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Comment by nordsieck | Hacker News Reader

> Playing the devil's advocate here, why should we teach handwriting at all? Why not just have first-graders learn to type?

I really can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.

The most obvious response is: sometimes you have to fill out forms on the spot.

Also, I personally find that I have much greater retention for handwritten vs typed information.

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Also, even in the future, the power will go off once in awhile. Hand-writing would be like swimming. Not necessarily used much, but a skill worth keeping.

The level of training you need for basic swimming is only a couple hours. The teaching for handwriting is a lot more than that.

Anyone who uses the latin alphabet will have the character shapes memorized, so I'm sure they'd do just fine for emergency use even if they'd basically never written before.

That said, a huge amount of handwriting curriculum is actually motor skills practice, and that's pretty important!

Handwriting small notes in a meeting is less obtrusive than hauling out a laptop or thumbing a phone. I carry a 3.5 by 5.5 inch Cahier and a Spacepen at all times. If I need to write more extensively, I use one of my fountain pens.

It's also free-form. If I want to include a sketch or some math, it's easy.

"Also, I personally find that I have much greater retention for handwritten vs typed information."

Studies support your anecdote: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/taking-notes-by-hand-c...

All of those studies were funded by Big Pencil companies...a lot of bias.

Pentel, more like cartel, right?

Exactly!

Shh, they'll send Big Eraser to rub you out.

Interesting! I've watched my wife writing things while studying that I can't imagine her ever referring to and I have the impression she regards writing it as a means of helping her learn. I'm aware of the value of taking notes but what she's doing is direct copying, no digesting.

All the forms I ever had to fill were in block letters. In fact as a kid we only learned cursive so I wasn't used to writing in block letters when filling in forms which was weird.

Are people referring to cursive as any type of manual writing?

You use both. Commonly referred to as printing and cursive. First, you learn to print, then you lean cursive.

Lately, people have been calling printing "manuscript", which is either silly or an attempt to dignify it.

Nowadays, some say, why learn handwriting? Why learn arithmetic? We have calculators and keyboards, after all.

It's sad, but there will be a revival someday.

That's an argument for learning how to print though (which I agree is necessary) rather than learning cursive.

I wonder if that retention has to do with having learned handwriting before typing, and that one who learns typing first would have equal retention to one who writes. Would be interesting if a study is done on this! (Of course, carefully, so as not at the expense of children)

No. I believe it has to do with the greater richness of motion involved. Writing a letter involves more effort and a specific motion of the hand for each letter and these are different for each letter (pushing keys on a keyboard is largely undifferentiated; what really varies is the position the fingers have to go, not the motion needed to produce a character which is the same). This, I think, exploits spatial memory as well (note how mnemonic devices like the method of loci work).

That does matter! A Stanford study on brain computer interface implants found that 'mentally handwriting' instead of 'mentally typing' was more than twice as fast, in some cases over triple. Because of those different motions/patterns for each letter.

>https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2021/05/software-turn...

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