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Comment by magic_beans | Hacker News Reader

Yes. And this was in 1998. Feels ridiculously irrelevant. Just like my third grade teacher who was adamant that we would only ever be able to write in cursive and in black ink in high school, college, and the workplace, and that to write in manuscript with pencils was not something any respectable adult would do...

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I doing some work in a school just a year ago that still taught cursive to their students. I asked why and their response was pretty much just "because that's what you do in third grade." I don't get it.

"[...] These findings demonstrate that handwriting is important for the early recruitment in letter processing of brain regions known to underlie successful reading."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4274624/

Some educators specializing in dyslexia treatment point to research around cursive handwriting being a helpful tool:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/connecting-dots-role-cur...

You only learn to write cursive in third grade in the US? So you learn to write "print letters" first and then cursive? In Hungary we only learn cursive, and in first grade. As one gets older they generally move towards a mixture of that and print letters, though. Still I find some form of cursive to be much faster to write compared to print letters.

And even though I don't write huge letters and pages of text in handwriting, I do take notes and write scribbles to organize my thought very often. It's not like typing has replaced all use cases of handwriting.

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