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Comment by dominotw | Hacker News Reader

Do you think it has anything to do with girls having better handwriting.

I couldn't improve my handwriting for the life of me when i was in school and got really poor grades from teachers not being able to read what i was writing.

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Today, it's typing. I've seen the difference in kids. I think readability may be one issue, but perhaps even more important is that if writing is physically awkward and painful, it leads to writing fewer words and doing fewer edits.

My own experience was that learning to type, thanks to getting interested in programming, was game changing. All I can say is that I could write lengthy essays and reports in a jiffy. Still can.

> Today, it's typing.

Not for math, at least not for my kids. I was helping my son with his high school physics homework a few days ago, and IMO his poor handwriting was a genuine impediment to his mathematical problem-solving.

Layout is more important than handwriting for maths, no?

poorly written 7's can look like 1's, and 5's like 6's. I lost a lot of points in high school math because I couldn't read what I had just written on the previous line!

Taking notes for my maths degree I learnt to 'cross' my 7s and zs.

More suggestions that I learnt: Put a line at the base of your 1, otherwise it looks like a lowercase l. Plus it helps distinguish it from 7's that aren't crossed out.

Same goes for 4's. A lot of people don't make the top into a closed triangle shape. Instead they write it like an unfinished or upside-down h.

I had a similar issue, made worse by the fact that I was left handed and writing from left to right. So aside from smudges, I’d visually cover what I had just written. Plenty of opportunities to lose train of thought or misread something

That's true. My college freshman physics teacher took me aside after the first couple of assignments and said: "You'd make fewer mistakes if you could read your own handwriting."

I hated writing and editing way back when. What I should have done looking back is use scissors and tape to patch different paragraphs together, rather than writing down the side of the page in the margins to fit in the edited text

Schools have largely (and probably wisely) abandoned looped cursive handwriting, a fiendishly difficult sort of writing with variant letter forms and complicated joins, but I tend to think that teaching cursive italic, a simple and beautiful form of cursive writing (think William Shakespeare rather than Thomas Jefferson) that uses the same letter forms as printed italic with simple joins, would make it easier for boys and girls to develop better handwriting overall, both printed and cursive.

That being said, handwritten long-form text seems like a rarity in the age of computers, though I still feel that I express things differently in handwriting.

I've had a terrible handwriting, and we had 'calligraphy' in like 3rd-4th grade or so, where I consistently received 1s and 0s, sometimes 2s (of 12), switched few schools, and the only person who cared enough about teaching me writing, instead of "grading" it, was my math teacher in high school, maybe it didn't become perfect, but it became readable, and for that I'm grateful to her.

Even though I'm mostly typing now, it helped me in university and it helps me sometimes when solving problems on paper is easier than with computers.

Fine and large motor skills develop unevenly across genders/brain structures. There may be a link here, a feedback loop.

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