal for the case at hand, so I debug and tune less.
All in all I enjoy designing software more and write better software at the end . Win-win.
Plus, fountain pens are nice.
Having all of the former pages on hand, made it so that I could cross-reference a current idea with one I'd already been sketching on some days or weeks back. I could see that I wanted to use the same card in 3 places, and then force myself to consider which one to put it in. I could sit and stare at something I'd written, and turn it over in my head, take a sip of my beer, and contemplate, "What are the motivations of this fictional character?"
I'd forced myself to start thinking more long-term. I ran a Pilot g2 down to about 1mm of ink remaining, filled the whole notebook out, got a new one.
It's a notebook with nothing important or classified, I regularly allow friends and family to scribble a page here and there, and have torn out a few bits to use as a kindling for a firepit with a faulty igniter.
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.
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.
Many of the written works we have remain because Christian monks choose to copy it again and again - we mostly have no idea what works they choose not to copy (there is evidence they choose not to copy some works, but you have to be careful as there were multiple monasteries and one choose not to copy something doesn't mean a different didn't copy it thus it survives anyway). We also don't know which works don't survive because some per-christian civilization didn't copy it - folklore tries to blame Christians but many things didn't survive for them to make a choice. (in other parts of the world it wasn't Christians of course, but same considerations applied to them)
I'm no expert, but my understanding is most of the tables survive because the town brunt - otherwise the clay was erased and we lost what was on it. It is really hard to write something book length on clay because of thickness, but for lists you will erase when done (think shopping lists - which is of great interest to archaeology because it is insights that wouldn't have been put in books) clay is easier than making more paper.
If all should fail, we'll just pick it back up, just like we have before with those things. Until then, they will remain dead to most.
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.
So for example, if someone is jotting down a grocery list, they'll write common words like rice or milk in Hanzi, but then struggle to remember the characters for deodorant, and just write it out using pinyin.
There's a lot of hand-wringing about it there as well. Kids these days!
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'd add that you can shift sideways into drawing diagrams, or mathematical notation, or devise your own symbols on the fly in the blink of an eye without any friction, apart from the overall manual experience. So a way of capturing thoughts quickly before they evapourate. Then these notations can be rendered into electronic texts at leisure.
Generally, I still do hand writing in terms of visualizing software with pen and paper but not in cursive but print letters as glace value is much more important here than information density and speed of cursive.
I find these fears really unfounded tbh. If we really need to hand write I think anyone can learn this skill in couple of days as we still have great hand dexterity, maybe even better than previous generations.
It held me back during school, Nobody could read my writing, therefore I was thick as shit. All my exams were hand written, so they needed to have my exams transcribed by someone who could read my writing. (I could dictate my answers, but that required a different "statement", and dictation was expensive so the local authority said no. [its also a very hard skill to pic up on your own])
For normal school work I had access to an emate 300 which was great, but it was down to me to learn to type at any speed.
I got mediocre grades.
Had my mum not been middle class and frankly karen like in pursuing all of the options, I'd probably be in jail right now.
That being said, had I not learnt to hand write, it would have fucked me even more, as my fine motor skills would have been non existent.
(I also now use a wacom tablet as my main pointing device, which is ironic.)
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.
It's not just you. My kids didn't want to hear it, but they're coming round to the benefits of writing notes during their learning.
Why Writing by Hand Is Better for Memory and Learning https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-writing-by-ha...
Why writing by hand beats typing for thinking and learning https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/05/11/1250529...
Advantage of Handwriting Over Typing on Learning Words https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8222525/
There is only downside in distracting yourself to have to copy everything verbatim instead of, you know, actually focusing on the material being presented
So then I got the brilliant idea to not take notes, since I wasn't looking at them!
It turned out that the act of taking the notes was fixing the material in my head such that I didn't need the notes to refer back to.
Keeping notes on what I'm doing in org-mode is somewhat helpful, but drawing rough sketches of what I see in the debugger is essential.
By the time I filled both sides with an entire college class of info I might not remember, I often didn't need the card... so I began doing this for other tests where I couldn't bring the card in.
I wonder if my contrary experience is linked to my being mostly aphantasic and also lacking an internal monologue. Verbal input and output are activities I have to engage which takes me out of my default mode of thinking. And they are somewhat mutually-exclusive. Roughly speaking, it is like I have different mental postures for these. I think easily in a "resting" state. Figuratively, I have to "sit up" (for reading) or "stand up" (for listening). To write or speak, I go further into a variant "fighting" posture, e.g. getting myself centered and my reflexes cranked up more.
