by customguy 4 hours ago
> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary.
I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.
It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.
i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy.
i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.
and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.
i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.
I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.
These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.
I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.
That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here
Well sure, but if you force feed anything clumsily you can ruin it. We had a nice teacher, and took our sweet time in first grade learning to write the alphabet in first grade. Then it was done. IMO it wasn't "additional material", or material at all, it was part of the fundamental skill set with which to interact with the material. And there wasn't a thought in my mind that it could be any other way, of course you learn to read and write when you go to school.
How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?
I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper.
I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.
> I think everybody should be able to write cursive
As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?
Not disagreeing with your opinion, just answering your question:
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.
It's been clearly shown to be beneficial for some people. I too happen to be one of them.
For others, hearing stuff (and saying stuff) out loud is more useful. I had a friend who'd make nonsense songs of stuff to learn: just doggerel, but by singing it to himself when revising, he had a massive uptick in retention. He was so happy when he worked that out.
I imagine there might be other modes that work for other people too?
And I strongly disagree.
The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.
And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.
Different strokes
Are you sure this is a permanent fact about you and not something that would change if it became habitual?
I mean, I have no way of knowing if it's the former or the latter. But I've been noticing recently when people treat their traits as changeable and when they treat them as core to their being. I don't really have any faith that, in most cases, one can differentiate the two as much as one thinks one can.
Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22
Do you acknowledge you're a minority?
I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.
But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.
That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.
I'm hopeless at pure cursive writing. My default writing is a joined-up-ish kind of printing. Writing using it works really well for retaining information for me.
point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.
I just like it, the same way you hate it. If disliking it is valid, surely so is liking it?
It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.
... And there are jobs that use those skills.
Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/
My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.
So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?
If everything is just extremes, then acknowledge that the other extreme then is everybody sitting on their ass watching "Ow! My balls!", clad in advertisements. And given the choice between those two worlds, yes, everybody should have the dexterity of a surgeon.
Learning cursive won't automatically give you the dexterity of a dental surgeon, that's just a silly conclusion you have drawn from one example.
What is the downside of learning cursive?
If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...
I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.
Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.
What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?
The big advantage of writing in cursive is speed and less muscle fatigue. Writing in cursive requires far less lifts of the pen and far less tiny movements... a reasonable cursive script (Spencerian, but with a little less flourish) is quite easy to write legibly and with speed, with just a little practice.
The junk that used to be taught in US schools (a type of Palmer cursive) it not fun to read or write.
BUT, the above analysis only really applies to people who want to write, and want to write a lot.
(Apologies for repeating my reply from above here as well.)
What's the benefit of a HNSW KNN search over brute forcing it? Speed, with minimal loss of accuracy.
Cursive vs printing (I'm guessing that's what you mean by "standard writing") is exactly the same, provided you can actually write in cursive. If you weren't taught in school, then sucks to be you, I guess? Modern pedagogy has a lot to answer for :(
When each word is a smooth continuous line I can write faster and with less effort. The short up and down motions of printed letters tires out my hand.
What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?
No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.
In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything.
In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.
When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.