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Comment by Propelloni | Hacker News Reader

Improving your hand writing is not hard. For whiteboards start out with using block letters only. It will slow you down in the beginning but not for long.

That's one of the "game changing" hints I received during my time as a tutor at university. (One other was to always copy books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated now.)

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>One other was to always copy books from back to front; very useful but somewhat outdated now.

What's so useful about that?

Slows you down if I had to guess

If your copies come out of the machine right-side up and they get stacked on top of each other, then you can just take the finished stack from the machine when finished. Otherwise, you’d have to reverse the stack, which in real life or in a computer is an expensive operation.

My mother had an inkjet printer where the pages came out right-side up. Multi-page documents finished up in reverse order. It was an infuriatingly awful piece of design.

I thought we were talking about handwriting practice haha

The photocopies come out stacked in the right order maybe?

This would be a kind of interesting data structure. A stack, FILO, but you can flip it for reading (maybe flip is an expensive operation).

Grass is good.

Others already said it, but yeah, the copies came out ready-to-read. The university had, IIRC, Sharp copiers which put out the copy right-side up.

> For whiteboards start out with using block letters only. It will slow you down in the beginning but not for long.

I strongly dislike this advice. The slowing down is probably actually the feature here that works; as for the uppercase, it definitely hurts comprehension. Go lowercase, slow, and deliberately never joining any letters, for your beginning, and I think it will probably be better for all parties involved: reading and comprehension will be improved, you'll get at least as much improvement in your handwriting, probably more, and certainly in a more useful area.

You are right, it is mostly about the slowing down. Switching to the unfamiliar block lettering forces you to go slow. It's a trick, so that you do not have to be deliberate about writing speed but about lettering. In my experience the latter is easier than the former, but obviously YMMV.

I don't know if uppercase hurts comprehension. I think, I have no problems whatsoever. But block letters are not all upper case anyway. You make them of different size to signal upper and lower case, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_letters

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