Hacker News Reader

Comment by izacus | Hacker News Reader

Why is improving your handwriting out of the question?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia

There's a very specific part of the brain responsible for the movement planning and fine motor control required for writing. Some folks have it underdeveloped, and need to spend an inordinate amount of effort and concentration in order to write. And even then, their writing will often degrade over time as they fatigue.

Oook, but is that the case with the OP or is it an excuse? Handwriting does require a bit of practice (children usually do it for a few years to get good).

It's not an "excuse" because he doesn't have to excuse himself to anyone for his handwriting. He found what works for him.

I can say that in my case my 6th grade teacher started paying close attention and noticed that when I was trying my hardest to be neat I was doing like my peer at their worst. He had the school counselors do some tests which didn't result in anything other that agreement that I have an inability to write neat.

I first head about Dysgraphia 10 right here though - the symptoms a familiar enough for a self-diagnosis, but as all self-diagnosis there might be something else.

My teachers noticed it in the 3rd grade. I was able to write cursive, but it took me far longer. The result of this is me using a device called an Alphasmart (they stopped making them a couple of years go), through the rest of my education.

Yes it is.

Another bad handwriting guy here. For me, the answer is "I have better things to do". Learning to cut out distractions on a laptop will serve me better (IMO).

Although in grad school I never used to a digital method of annotating papers and did it by hand anyway.

Its not an option for everyone. I had a classmate in undergrad who had a medical condition where they could not take notes by hand. They even had a doctor's note saying that they had to have a laptop in class.

True, but Compuguy was not referring to people with medical conditions in my opinion. He is referring to the "many" that don't want make a concentrated effort to improve their handwriting but could if they did.

If a student has a medical condition that makes it so their handwriting is not legible then they probably had the same issue in HS and should be able to navigate College bureaucracy well enough to get the exemption status.

I should of mentioned it earlier, but I do have a medical condition, which a previous poster mentioned (Dysgraphia). I also did "navigate" the college bureaucracy and sometimes had to push teachers to allow use of a tablet or laptop, even with an exemption.

Not physically able to use hands != perfectly able to use hands but was failed by their elementary school system and now rationalizes that learning to write legibly is somehow a waste of time ;)

Not to be too personal, 99% of college students (including myself back in the day) are lazy rationalizers in some fashion. In my experience it's not until Junior/Senior year that some majors start squeezing that out.

Just remembering the amount of excuses and ways we used to rationalize our laziness in college really makes me cringe :P

Most people do grow up tho.

On the other hand, I had some number of years of handwriting class in grade school (Palmer script) and handwriting was consistently my lowest grade as I recall. It's never been good in spite of considerable practice--and it's slowly deteriorated to almost illegible today.

I'm in the same situation, my handwriting is illegibly bad, even by myself - the main reason I don't want to improve it is that I just don't use it, haven't for years, it'd be an incredible waste of time and effort. There's no motivating reason to do it except for perhaps some very abstract learning benefit - which hasn't to my knowledge even been proven out in the software engineering or computer science field, where it arguably makes the least sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com