What Killed Penmanship?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I handwrite all of my personal things (journals, drafts of a few novels, todos, etc) and find it both pleasant and more effective than doing so in org-mode or similar digital tools. This is primarily because handwriting triggers a mnemonic effect that allows me to retain information with very little effort, whereas typing does not.
I also just enjoy spending time on written art away from the computer, which I otherwise live on all day for work. Sitting down at my laptop for recreation starts to feel like work really fast. Sitting down with a notebook and my favorite fountain pen feels like play.
Nowadays, when I write by hand, it is always in haste, standing awkwardly in front of some flat surface, and using a scrap of paper and a partial dried-out pen I got for free a decade or more ago. No wonder my writing has gotten worse! And it wasn't good to begin with.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I've not kept the preparatory aspects of good writing from the past when I am "writing" on my computer. The keyboard is always there, a fresh "sheet of paper" always at hand, and it is so easy to edit and change my writing afterward, that I don't care much about thinking before writing.
(okay, yes, also the inks themselves were completely different, with fountain pens having to use dyed water solutions to avoid clogging the pen, whereas dip pen inks actually have solid particles of pigment held in suspension in their ink, giving bolder colors and darker blacks when dry on the page; if you put a dip pen's ink in a fountain pen it would very quickly clog up with those pigment particles. And back in the day, it would probably eat right through the latex bladders the ink was stored in)
The fountain pens you get today are very different from the ones back then; they have stiff nibs which can survive the sorts of pressures that ballpoint users are used to inflicting on their pens, and they're equipped with quick-drying ink. They're pretty much indestructable under normal usage. But back in the day a fountain pen required a very light touch and some patience (or blotting paper) to ensure the writing didn't smudge and that you didn't damage the nib.
(there's been a mild resurgence in the popularity of flex nibs in fountain pens over the past few years. I haven't seen any which have anything like the flexibility you see in real vintage pens, but it's a lot more than we've seen in fifty years and it's nice to see them making a modest return!)
Now I want a vintage fountain pen
Every once in a while I find a census where the census taker printed, and I weep with joy. Bad print is so much easier to read than bad cursive.
Like many things in education, the actual objective is often not obvious and sometimes the neurological benefit is a side effect.
Same with cutting shapes, posing toy figures, and applying glue. I have a 12 y/o and a 7 y/o and it's amazing to see their arts and crafts development over time as they develop their fine motor skills and dexterity through a variety of teaching methods.
These fine motor skills are precursors to uplevel skills like touch typing. Why not start with touch typing? I couldn't train my daughter to touch type until her hands were big enough (around first grade, but still too small TBH). A 4 year old has an awful hard time using a mouse because they lack the motor controls to precisely manipulate with accuracy (I observed this first hand as my pre-schooler did virtual school during lockdowns -- we switched her to a touch device).
How do you develop those neuromuscular pathways? Through seemingly useless and repetitive training like correctly holding a pencil or crayon, tracing letters with precision, cutting various shapes out of card stock, coloring within the lines, etc. Kids start with gross motor skills that use their whole limbs and then slowly build fine motor skills that involve complex wrist and finger movements through practice of various techniques.
If you observe children with developmental disabilities, they have a hard time performing seemingly basic tasks like coloring within the lines. In many cases they cannot even "correctly" hold a crayon or pencil in a way that allows precise control. Their movements rely far more on gross motor skills because they cannot develop the neuro pathways required for fine control of their muscles [0].
Fine motor skills were perhaps more important in the days of manufacturing (e.g. sewing, parts assembly, wood working, metal smithing) and maybe why Asia seems to be particularly good at manufacturing and assembly of electronics. But I see such skills as still relevant today: touch typing, surgery, digital arts. Perhaps that's a contributing reason to why we don't seen as much precision manufacturing in the West even when cheap labor is available in Central and South America.
[0] My spouse was a teacher for many years, transitioned into special education first as a learning disabilities teacher consultant and now as a special services supervisor.
Maybe they find it hard to teach because they (1) don’t know how, (2) they’ve been busy miseducating people with the hidden curriculum. When my son was in school they were at the tail end of trying to teach handwriting and they sent home worksheets that were titled “Handwriting without tears” which is a confession that this is a sadistic exercise.
Like the practice of having kids “cry it out” in a crib, and the 110% support that bullies get all the way up from teachers to the school superintendent, it’s all part of a curriculum that teaches people that people in authority can abuse you all they want and there is nothing you can do about it, though people like Sam Bankman Fried get to go to private schools where people respect your autonomy and you don’t get crushed down…. They have to crush you down so that those people don’t get competition for running the world.
I did not find art class agonizing the way I found handwriting but my impression then was that there was some small group of kids, maybe 5-10%, mostly girls, who did much better than the rest of us and my belief is those same people do better quality work of that sort than the rest of us now.
Some of those activities like art and music are activities that only some people are going to really benefit from. I learned to touch type, I think, because I really wanted to and because I found working with computers to be meaningful. Had I been exposed to music in a way that engaged me I might have gotten something out of it but instead I got endless drilling with the recorder that hurt my hands and nobody told me how to reliably make more than three notes, something I figured out only decades later after I’d gotten a PhD in nonlinear mechanics enough to understand the sound generation process.
