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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

>>It's print. With upper and lowercase letters.

So like.......not linking the letters together then? Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?

>>But of course this is HN where most people are technical.

For sure, and as a professional programmer I keep a notebook with hand written notes - the fact that I have a keyboard and multiple monitors in front of me doesn't change the fact that hand writing is still the best(for me) way to save and recall information.

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> not linking the letters together then?

Correct.

> Doesn't that just actually take more effort than just writing cursive? And is slower?

Probably yes to both counts.

However, when I'm handwriting I'm generally not in a position where speed or effort is the most important thing. To me, it's not much more effort to print and I get the added bonus of legibility. When I write cursive, it can be hard for me to understand what I wrote when I come back to it. I'm just a little too sloppy. It would take effort for me to get to the point where my cursive is neat and I frankly just don't handwrite enough to warrant that effort.

Consider this, do you use shorthand? I'd assume not. But why not? It's the fastest way to write anything. Cursive, by comparison, is both a lot of effort to write, is slower, and it wastes space.

I'd say for (some of) the same reasons you likely don't write shorthand, I don't write in cursive.

I don't get your point of not writing cursive. It is literally the same as what you are already doing, but just stopping raising the hand between letters. It is also not like you have that specific cursive, and then it is unreadable. It is a continuous tradeoff of faster vs. readable, so you can just slow down for some letters and not for others.

The thing that needs effort is learning to write, why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?

> why did you waste time on learning to not connect your letters?

As someone who learned cursive by learning a new script first, you're making a big assumption here. Nobody learns to not connect their letters.

I didn't learn to not connect my letters. I learned to write without connecting letters, and never properly learned to connect them (until much later in life), because that was never required (and never emphasised while I was in school anyway). If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess. So I didn't. Not until I learned to write in a new script and could transfer that back to my original handwriting. I still don't write a cursive lowercase F, because Cyrillic doesn't have that glyph, and the one that I'm supposed to use never looks right. Not that it matters, since I only write in cursive for myself.

> If I were to write as I did before, but attempt to connect the letters, it would turn into an unreadable mess.

Oh, okay. They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print? They focused on that here, but maybe that was actually part for the preparation of learning cursive.

> They did not tell you in which order and direction you should write letters in print?

Not that I can remember, although I can't really anwser that with confidence.

>>Consider this, do you use shorthand?

I have no idea how to write shorthand. I assume you know how to write cursive, so no I don't think the reasons are the same.

You could learn it. It would take some effort but it's not insurmountable and it's inarguably superior to cursive in terms of effort to write.

I can't write legible cursive. To do that would take time, effort, and practice. Much like it'd take that to learn shorthand.

That's my point. You and I write the way we do because writing in other ways would take more effort than we want to spend.

Well, fair. Maybe I should learn shorthand.

A part of me wants to learn it as well. It looks so alien that it seems interesting to learn.

Because of this conversation I've been reading up on it. There are multiple systems, but for English they all pretty much revolve around representing words phonetically. One form (Pittman) uses different line widths for different sounds, making it work best with a pencil or fountain pen. Gregg doesn't do that. Gregg is most common in the US and Pittman is common in the UK.

Speed and effort arguments are negated for southpaws.

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