The End of Handwriting
(wired.com)139 points by beardyw 6 days ago
139 points by beardyw 6 days ago
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.
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.
Looking at this book, it seems very similar to how I was taught in the late 80s early 90s. We were forced to use fountain pens, and would get berated if we got ink on our hands.
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?
The shape of the letters is largely irrelevant, the source of motion is the important part. In regular cursive it is the fingers that move the pen. In business penmanship it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.
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.
When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems?
(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.)
Here's a nice article on some shorthands: https://blog.zdsmith.com/series/shorthands.html
The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.
This book is quite a find. I'm tempted to give it a go, as it could make my writing portable anywhere. My only misgiving is later getting that writing into electronic form, which nowadays is a non-negotiable. The technology for handwriting recognition, long-form, seems to still be fairly poor.
I'm starting to appreciate not having digitised notes.
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.
My children go to a charter school in AZ and they are only allowed to write in cursive (3rd grade and on). Public school families I have talked to are also learning cursive.
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".)
I am employed, and she's long-dead.
Signatures seem to be completely useless. Like you, my signature has devolved into a squiggle that is never the same, and it has never mattered.
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.
I've seen a suggestion that a signature is now nothing but a signal. An agreed-upon way of communicating "this is serious and binding". Being able to point out that a signature was faked in some cases is a rare side benefit at best.
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.
Charlemagne wasn't exactly please about that state of affairs though.
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.
Writing by hand teaches fine motor skills that can bd transferred later to other tasks. When I was in school, we learned not only block print and cursive but also half-uncial script. Nobody expected us to get jobs copying medieval manuscripts: we learned better how to control our fingers and wrists.
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.
Let’s be honest with ourselves here. Children are tortured in school through forced and constant rote memorisation and this makes most of them hate learning anything in later life.
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.
This is one reason why I employ the Scriptorium language learning technique developed by Alexander Arguelles which focuses you on actively engaging with a text by reading it aloud, carefully writing it down while saying each word, and then rereading the written text aloud. I try my best to keep my my cursive consistent and looking nice, but despite my best efforts[0] it still gets a bit scraggly at times.
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".
It's also fun because every few decades there's a new fad in school penmanship so each generation learns a different cuesive and it's all a mess.
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.
For me, in Germany, it was always cursive from the beginning to the end of school. We learned to write in the first class of elementary school. I still only write cursive and cannot write any other style, by hand. And only with a fountain pen. The style I was taught is called "Lateinische Ausgangsschrift". At a catholic elementary school in NRW. If you are interested here is an overview of the different cursive styles: https://www.schulschriften.de/html/schreibschrift.html
I find the discussion very weird. I'm from Germany, cursive is taught in class two. There were people in class who never got it, but mostly one or two. I don't get how people can stand writing in printing letters, doesn't it take too much time to essentially stop writing after each letter?
Belgium: the only handwriting i can do properly is cursive (each word is a connected string of curly letters). I often cheated on the capitals because they are a bit grandose curly in cursive. We wrote notebooks full with cursive in different languages, that's how most languages were thought. My 12yo kid was thought exactly the same hand writing but he has to write less because the usage of fill-in books in stead of empty notebooks.
UK: I find all this fascination with "cursive" very odd. I was taught to write indivdual block letters before and in the first year of school, and then like every other pupil, was excited to move on to "joined up" writing, which was (is) very similar, with the letters having small extensions to link them to the adjoining letters in a word, thereby making writing much faster. The way I was taught to write block letters was cleary designed to lead to this - there really wasn't much difference. Reading and writing joined up letters seems pretty normal to me and to my kids.
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.
Writing in cursive is common in Italy, and signatures are important, must be legible, and will be scrutinized.
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.
The fact that some people are totally unable to draw while others excel at it would alone imply that you should see similar variation in writing. And we do.
> 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 point is that you almost never see text written in cursive anymore.
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.
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.
Typing at speed on a fully mechanical typewriter was an incredibly valuable skill that required a lot of physical and mental training.
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.
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 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.
I was constantly chided as well, The teachers seem to have regarded my poor handwriting as moral failure,ike choosing to do something naughty, rather than as something that they needed to give me more tutoring on.
> 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.)
I'm partial to cursive italic, which dates at least to the Renaissance. You don't have to learn two sets of letter forms (printed and cursive italic use the same forms), and the joins are simple. It is easy to learn, and works well for both everyday handwriting and calligraphy.
I agree, and my handwriting also sucks. My brother could have been an architect; his handwriting is amazing without trying. Give me a keyboard and recess too.