What I know about physical training is that pain (for the most part: the “burn” in weight training is helpful but twinges of pain from your tendons aren’t) is the enemy of progress and that all you get from painful training is no progress, more pain and muscular inhibition. Worse, the experience of pain causes you to get better at feeling pain. Time and time again I learned the only way to make progress was to eliminate the pain first, once I did that I’d go from years of no progress to rapid progress from day to day. Who knows how many cases of chronic pain today date back to kids in school being told to disregard pain and soldier onward through unproductive and wasteful activities?
Of course an inanimate object doesn't want anything, but it felt way more natural to write connected.
On the other hand, no matter what type of pen or pencil I use, it does not feel natural to write connected, so I don't.
My conclusion based on this is that cursive is something we do, because it made sense once, but we didn't know why, so we never stopped when it no longer made sense.
The issues I notice: the stylus must be lifted far off the screen to deregister the touch. It’s also bad at registering where a pen down motion touches the screen if it’s in motion. Cursive writing makes the results neater.
And then in 5th grade, one of the teachers decided that I needed more practice, and did the same thing. And guess what? I got even worse.
It turns out that you can't actually force someone to write better, you can just cause them more pain.
Unfortunately, unless one is born with the resources to pursue a truly individualized education, our education system is designed to benefit the most number of students with the lowest cost to implement. A classroom with 12:1 student to teacher ratio will surely be more effective than a classroom with 24:1, but are you willing to increase your property taxes to hire 2x the number of teachers?
Indeed, many students like yourself will not progress optimally in such a system, but perhaps until AI develops to the extent that we can have a fully individual educational experience that kids can actually adhere to (having seen my 4 year old on Zoom lessons, I think we're a ways off even if AI can build a personalized curricula), there will be students that cannot grow optimally under a "normalized" education system designed for mass efficiency,
They are two different types of neurological engagement.
I hear you: not every child develops dexterity and control of their musculature at the same time and same pace. In fact, some people may have musculoskeletal structures that simply will not allow them to develop high levels of fine motor control. But our education system is designed to train as many students as practical with the least amount of cost.
You're right: there are many ways to achieve it. Some that you mentioned are already used in schools. For example, one thing they focus on it holding a crayon the right way (e.g. not in a fist). Playing with building blocks, dressing up dolls or setting scenes with small toy figurines. This is also why young kids bring home so many arts and crafts as they learn to use scissors (tool use), apply glue with precision, and manipulate small objects.
Penmenship is perhaps easier to administer en mass and easier to grade objectively rather than tool use though.
I do think that there's room for change in the curriculum, but not all solutions are practical and cheap. For example, why not 3D pens? It is easy to objectively grade the result. But it's not practical and difficult to deploy compared to pen and paper which are cheaply available, easy to distribute, have low risk of injury, and equitable.
My fine motor skills qualify me to be a ditch digger, so perhaps the use of cursive did not so much develop my fine motor skills as evaluate them.
Dijkstra was well known for his habit of carefully composing manuscripts with his fountain pen. The manuscripts are called EWDs, since Dijkstra numbered them with EWD, his initials, as a prefix.
PDFs of his EWDs can be found at https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/
An example EWD: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd13xx/EWD1300.PDF
Cursive may be dead, but for good reason. We don’t need to draw out huge chunks of text quickly anymore. If you don’t need to hand write blisteringly fast, printed letters are imminently more legible/consistent. Cursive also requires a lot more practice that would just be a waste of time. I write beautiful cursive letters on occasion for my wife, but it’s terribly slow because I don’t have much practice.
People with good printed penmanship are not rare. In school I recall admiring many classmate’s neat and creative note taking styles in the 2010s. That’s because note taking is where hand writing still offers benefits over typing. The freeform of pen&paper is still faster than typesetting atypical styles.
Disagree. My anecdata suggests that out in The Real World(tm) legible penmanship is exceptionally rare and finding good penmanship is one step below finding Bigfoot.
When I write on tablets and boards, I use a much simpler handwriting style, usually neat capitals, so I have writing for me and writing for others.
The main thing that kills penmanship is a lack of practice, like playing guitar. I think Nile Rodgers said, if I don't practice for a day, I know it. If I don't practice for two days, my band knows it, and if I don't practice for three days, the audience knows it. Maybe it was Pat Metheny, but the point holds for me. If I don't write in my diary for a few days, the writing isn't as smooth and fluid. But when I have been writing like a beast, the words flow like anything onto the paper.
Hard to find time to pick up a pen for pleasure.
I think I've always had a bit of issue with my writing, I never liked printed handwriting and stuck to cursive, but I was forever paranoid it was unreadable to others. So if I have to write in case where others are going to read it, I just write in all caps.
I rarely right nowadays, and my cursive has definitely suffered, it's still readable to me, but does not look as neat as it used to.
Truer words have never been spoken.
