Comment by noosphr
4 days ago
Cursive as taught in schools today is useless at best and dangerous for your health at worst.
The cursive that made the world run between 1850 and 1925 was called business penmanship and it lets you write at 40 words per minute for 14 hours every day for decades on end without pain or injury.
If you're interested here's the best book about it: https://archive.org/details/tamblyns-home-instructor-in-penm...
Note the advice given:
>following lessons will make of you a good penman, if you follow instructions implicitly. The average time to acquire such a handwriting is from four to six months, practicing an hour or so a day. Practice regularly every day, if you want the best results. Two practice periods of thirty minutes each are better than one period of sixty minutes.
After two months I can comfortably write at 20 words per minute for four hours without stopping.
Looking at this book, it seems very similar to how I was taught in the late 80s early 90s. We were forced to use fountain pens, and would get berated if we got ink on our hands.
I'm not sure if I can tell the difference between Tamblyn's business penmanship" and "looped cursive" and any other type of cursive to be honest. The difference in individual handwriting seems to be much larger than the difference in overarching styles?
The shape of the letters is largely irrelevant, the source of motion is the important part. In regular cursive it is the fingers that move the pen. In business penmanship it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.
Here is a video that gets most of the basics right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TWpFsv9Ib0
Here is one that gets it wrong: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/vCPPcweLKWQ
The reason why the letters have the shape they do in business penmanship is for legibility and ease of motion. There are several variants of most letters you can choose from. The standard alphabet as given in that book is a very good compromise. The reason why newer cursive hands that use finger movement have a lot of the same shapes as business penmanship is cargo-culting.
>it is the shoulder that moves the hand which is incidentally holding a pen.
Yes, arms instead of fingers, thanks for the great ergonomic video link, this was the most surprising finding when I got into fountain pens and feels like a totally different skill from the school days of handwriting cursive: https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/372976-recomm...
Really enjoying that first video. Thanks!
I attended French school (I'm not French) and up until high school I was forced to use fountain pens too.
When going through the effort to re-learn how to write, why would one learn this rather than one of the more logical/easy shorthand systems?
(To clarify, I mean in this day and age! I would understand if one needed to send 300 letters a day to a non-shorthand reader.)
No one is stopping you from using muscular movement to speed up your shorthand even more.
If you use finger movement for shorthand you still have a 30 minute writing limit before you start getting hand cramps and carpal tunnel syndrome after a few years.
Here's a nice article on some shorthands: https://blog.zdsmith.com/series/shorthands.html
Cursive is essentially just a shorthand. It is just a standardized way of writing fast while sacrificing some readability.
So, yes, now that the world no longer uses crusive that much you might as well pick another standard.
I would strongly disagree.
Shorthand is (hopefully lossless) compression technique.
Cursive is a font optimized for continuous use by the human hand and a stylus, leveraging keeping the stylus point on the page between letters of the same word.
It's comparing 7-Zip to Arial.
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As the sibling says, shorthand is a very different thing. Cursive seems much more a way to write with fewer finger movements. That is about it.
I'm tempted to say it is also about fewer pickups of the pen, but I think that is largely the same thing. Many of the finger movements you do when writing otherwise will be to pick the pen off the page.
The shorthand systems are mostly designed to be transcribed by the writer or someone very familiar with the writer's particular style, preferably while the information is still fresh in someone's mind to resolve ambiguity. Shorthand is mostly not a great system for long term information storage and it's not easy to quickly skim documents written in shorthand.
This is a common myth, but from what I understand of people who write in the more logical shorthand systems (without abusing custom abbreviations etc.) it's eminently skimmable, even long after the information is no longer fresh in mind.
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I was about to reply that that most people probably can't easily read this hand anymore, but after looking at the book examples they're pretty readable to me, despite always struggling to read cursive (e.g. in birthday cards from my grandparents).
As one would hope, for a system vaunted to allow hours-long recordings. I mean: if it's a book on shorthand, only legible to court recorders, that's one thing, but this is not that.
This book is quite a find. I'm tempted to give it a go, as it could make my writing portable anywhere. My only misgiving is later getting that writing into electronic form, which nowadays is a non-negotiable. The technology for handwriting recognition, long-form, seems to still be fairly poor.
I'm starting to appreciate not having digitised notes.
When you can sit down and write out 1,000 words in 30 minites making indexes which you update weekly becomes just another form of revision. This works well for both study and business planning. Less so for emails and instant messages, but each medium for its intended purpose.
It is amazing how much of our education system requires being able to write text by the wheelbarrow when no one today can write more than a thimbleful without hand cramps and wrist pain. Imagine how much people would want to use Facebook or reddit if every like and upvote came with an electric shock. Our education system does that to everyone from age 8 and up when it comes to writing anything down.
Do they still teach cursive in school? I’m pretty sure I know a handful of college kids who never learned it.
My children go to a charter school in AZ and they are only allowed to write in cursive (3rd grade and on). Public school families I have talked to are also learning cursive.
Hmm, turns out I’m the one living in a bubble. Looks like half of the US teaches it categorically and half of the rest are “it depends”. Only a couple states have gotten rid of it and not the ones I expected.