My grandmother wrote me letters in cursive. They got more and more unreadable as she got older. I should have bought her a typewriter.
> Cursive is actually only a couple of hundred years old.
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 had a similar experience with writing, in my case it included print exercises. It was very frustrating and it took me a long time to gain an appreciation for writing after they finally caved and found a cheap old DOS PC for me to do work on.
the article links the decline of cursive writing and the rise of the AI cheat happening at the same time as a definitive moment, and suggests bieng locked in an exam room with blank(unlined) paper might be a good way to force peoples hand(accidental pun) and seperate the knowlegable from the rest. my personal feeling, that as you so well illustrate, is that a significant number of academics and hobbiests will want to study and experience past practices as to keep the undestanding of cursive alive into the forseeble future unlined, just for the extra test of focus
Worth mentioning that English itself has only been around since the 1600s, basically when Chaucer was around.
Not predicting the computer revolution, and specifically the calculator revolution, is not their fault.
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.
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
I’m left handed, with the right ink and paper this isn’t a huge problem. I picked up fountain pens a year ago and I will never go back to regular pens for my own writing.
Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.
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.
Please share what the right fountain pen, ink and paper would be for a left-handed person to avoid smearing everything to kingdom come! (Asking with honest curiosity as a fellow leftie who would love to be able to use a fountain pen).
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'm confused. The only thing both have in common is that they are pens. For the rest they are on opposite ends of the pen spectrum. Unless a pencil or a felt tip are called pens as well?
Lamy has left-handed nibs for their pens. So there are options.
> 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.
> 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).
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!
It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.
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.
Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.
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.
I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.
Depends what you mean by ballpoint. For a liquid ink rollerball, that's true or very close. For a gel ink pen, or an oil-based standard ballpoint, that's very much not true. Conventional ballpoints require much more pressure than a rollerball (like the UB-157) or a fountain pen. Gel pens are in-between.
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.
Fountains also feel incredibly good to write with once you find the right nib + pen + ink combo you prefer.
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
See, here's what I don't get: Who wants to go through the trouble? Buying tons of nibs, pens, inks, and paper to find one I like, when I go months without even picking up a normal pencil or pen? I'm really curious what people are still writing by hands these days, especially where others would have the ability to comment on it. I don't think I've even used a pen for a signature in god knows, since all the doctor's offices, etc, these days either have touchscreens or email you the forms to fill out online. Are you writing for fun? Doing math? What am I missing here?
At least for me, it was back when I was taking classes in college and writing a lot of notes. Made it easy to try a bunch of pens and inks. That said, just try a few. You don't have to be systematic or spend a bunch. I like fine tips, so any fine tip is fine with me.
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.
that may be the case for your particular writing style, but it is not universal.
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
> No, fountain pens have a "cool" factor and can be made for decorative stuff, but that's it.
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 agree with you - the low/no pressure that a fountain pen writes with is important. However, I will say that decent rollerballs (eg UniBall Vision) require only the weight of the pen itself, which means there is very little difference from fountain pens (but not none).
Recently I restarted using my Vision Elite rollerball and Signo gel pen, because the last notebook's paper didn't play well with my fountain pens.
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.
>becomes tuned to your handwriting
I didn't know that, what's the noticeable difference?
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.
Technical pens (staedtler) are great for math writing and quite precise (I studied engineering and used these a lot for notes with lots of formulas, diagrams, math notation etc), but the ink does take a bit to dry so it can be smeary particularly for left-handed use. They’re also a bit unforgiving with writing angles (likely not optimized for writing, for sure but they do work)
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.
I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.
Well it's not magic, you still need to learn the skill of how to use the pen properly to write cursive.
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.
That's probably because YOU use a cheap fountain pen. ;)
I use a cheap (£20) fountain pen it doesn't affect how good my writing is. That's practice not tools :)
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.
Have you tried a good fountain pen? A good nib makes all the difference.
I'd like if you address the main point of his post: being left-handed.
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.
The issue with being left handed, when writing a language that is written left-to-right, is the hand gets dragged over freshly written ink. A fountain pen has liquid ink that takes longer to dry than a ballpoint pen, it would make things significantly worse.
> 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.
What I’ve seen being done before, not only by lefties but actually by quite a few people, is to shift your paper 45~90°, so that you’re effectively writing bottom up (right handed) or top to bottom (left handed). It can get a moment to get used to it but it alleviates the smudging significantly.
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.
I write with my hand below the line to avoid smudging. A consequence of this is my pen meets the page at quite a shallow angle which I find is perfect for fountain pens but scratchy with ball points. These days I do very little hand writing and find my traditional pose (described above) causes hand cramps, but I don't know if that's specific to the odd way I write or if all poses would when so out of practice
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.