Ordinary writing is a tool. Your tools should be appropriate to your work. To maximize readability, computers with keyboards are amazingly efficient. When they aren't quite what we want, the good alternatives are:
- dry-erase markers on whiteboard. Not conducive to standard handwriting. (There are methods to get artistic results, but they are not the same techniques as ink and paper.)
- chalk on chalkboards. Also not suitable for standard handwriting, and increasingly replaced by whiteboards.
- small notes on post-its, in notebooks, on forms, and in marginalia. Handwriting works here, but using a drafting letterform is more consistently readable, easier to scale, and you can teach yourself to do it acceptably well in a few scattered ten minute increments over a week.
Not judging, mind; I just think it's interesting to note that others have different ideas of what acceptable ranges of communication are.
When it came time to learn how to write with a pen, I had the same attitude "I won't need this, ever, there will be computers and nobody will ever touch a pen again, because that's stupid!" That was early 90s.. I once again was a bit on the optimistic side.
I've learned to read a dial clock and write a letter using pen and paper, but they're secondary to me.
The round clock is a gauge for time. A gauge is an awesomely intutive way to show the change of magnitude of a value.
"What time is it?" (Looks at digital clock) -> 13:32:02 -> "It's thirtheen thirthy two"
"What time is it?" (Squints a dial clock) -> ( \| ) -> "It's.. something like (squints out window, okay, it's night so 12 means 24) -> "Okay it's something like.." okay, it's almost 24, and the minute pointer is nearest the 11, but when readin minutes there's 5 minutes between each hour.. so now 11 means 50, oh maybe the minutes arm is probably a closer to the next dot." "Yeah, okay, 12 means 24, and 11 means 50 and it's going this way around, so it's +1".. It's 23:51.
yes, objectively much simpler and easier.
I don't know why you think a gauge allows some intuition that is missed with symbolic representation. There's 24 hours in a day (because fuck decimals I guess), and it's intuitive that 12 is the middle of the day, that one hour is roughly a tenth of your waking day, that thirty minutes is half on an hour..
Sure, you feel a strong intuition for dial watches because that's what you've grown up learning, but the intuition comes from you having used it a lot, not from the display method itself. Places where dials make sense (somewhat) is for things with limits, maybe your fuel gauge or your temperature gauge, and here a simple "bar" is still easier and more informative to read. Gauges are primarily the way they are due to technological evolution, it's the simplest thing we know how to do, making things that turn around, we're really good at that, even early digital clocks relied on numbers printed on cylinders or and similar "rotation oriented" principles.
"How long until this meeting is over?"
"Well, it's 4:37, the meeting is done at 5:00. So 5:00 - 4:37 is 63, no wait, 23 minutes."
Analog:
"How long until this meeting is over?"
"Oh, about a 1/3 of an hour, maybe a bit more."
Okay, I concede that digital watches are objectively more exact than digital. So there is something objectlvely better.
But arguing against round clocks having redeeming qualities is dumb. When you look at the gauge, it's enough to check in which area it is to get a rough idea about the passage of time when you don't need down-to-the-minute precision. The long dial moved from left half to right half? We're on the order of half an hour. You noticed the short dial move? It's an hour. With a digital clock you can't pick up those things semi-consciously, you must do actual calculations.
As to a bar-shaped clock, given to the unbounded nature of time, it clearly doesn't work as well as one that repeats itself in a circle. I also don't see any meaningful difference in accessibility.
I disagree, you build intuition around numbers just as you do anything else, and there's so few of them when dealing with time, you feel it, your mechanical intuition has been built the same way. Like, if you read "19 minutes" you don't really need to calculate to feel "about a fourth of an hour" but if you needed to know, you don't have to squint harder.
I agree, bar-shaped clocks would be silly, I was just thinking about gauges in general, where they make sense, and dial clocks are a special kind I think, because they wrap around all the time, exactly like your temperature or fuel gauge do not (or the "windows file copy progress bar"). A bar for an engine temperature, or fuel, or.. A time-constrained meeting! that'd make a lot of sense if "quickly determine if the engine is overheating without looking away for too long" is the priority (or if you need to decide if you have to run to the bathroom now or can wait for the meeting to end)
And that's ignoring the higher drift in most analogue mechanisms, as sufficient technology can continuously correct for that.
If you want exactness, go for symbols, but you will lose the immediate sense of proportion between multiple values.
Indeed, but exactness is the most valuable property of a clock, which is why digital timepieces win over analog (guages) in most cases.
Wait what ? So, you first have to squint, real hard, to find out how much past the printed number the indicator hand is, and THEN you have to do what kind of non-math magic to find out "by how much" ? "By two deegrees!" ?
If I'm not already on cruise control, I'll press "set" just to quickly see how fast I'm going.
This was my guess. We are all in a big hurry.
And yes typing is much faster. I type slowly, maxing out at about 72wpm, but at that speed you have less than 1/3 of a second to write write a letter. Can anyone draw that fast?
Pretty sure it has to do with the fact that we type much faster than we write
I don't own anything amazing but have come to appreciate good quality paper and the clarity of thought that writing with pen and paper forces upon me.
I assume the answer is more complicated than just pointing to a technological advancement. As usual, social-cultural issues will have been at play as well.