Also, I feel like anything I really learn is merged into my unified "world model" almost immediately or with a very short latency. But, I have very poor rote memory. I don't memorize what I hear or read. I extend my understanding and then can speak from that understanding later, in my own words. I do best when I can learn something abstractly and synthesize a bunch of related ideas from that understanding. I can infer my own abstractions, but I need to do so rapidly before I lose the examples being communicated.
I struggle when there is an expectation to memorize disconnected examples and defer the abstraction. If I don't generally understand new content in real-time as I listen or read, it is just noise. I cannot recall content I didn't understand in order to figure it out later. I only retain the meta-memory that I was exposed to and rejected some arbitrary noise...
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 am so glad I'm not alone there. It's hard to not feel stupid when you have to work out the winding order of some triangles for the 10th time.
I very rarely write on paper anything more than a short sentence at a time.
For me, paper is less about writing and more about laying out my thoughts.
(So far writing on digital tablets has been a less than great experience and I really like the real world arrangeability and simultaneous viewing of multiple pieces of paper.)
The world is certainly in a dark state and the end is nigh.
/s
How are they charging it and what network serves mud-huts?
Again, youre dreaming. Not even close to 6/7 billion smartphone owners.
https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owner...
Nevertheless, I still handwrite an awful lot, but it is annotated drawings, mathematics, the things that can't be done easily with a QWERTY keyboard.
I don't want to input LaTeX on a keyboard, I want to handwrite on an iPad and have AI transform that into LaTeX for me.
Technology therefore is killing handwriting in some contexts and enabling it in others.
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.
But I wonder how many young people are comfortable with writing in general, printing or cursive.
This is what would be a great use of AI, not stuff like Recall.
Handwriting certainly won't die until I do, at the very least.
There’s a running theme in my life that I prefer manual things. I enjoy practicing Olympic weightlifting, driving my 14 year old manual transmission and inking paper and tying with my HHKBs in Vim. To me, tools are the best when they feel like an extension of my physical body.
Not every skill is worthwhile. Trying to justify clinging to this obsolete practice simply reeks of sunk cost.
If you set out on a mission to find evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find it. The quality of that "evidence" is another matter entirely.
If handwriting is increasingly useless by itself - and we are already in a world where the vast majority of writing is digital - then for it to be worthwhile, the "side benefits" of learning and practicing handwriting must outweigh the benefits of literally any other thing you could be doing instead.
That's a very high bar to clear - and I don't think that the janky evidence we have supports this.
But as you say, if you set out on a mission to find (or equally ignore) evidence of something, and put in enough effort, you'll find (or ignore) it.
So good luck. What you think might be very different from the reality.
I'll leave it here because it's pretty evident that even if I lie tomes in front of you on that particular subject, your mind is already set in stone on that matter.
Some people like to write their todo lists on paper, some on their phone. Some people journal to a notebook, some do it in an app. Because we think the usefulness of writing is only the things we write. We ignore its secondary effects.
Writing imposes a speed barrier to brain, slows down the thinking process, esp. if you are writing with a permanent pen (anything sans a pencil). This slowing down allows refinement of the thought, but since it happens automatically, we don't appreciate it. One can type thrice the speed they write. It'd be perfectly legible, but is it perfectly filtered? I strongly doubt that.
I find my ideas are fuller when I write, rather than type. I find my words are more powerful, sentences are shorter yet more meaningful and dense. When I can't quite collect an idea or something gets too scattered, typing it out doesn't help, but getting a paper and writing the idea out allows me to round it instantly.
On longer projects, I keep lab notebooks. I do my design + write my mental process down. This allows me to visit a decision and see why I did it, preventing future errors, plus I have a lessons learnt document. This doesn't work with a keyboard. I tried. Many times.
We humans don't know what we don't know. I didn't know the power of writing until I started doing it regularly. I didn't know how it benefited my concentration until I started to see the effects. I didn't know until I half-filled my first lab notebook and saw the thinking trail and I remembered everything without effort.
Our quest for efficiency and progress is both a blessing and a curse. We abandon things as useless we don't fully understand. Then we wonder about what happened to us. Writing is one of these things we don't fully understand and deem useless because we don't fully grasp what it does. People who understand its importance create things like ReMarkable which is used more and more around me.
I still prefer pen and paper, because I use permanent inks on posh paper, then label the notebooks and visit them when necessary. Less important things are typed on a keyboard, shared on a digital garden, but regardless of how hard I tried, typing away on a wonderfully crafted keyboard in an impeccable app is no substitute for writing, the brain processes writing triggers, the things it unearths or the ideas it allows to be born.