Tools definitely matter. If fountain pens just aren't practical or not your thing, modern pens like the uni jetstream are excellent as well.
Any suggestions on how to get into fountain pens? I handwrite a lot, but fountain pens have always intimidated me.
Get a pack of Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens. Just write with them, with no pressure. The cheapness and disposability means no reason to be intimidated. Then after you go through one pack of Varsities, buy a Pilot Metropolitan for about $20, and optionally a $10 piston-fill adapter and a bottle of ink. A Metropolitan is one of the cheapest "good enough" fountain pens.
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.
For handwriting in general, I would not recommend a fountain pen. For cursive in particular, though, sure. The soft, pressure-sensitive tip of a fountain pen is the only place where cursive really makes sense to me. With a ballpoint, felt-tip, or pencil, printing feels much more natural.
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 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.
> it’s just true that this method reliably worked for me
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/
The studies you linked are garbage not related to the only part that matters - learning. What they measured is that if you ride a bike while listening your legs will have higher muscle activity, and so will your brain that managed those legs.
There is only downside in distracting yourself to have to copy everything verbatim instead of, you know, actually focusing on the material being presented
Currently, at work, I can't make progress on anything to do with geometry or graph structure or math without LIBERAL use of scratch paper.
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.
I did the same, double copy: one during the lesson, ugly and full of mistakes, and one at home, well done and corrected. Took time, but I really made sure I understood the topic.
I'm your opposite as the extremely sparse note-taker. I can use a notepad for writing down basic checklists but absolutely cannot take notes when learning. My main way of learning, and doing cognitive work in general, is of listening/absorbing, then ruminating and synthesizing my own new ideas later.
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...
The best tests in school were ones that allowed me to bring in a notecard of notes. I would have to ration out the information I was going to write; how and where and how big were all important.
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.
In college I always took notes in class then I would rewrite them and at the same time organize them. In my study groups people would always copy my re-written notes. There was certainly something there aiding in learning, more than just sending a document of notes and just reading it.
Sometimes I'd just take one set of notes and then not look at them after.
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.
Aside from learning, I also find that pen-and-paper is much more effective for journaling, when I want to work through a problem or brainstorm something. Once I've worked it out, I'll often type it in so I've got it saved in a searchable, archivable form. But putting it on paper first seems to help me think about it. It's like I see the words in a deeper way than when I'm putting them on the screen.
The thing is, writing on paper is much slower and hurtful than typing, but then again maybe that's the point when the goal is to keep it brain-stored and understood.
Same here. Part of me wonders if primary school trains your brain to learn via writing things down on paper.
Similar experience, I took written notes in uni and it worked pretty well. I think my laziness helped - I wanted to write the minimal set of notes possible, so it encouraged me to understand the content, figure out what was significant, then write that down.
I find it odd that some people find that way of teaching/learning odd.
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.
No constraints when writing. Not having to fit your thoughts into some predetermined format on the computer helps.
This echoes a lot of my own thoughts. I've taken to carrying a pen and small notebook around. At first, it was to help spend less time on my phone while eating out or something, and to keep track of all of those 'wow cool ideas' about building MTG decks, and 'what if' scenarios for a Pathfinder game I'm in.
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.
I agree. I still design my algorithms and software architecture on paper, and keep "lab notebooks" for serious projects.
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.
Why not try to refine what you have in your mind for a couple of cycles before putting it down to paper, or typing it out?
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.
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.
YMMV.
> degradation in motor skills
If 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.
Machines have been writing with pens for longer than I've been alive - since 1958 according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter#History.
For that matters, pens are a type of machine. if you use a pen you are a machine operator.
A pen is a tool not a machine, or does your pen have a motor?
Machines that can hand write already exist: https://bantamtools.com/collections/bantam-tools-nextdraw
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.
> "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."
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.
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.
Usually archive link is at the top of the comments
I wonder what broke in this case
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 >_<.
I guess I've been out of college for a decade now. Did they get rid of blue books or something? I was forced to always sit with handwritten exams, including some CS ones.
"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
> Most of my handwriting these days is working out ideas on paper when I'm stuck on something in code.
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 scribble about programming because nothing digital has so far allowed me to use spatial arrangement, arrows and such to organize my thoughts as conveniently.
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.)
A lot of my doodlings are remembering which trig operator I have to use. It's usually tan
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.
I feel completely opposite. When I write, I find that my brain is overflowing with different ideas and different sentence structures. If I write by hand, by the time I finish writing out the first idea the second is gone from my brain. When I type on a keyboard I actually can finish typing out the first idea without forgetting the second.
