Comment by jez

Comment by jez 7 hours ago

3 replies

The handwriting in some of these snippets, while sometimes difficult to read for one reason or another, is nonetheless beautiful: did everyone who wrote have such great handwriting back then?

I'm looking at the piece in the Instagram post linked by the page, which begins, "honor of holding in their service". The lines are so straight, the letters are so uniform!

hello_newman 6 hours ago

As someone with terrible handwriting but decent cursive, i think cursive provides a better structure for achieving cleaner penmanship compared to non-cursive writing. My theory is that cursive’s consistency of soft, flowing loops rather than a mix of abrupt angles and disconnected lines helps create a more uniform result.

I also remember teachers telling you when writing cursive to seldom lift your hand from the page. I think that act of keeping your pen on the page for most of the writing process encourages a smoother and more natural flow, reducing the chance of jerky, uneven strokes

999900000999 6 hours ago

Widespread literacy is an extremely recent phenomenon.

I highly doubt most people could write that well

cyberax 7 hours ago

Handwriting is a skill, you get better with practice!

A lot of bad handwriting stems from using it to write down things quickly (see: https://imgur.com/doctors-strike-5ANma ).

If you instead focus on doing slow calligraphy, your handwriting can improve rapidly.