I think comparing a nebulae to a fusion reactor on earth is apt. While former are much more primitive, they form stars. While the latter has all the tech humans can offer, it just creates little sparks compared to the former.
So, we shan't bash things we don't understand fully, and shan't throw stones to others since we all live in houses made of glass.
It's not like you can't impose a speed barrier at will. Plenty of writers or programmers spend time thinking, writing absolutely nothing - regardless of whether they use a mechanical keyboard or a goose feather quill. Humans aren't LLMs - nothing compels them to produce text at all times.
Plenty of writers and programmers also spend a lot of time cutting down and editing what they just wrote - to get sharper prose or more concise and understandable code. Which is NOT something that can be done with a goose quill.
What you said is true though. I also spend some time not writing or typing anything but thinking, but I know where I want to arrive and trying to find a polite and concise path from where I am to the point I'm trying to arrive.
When I'm using pen and paper generally that arrival point is non-existent. IOW, I'm working on much harder problems and hacking a mental path towards somewhere I don't know, so I need to slow down, and chip away a problem step by step.
Some programmers go to a whiteboard, some talk with rubber duckies or their colleagues, to add an external speed brake to the process, because when you tend to think hard, the brain's speed brakes wear down. This is not myth, it's neuroscience. Adderall and Ritalin is used to add these speed brakes to people who born without them. This is a thing. Don't ask me how I know.
"Your first draft will be shit, edit until it makes sense" is the 0th rule of writing anything. What I do is writing that draft on paper, and editing in my mind. Then write the 5th or so draft to the computer.
This allows me to create what I want in less iterations in less time.
What you already said is also true. Humans are not LLMs. We're not copies of machines, or copies of each other, for that matter.
Really, it just sounds like you like tomatoes way too much. Which is fine. But don't you go around preaching about how tomatoes are a vital part of human diet and everyone should eat them all the time.
Disagree. At least for prose, I do my best editing that way. (All right, not a goose quill - I use a ballpoint.)
I find it easier to draw a line through some text than to move the cursor to the start, hold down shift while moving to the end, then hitting backspace or delete. I find it easier to move some text from one place to another by drawing an arrow than by selecting the start, shift selecting the end, ctrl-x, move to the destination, then ctrl-c. And so on.
In short, pen and paper break my mental flow less, so I can put more uninterrupted brain onto the actual editing.
Now, sure, after I'm done with the editing, then I have to go to the actual file, find the start of that text to delete, hold down shift while I move to the end, and all that. But I'm not making the edit decisions while I do that.
This is just what works best for me. If it doesn't for you, that's fine. Don't use 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.
> 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...
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.
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.)
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.
For me, I encounter things written in Chinese way more often than I see cursive. I don't know how to read Chinese, but I don't really worry about not being able to.
"Sure, it says <<whatever>>, clear as day, but damn, 'typing it in' on these tiny little buttons on this darn 'keyboard' thingy..."
> 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.
Not exactly. Handwriting better reinforces information in our memories than typing or reading or listening alone. So, if we're going to be doing a lot of writing because we intend to do a lot of note taking (and reading of our scrawl later on), then effective writing is obviously useful, which is what cursive is supposed to be. Now, perhaps that doesn't necessarily mean you have to use cursive as you are familiar with it, but inevitably, all handwriting written quickly turns into some kind of cursive. Writing block letters is slow and tedious.
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.
(To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)
If you use finger movement for shorthand you still have a 30 minute writing limit before you start getting hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome after a few years.
So, yes, now that the world no longer uses crusive that much you might as well pick another standard.
Shorthand is (hopefully lossless) compression technique.
Cursive is a font optimized for continuous use by the human hand and a stylus, leveraging keeping the stylus point on the page between letters of the same word.
It's comparing 7-Zip to Arial.
They add various aabreviations and common short forms on top of that, but one easily gets something like 50 % of the benefit by only using them as an alternative alphabet.
I'm tempted to say it is also about fewer pickups of the pen, but I think that is largely the same thing. Many of the finger movements you do when writing otherwise will be to pick the pen off the page.
I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between Tamblyn's business penmanship" and "looped cursive" and any other type of cursive to be honest. The difference in individual handwriting seems to be much larger than the difference in overarching styles?
Here is a video that gets most of the basics right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TWpFsv9Ib0
Here is one that gets it wrong: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vCPPcweLKWQ
The reason why the letters have the shape they do in business penmanship is for legibility and ease of motion. There are several variants of most letters you can choose from. The standard alphabet as given in that book is a very good compromise. The reason why newer cursive hands that use finger movement have a lot of the same shapes as business penmanship is cargo-culting.