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.
Overheard a bank teller the other day saying they're teaching cursive in school again. And she makes her kids hand write thank notes for b'day gifts.
Back In My Day we did cuneiform on stone tablets, and were grateful. Postage was a lot less back then too.
This is a false equivalence. One is a tedious and deprecated way of writing, the other is a complete dependence in technology. Imagine if the power goes down. The kids won't be able to write anymore.
Okay great. One in 10.000 that has a typewriter will be able to write.
While they are definitely not in common use and probably have some defects, I don't think they are that seldom. Most are probably rotting in the cellar/attic.
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.
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.
* https://lfpress.com/news/local-news/analysis-why-handwriting...
* https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/cursive-writing-ontar...
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.
Oh that takes me back to uni. I was trying to learn Greek at the time. So all of my grocery lists and to-do's were just English, transliterated with Greek letters.
While good handwriting is a skill that can be taught and learned, not everyone can learn it. Like art, some people have an innate ability, and some have no ability and never will.
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 love writing cursive, there's a zen to it.
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.
I haven't written cursive for years and inspired by this article just tried it out and it still works! I never had a pretty hand writting and it's still just as ugly but very much functional.
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.
My handwriting was especially bad even before smartphones, so I'm glad I rarely need to write anymore.
When I lived in Japan my method of study was to write down all the kanji I didn't know. I don't really think you can learn a language like Japanese without writing it down. There is something magical about writing that locks information into your brain in a way very different from just reading it on a smart phone.
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.
My Handwriting is, actually, not bad at all. During school days, we four friends used to kinda compete on many things, including Handwriting. We tried a lot, from cursive to type-like to stick, to cowboy’s rope, to queen’s drape, and all sorts.
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/
In the late 1970s to early 80s, I learned a more or less standard cursive for the time. My high school, college, and even graduate school education relied a lot on "blue book" exams, short essays written in class, in cursive. Over that period, my cursive declined into an illegible scrawl simply because I was optimizing for speed. I did develop a 100wpm typing speed, but that probably wasn't a major contributing factor.
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.
I wonder if slide to type has any overlap with cursive writing.
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.
I recently picked up my fountain pens after a 5 year hiatus. I used to collect them in my college years and continued using them in grad school. I loved the feeling of writing formulas on blank sheets of paper and pretending to look like a Physicist. But it all stopped after I began working with a computer. I started to collect HHKBs instead. I find it much easier to gather my thoughts and think logically and remember stuff when I’m writing with my hands.
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.
One person who has been hoeing this row hard is Kate Gladstone:
https://handwritingrepair.info/
Certainly, requiring that folks write things out legibly is one way to address cheating using AI.
I've been keeping a journal since the '90s, handwritten in cursive. Other than my signature, it's the only cursive writing I do. Everything else I use block capitals. Writing by hand helps you remember things in a way that typing does not (though taking notes of any kind helps).
You can have my Japanese fountain pen and mechanical pencil when you pry them from my cold, dead hand.
Meanwhile, the Japanese Stationary Store Awards 2025 just happened [0].
The Japanese are famiously behind everyone else in dropping hand writing. In part because their script is really hard to type (or so I'm given to understand), in part just culture. We can debate if hand writing is good or bad, but an outlier example is not part of any useful debate.
The script is not hard to type; in fact, a similar problem is happening there as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
My father has dozens of notebooks in which he writes prose. I couldn't imagine doing the same. I want my writing to be searchable and digitalized. It's easier to edit text when it's not committed to ink.
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.
This would actually be a cool use case for AR glasses- digitize everything as you write it, tie it to the physical notebook it’s in, so that you can later search it, or have the system tell you things like “you wrote your thoughts on your summer 2032 London trip in pages 34-39 of the red muji notebook that should currently be in your desk’s bottom drawer”.
I do a lot of writing by hand, and I have books and loose papers to write in, and several pencils and erasers. I also use the computer for writing, but perhaps just as often I write by hand.
Not OP but I write by hand daily, I take all my meeting notes by hand and all my personal notes by hand too actually. Over a full day I probably do an hour or so of writing. I also often lug quite a few different notebooks around with me (agenda, customer notes, meeting scratch, brainstorming/abstracting): https://s.h4x.club/8LuKkvpP - I'm a bizniz person on the strategy/growth side of things.
I agree with the common sentiment that handwriting is a great tool for thinking. I prefer paperless studying, but I'm always looking for good tools for writing on my electronic devices. Although formal typesetting is beautiful, my long-standing habit of handwriting always makes me want to add my own notes. That's why I really like using OneNote, as it allows me to combine both typing and handwriting.
