[HN Gopher] Shunned in computer age, cursive makes a comeback in...
___________________________________________________________________
Shunned in computer age, cursive makes a comeback in California
Author : pseudolus
Score : 26 points
Date : 2024-01-27 14:33 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| denali53 wrote:
| I've always found that note-taking by hand in school and
| university (implicitly through cursive, because I would find
| writing out in block letters way too tedious) - to really help
| recall and understanding, even if I was writing down what I hear
| by wrote. Have never had the same feeling typing out the same way
| into a laptop (which is what I now do at work) - that ends up
| more as a data-filing exercise.
| mig39 wrote:
| In education, that's called "multiple means of representation."
| If you just listen to a lecture, you will remember a bit of it.
| If there are visuals along with the lecture, you'll remember
| some more. If you write stuff down, type stuff out, discuss it
| with a group, you'll remember even more.
|
| I take handwritten notes all the time, but rarely have to refer
| back to them.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| Yeah, same. Very rarely return to my notes. Writing the note
| and maybe glancing back at it a few times "in the moment" is
| enough to help with retention later on.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > In education, that's called "multiple means of
| representation." If you just listen to a lecture, you will
| remember a bit of it. If there are visuals along with the
| lecture, you'll remember some more. If you write stuff down,
| type stuff out, discuss it with a group, you'll remember even
| more.
|
| However, that doesn't explain why the effect is stronger for
| handwriting vs typing.
|
| My personal belief is that this is learned behavior, ie most
| of us were taught to take notes by hand at an early age and
| that leads to brain treating them a certain way.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| I use cursive to write a personal note, and also use many
| variations of typefaces in brush or cursive style for art
| projects. The world is aesthetically poorer without cursive IMHO.
| People who do not write that way are almost always able to read
| it when they try, in recent experience.
|
| Interested to hear what other non-English languages have cursive
| forms.
| krab wrote:
| I think most of the latin alphabet languages have cursive
| forms. Cyrillic as well. Definitely English is no exception.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| The Cyrillic variant is almost a different set of characters!
| And the flowing into each other takes such an extreme there,
| that my last name is a nigh-illegible series of wavelets.
|
| I have no idea how Russian, Ukrainian, etc., historians
| manage to read old Cyrillic documents.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| Honestly, if you look at old German documents written in
| the Kurrent cursive system, it's about as bad. For the most
| part, it's just a matter practice and familiarity with the
| writing system.
|
| Lishin though, that's definitely a rough one.
| krab wrote:
| The latin cursive scripts differ country by country. And
| reading old letters, even if it's in my language, is very
| hard. The letters looked differently. A proficient writer
| would write them consistently but to read it, you're
| looking for "distinguishing traits", not for the letter
| shape as depicted to learners.
| trealira wrote:
| Chinese and Japanese characters also have cursive traditions.
| The normal handwritten form of a character often looks
| significantly different to its printed form. Lines that are
| separate in print form become one squiggly line in cursive
| form, so stroke order is pretty important. For example, this is
| Si , a pronoun to refer to yourself in Japanese:
|
| http://db.yamasa.org/ocjs/kanjidic.nsf/a7397e6ad510cc2a49256...
| mig39 wrote:
| I think handwriting is important, but "cursive" is meant for
| quills, where if you lift your pen, the ink spills out.
|
| They should teach good handwriting, and not worry so much about
| having letters that have to flow into each other.
| lacrimacida wrote:
| To me thats a strange take. Letters that flow into eachother
| make it easier to write IMO. To Me it's a bit similar to just
| using a keyboard and taking the hand off the keyboard to fuss
| with the mouse.
| progbits wrote:
| Easier to write maybe (when I take notes just for myself I
| use a messy mix of cursive and print that no one else could
| read) but I think it's harder to read, especially for wide
| audience.
|
| Depends on what you optimize for I suppose.
|
| I absolutely despite printed out text in cursive font. There
| is no purpose, it tries to look cute but is just hard to
| read.
| trealira wrote:
| Yeah, as someone who taught themselves Palmer script [0] in
| high school, I learned that it can only really be written fast
| if you have a fountain pen (which made me buy a cheap fountain
| pen), and that it's hard to write block letters using one. It's
| easier to accurately trace the shapes of cursive using a
| ballpoint pen, but because you have to press down a lot more to
| get a solid line on the page, you're forced to write more
| slowly.
|
| I think something like Getty-Dubay Italic [1][2] is more
| appropriate for pencils and ballpoint pens, and for teaching
| children to write. It's also a more basic script than cursive.
| The primary thing is learning the basic shapes that make up
| most lowercase/minuscule letters.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Method
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getty-Dubay_Italic
|
| [2]: https://handwritingsuccess.com/italic-examples/
| wrycoder wrote:
| So, what do you do between words?
|
| Note: the ink doesn't "spill out", if you cut the quill
| correctly, and it certainly doesn't spill out of a metal nib.
| floren wrote:
| This is a nonsense take; look at historical scripts like uncial
| or Carolingian miniscule, which were written with quills and
| definitely involve lifting the pen, often multiple times per
| letter.
| snovymgodym wrote:
| In my experience, the Latin cursive that you may or may not have
| learned in an American classroom sucks. Common characters require
| too many strokes or raising the pen. Having to dot your i's and
| cross your t's breaks the flow. Also lots of people can't even
| read it.
|
| It was only when I learned Russian Cyrillic that I grew to
| appreciate a good cursive writing system. It's super fast, most
| characters resemble their printed counterpart, and lots of words
| can be written without needing to lift the pen once. Yes, there's
| some ambiguity like li and sh, but that's rarely a problem once
| you actually know the language. In comparison to the English
| cursive I learned in school, it actually feels like a system
| intended to be read and written by regular people for everyday
| use.
| cko wrote:
| Tangentially, as a pharmacist I could always tell which doctors
| grew up in Russia. All of them have this nice loopy cursive way
| of writing.
| mnky9800n wrote:
| What I like about russian cursive is that most letters
| terminate at the bottom instead of the top which means you
| don't need to cross over a letter or make some other mark that
| is messy to start the next letter.
| countWSS wrote:
| I initially wrote cursive, then turned to block letters as it was
| more intelligible and lately write in cursive-block hybrid that
| is easier to read/write, where simple block letters are written
| with curves and not connected(easier to read). The normal cursive
| with its dense letters is fairly hard to read, especially if
| light strokes are used, and stuff like doctors shorthand is
| practically cryptology-tier.
| baerrie wrote:
| My print handwriting is terrible but my cursive is pretty good.
| For that reason I have switched to exclusively cursive when
| writing anything personal. Also, you can create your own little
| embellishments and style which is fun
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| In the UK I don't even remember any other option than joined up
| handwriting. I'm pretty sure it is still the only option in
| schools. Writing in block letters was seen as juvenile. I presume
| that's not the case in other parts of that world?
| IshKebab wrote:
| Yes, though I realised what Americans call "cursive" is much
| much more prescriptive than our joined-up handwriting. There
| are rules... whereas ours is pretty much "join each letter to
| the next one".
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| Brahmic scripts such as devanagari, Gurmukhi, and Bengali are
| noted for joining glyphs with a long horizontal line across the
| top ( _shirorekha_ ). However, other examples such as Tamil use
| more curls and curves, and lack the shirorekha.
|
| I am told that one reason for this change was because manuscripts
| in certain regions used parchment or vellum, and in other regions
| used palm leaves. Writing on a palm leaf, if you made long,
| straight horizontal marks on it, you could split the fibers.
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Thiruvaymoli_palm_ma...
|
| https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Palm-leaf_manuscript...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-01-27 23:01 UTC)