Yes, arms instead of fingers, thanks for the great ergonomic video link, this was the most surprising finding when I got into fountain pens and feels like a totally different skill from the school days of handwriting cursive: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/372976-recomm...
When you can sit down and write out 1,000 words in 30 minites making indexes which you update weekly becomes just another form of revision. This works well for both study and business planning. Less so for emails and instant messages, but each medium for its intended purpose.
It is amazing how much of our education system requires being able to write text by the wheelbarrow when no one today can write more than a thimbleful without hand cramps and wrist pain. Imagine how much people would want to use Facebook or reddit if every like and upvote came with an electric shock. Our education system does that to everyone from age 8 and up when it comes to writing anything down.
I had one teacher who wrote in cursive in University, and her penmanship seemed pretty good. But I always struggled to read it. We are just not used to seeing cursive writing on a daily basis.
Print was more seen as a stepping stone, a teaching aide, something to be eventually superseded.
My handwriting was, and still is, pretty awful but I soon learned to argue that the legibility of one's handwriting is in inverse proportion to one's intelligence, citing doctors as evidence and positing that higher intelligence leads to faster thinking leads to faster writing leads to decreased legibility. Never really had any problems in school (or since) and I will note that when I left secondary education my school still did not have a computer, even in the admin offices. My kids' experience has been very different but with similar outcomes in this regard.
But then again, Italy has something of a Catholic grade school mentality, but with more gelato and better shoes. /s (Sort of - do they still have a mandatory tax supporting the Vatican?)
It's like complaining that you were taught how to ride a horse, but it's 1921 now and NOBODY in New York City rides horses!!!
I absolutely have done long division, when a calc wasn't handy - back when that was possible.
Teachers are reactive, and slowly so, to changes in societal needs.
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.
Personal record storage, that may require translation for others to read (looking at you, Da Vinci).
Communication.
The same goes for playing recorders or simple musical instruments: you don't teach that to kids hoping that they'll get jobs playing the recorder, but so that they learn finger control and maybe, if you're lucky, something about music.
People who think that early childhood education is job training probably don't have kids. Educating kids is not about direct utility but about cultivating muscles and thoughts and habits that lead to other development later. The word "cultivation" is an agricultural term that describes tilling the soil: that doesn't actually grow crops (it happens prior to planting), but it makes the growing season to come much more productive than simply casting seed on the unbroken earth. Education is the cultivation of human potential before adulthood, preparing the child for a richer adulthood in ways that are not obviously utilitarian.
I feel that your viewpoint on this is that of a naive beta bucks provider’s view of school. Childrens spirit is actually broken , school is a training program in as much so that they accept a life as cogs in the machine. The hours are unnecessarily long , they are forcefully socialised and manipulated to care about what people think of them with praise and shaming tactics (gold stars , 30 sets of eyes on them all day etc.).
In this hellish environment which they will be arrested if they do not submit to and attend - they must submit to authority all day and work. Wear a work uniform. Follow work hours. Do work that could easily be compressed to 1-3 hours per day if it was necessary. But the work they do is about conditioning and breaking them so it is not compressed it is stretched out as far as possible with all sorts of justifications (the parents can’t mind them during these hours because they themselves are trapped in this situation too). The children must also hope that whatever older cog is paid to abuse and manipulate them wont punish them with more home work. This squanders and contaminates the best years of their lives.
I love computer programming and working hard. However it’s undeniable to me that school as it currently exists is not anything close to what your post makes it out to be. I would be extremely hesitant about having children in the future - if they are going to be forced to suffer as I did in school.
It disappeared in a single generation and nobody looked back except for old typists that refused to learn the new skill. They eventually died and now that skill is basically extinct.
Nothing of value was lost.
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.
I remember experimenting as a bored young adult with my first credit card, before tap to pay, when you often had to sign with a stylus on a terminal (in the US) - I would sign something different every time, sometimes nonsense, sometimes a little drawing, sometimes writing “Obama” or “Einstein” to see if I’d get a call from my bank or something - never did.
Maybe there was an era when actual matching signatures mattered, but it seems long gone.
I guess if you’re a celebrity signing autographs then it matters.
If papers were signed, then something was agreed upon. A trade performed, a commitment made. If no papers were signed, then it's just idle talk.
Many of the signatures throughout Europe's premodern era were crosses - anyone can make a "t" shape, everyone knew what it meant (and what it implied, morally), and it was as valid for this William as it was for that Henry because it was witnessed by state-recognized authorities (Notaries, if you will).