I don't write often anymore (since I can touchtype much faster), but on the occasions when I do, the "trick" I've found is to write big (like, think of how you'd want to write, then enlarge 2x2 or even bigger). This allows me some latitude when lines or curves go awry (which on smaller writing would be too obvious), and also visually dampens (since the "font" is so big) the amount of off-alignment of the letters.
I was an artistic kid and essentially came up with my own distinct handwriting "font". It was beautiful. 35 years later, all typing, I've lost most of it. Now my handwriting is illegible especially because that "font" is still the way I write but I don't have the muscle memory to execute it any more. The whole use it or lose it is very real.
For me, it's the opposite. I had been steadily moving from writing by hand to writing on a computer/device, even though it's so much easier to think clearly when writing by hand, due to search, reminders, etc. Now I write as much as I want by hand, have Gemini convert it to markdown, and I have the best of both worlds.
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.
The vast majority of written works did not survive. Paper will rot, and inks fade - in the typical case you only get a couple hundred years (deserts like Egypt give you thousands - which is why archaeology is so interested in Egypt, there is a lot more remaining to study but we have no idea how Egypt reflects people elsewhere). Before the printing press, books had to be copied by hand each copy separately - this is a lot of labor. I'm told (I can't find prices online, just contact us...) that you can buy a hand copied of the Torah (first 5 books of the bible) for prices starting at $50,000, and if you want a known scribes' work the cost can go up to $200,000 - this is a bit of an outlier as the Torah is a sacred work and so they will start over if there is even one mistake (not cross out the mistake), but still that gives you the idea of why you would choose not to copy a book if it wasn't extremely important.
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)
True, at the expense of being even harder to write than pen/ink.
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.
Ancient Greek is also important to our human past. So are the other hundreds of dead languages. Nobody would disagree that someone should know how to read them, but few argue that every single person should be fluent in them.
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.
> For years, smartphones and computers have threatened to erase writing by hand. Would that be so bad?
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...
I understand your opinion and I'm curious as to your reasoning why it would be bad.
Betteridge's law still stands. That wouldn't be bad.
(If it would be bad, we wouldn't stop writing by hand)
For me, cursive ended decades ago when I started college. Printing I can still do and do it rather quickly. But as always, I am the only one who can read it. This devolution started will before Email became a thing.
But I wonder how many young people are comfortable with writing in general, printing or cursive.
I got high marks for cursive in grade school, but I switched to printing in high school when I took Latin, because it made the distinction clearer between m's and n's and things like that. Forty years later, I'm trying to go back to cursive because it's faster, but it's a whole lot harder now.
Handwriting is an embodied form of thought. Its indirect utility isn't easily replaced by board-keying or tippy-tapping on a screen.
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.
As someone who despite all attempts at improvement has always had handwriting that looks more like what a chicken might create on paper if you inked its feet and fed it meth, good riddance. Being left-handed too, think smeared chicken scratches.
for me, the end of handwriting wasn't where/when I learned it, I learned cursive in kindergarten, and continued it for many years. it wasn't until I ran into teachers who valued time over accuracy that I faulted (it's not defaulted) and started writing scratch (which I can't even read!), and then typing.
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 hate seeing teachers destroy a child’s good handwriting.
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 actually write more quickly in block print than I do cursive. My left-handedness and the various accommodations I’ve adopted might have something to do with it.
I write tons of stuff by hand. I journal and take pages of notes every day.
Handwriting certainly won't die until I do, at the very least.
There's a thing in China where younger generations have to write out the pinyin for certain words when writing notes by hand. (I'm not sure if it's because they've forgotten the characters, or just how to write them. Maybe a little of both?)
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!
I fucking hate hand writing. It stems from a formally diagnosed issue (no not dyslexia.)
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.)
Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth. There are people living in mud huts that have smart phones, even though they cook on an open fire and use candles for light. More than half the world population has smart phones, and even some very poor countries have surprisingly high penetration.
>Everyone has a smartphone is close enough to the truth.
Again, youre dreaming. Not even close to 6/7 billion smartphone owners.
https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/smartphone-owner...
I continue to argue that if it were actually, practically useful, it would not be dying. People would just use it all the time because it is so useful. That's not the world we live in.
This is the problem of today's world in every level. We need to see "direct, immediate practical uses" of something, and if we can't, we deem it's not useful and start to phase it out.
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.
There is also "concrete and mounting evidence" for the unacceptable dangers of mass vaccination - according to anti-vaxxers.
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.
I understand. In the comments there are already links to high quality research, plus experiences of the users.
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.
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.