Egyptian signatures weren't written BY the person signing, but if you had your own cartouche, ain't nobody faking that... Wax seals only had names written in Latin print. Thumbprints were used in China, and handprints in paleolithic France.
Modern web interfaces give up on the "draw something like your signature with this janky software" bullshit, and fall to "just type your own name and we'll assume it's you."
All are societally-recognized authentic signatures.
I've heard stories from friends that their bank mails them whether a transaction is supposed to happen, because their signature was sloppy.
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.
It is disappointing, on many levels. But criticism is not punishment. Even if it can be punishing.
You must mean modern cursive, which is definitionally true. The ancients used cursive writing of various forms, of course (for example, hieratic)
But fret not! Reputedly, only a few scholars in the world are able to read the scrawl of Thomas Aquinas!
I worry your teachers have ruined you by trying to make your writing more artistic when they should have perhaps made you more artistic and let you bring the fine motor control back on your own.
My grandmother wrote me letters in cursive. They got more and more unreadable as she got older. I should have bought her a typewriter.
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.
It's a shame fountain pens are slightly too fiddly for every-day use since they still have some real advantages over more modern writing instruments. I've never had a fountain pen fail to produce a line unless out of ink. With ballpoints I feel like they don't work more often than they do.
OTH all of that just went away with using ball pens. OFC there are cheap ones, with the thin, brassy pen refills, which often show what you describe. For me that went away with using Parker and Lamy. I guess that would go for whatever fits into Rotring and Montblanc too.
Or the endless options obsessively discussed in fora commited to stuff like this. I just couldn't be bothered so far. My stuff is good enough for me :-)
Lamy Unic
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.
Not offering the class from the beginning to all is a lost opportunity, and moreover, robs children of a connection with their parents and grandparents.
https://handwritingrepair.info/
Certainly, requiring that folks write things out legibly is one way to address cheating using AI.
Back In My Day we did cuneiform on stone tablets, and were grateful. Postage was a lot less back then too.
After high-school, I settled on a mix between a curvy to type-ish Handwriting, which I carry to this day. A few years back, my daughters complained that my Handwriting is “too stylish” for this day-n-age. Even their teachers had to decode why I write some letters the way I write.
So, about a year back, I decided to dedicate a blank Notebook (not ruled or dotted) and I’ve been practicing a simplified version, mostly by removing the curves so they and the younger generations can read it easier. I’m taking it slow - write once a week or so.
For me, it is therapeutic to feel the tactile feedback and listen to the subtle scratchy sound made when the fountain pen writes on well-made paper. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/handwriting/
there are at least one or two enlightened comments in this thread saying their memory retention improves if they write stuff down on paper.
try it, it can't hurt.
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.
Years later (early 2000s) I decided my handwriting was unacceptable (was still using it for note-taking), and taught myself cursive Italic, which I still use today. Both prettier and less fussy than the cursive I was taught, works well with fountain pens, which in turn reduces muscle cramps.
You can have my Japanese fountain pen and mechanical pencil when you pry them from my cold, dead hand.
Full disclosure: I'm making a site that allows you to read books and then practice kanji by hand and then save to flashcards for later review.
Example:
https://community.public.do/t/kokoro-by-natsume-soseki-parag...
Click on the "kanji" at the bottom to expand and show the kanji in the page. Click on a kanji to see the animated strokes and practice it right there by hand.
For me, I have poor motor control in my hands. I physically cannot make the kind of precise motions that good handwriting requires. The act of writing is painful and physically and mentally fatiguing. I can't even do basic geometric engineering drawings. My hands just can't make consistent lines.
On the other hand (heh), anything I write longhand may as well be encrypted to anyone but me. Good for keeping notes private, I guess.
I will say that memory retention through writing does still work for me. It seems to be a truly universal mechanism in the human brain.
This is also partly an autistic thing. Lots of us have poor fine motor control, and thus terrible handwriting. It's also one of those things that doesn't seem terribly important: good handwriting is mostly a performance for the exclusive benefit of others. There's nothing intrinsically good or valuable about it and our time would be better spent learning about trains. That's not an objective thing, just how the autistic mind sorts priorities.
I do know I unlearned a bunch of my handwriting hardwiring when I learned to use a palm pilot. It had a system called graffiti that "simplified" some letters... which ended up replacing them in my handwriting habits after a while.
tnvmadhav•5mo ago
linuxguy2•5mo ago
NooneAtAll3•5mo ago
I wonder what broke in this case