Comment by ksenzee
4 days ago
The cursive thing is almost certainly because he's using fountain pens. Pencils and ballpoint pens lend themselves to printing more easily, because they require pressure to write, and when you let the pressure up between letters, the line stops. The first time I picked up a fountain pen and tried printing with it, I found all my letters were connecting whether I meant them to or not, and I suddenly understood why cursive exists. Everyone who's learned cursive in the ballpoint pen era has been unwittingly taught a performance optimization for a tool they're not using.
Wow I never knew this - what a useful bit of information. Makes me want to try a fountain pen, I do like writing in cursive but I often get hand cramps doing it for extended periods.
This is likely because you're writing by moving your wrist, as opposed to "arm writing". Learning to use your arm muscles to move the pencil will slow your writing down initially, but will give you more control and reduce strain over the long run.
See, for example,
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrMvJfuADfNUx6s3PEFaraQP7...
From the OP:
> "I learned cursive as a child. Then I went for many years without using it much, and forgot some of it."
While fountain pens may be nicer for cursive, they were very late in the games only coming into the scene in the late 1800s, long after fashion had been set.
In the US we were taught either the Zaner-Bloser or the D'Nealian alphabet, and while most of the claims of cursive over manuscript are typically overblown and fall under scrutiny, with common use it may not be faster, but is easer for (the small sample of friends I have asked) to write while not looking at the paper. Not faster, but easier to write in strait lines without looking (in my experience).
Manuscript (now called printing) wasn't common when Zaner-Bloser printed the book "The arm movement method of rapid writing"[0] IIRC.
But for business writing (which both Zaner-Bloser and D'Nealian were targeting) it is not so much the fact that you aren't lifting the point, but that you are using your whole arm.
The scientific claims of Zaner-Bloser are almost certainly suspect, but before word-processors, taking notes while not watching your writing was a critical skill, or was in my experience.
That is a very different world that the scribes of old, or even Roman cursive, which would have only had quills, and which did not really connect letters.
If you look into secretary hand, italic hand, and court hand, a lot of it had to to with style and preferences, with the US Declaration of Independence being in Secretary Hand, which had been in fashion for official docs for centuries at that point. Shakespeare also wrote his plays Secretary Hand, while ladies of the era would have used 'Italian style' italics.
So unfortunately it seems there are many back explanations, the real history is clear as mud in the absence of direct evidence, or more correctly, claims like in Zaner-Bloser.
[0] https://archive.org/details/armmovementmetho00zane/page/n3/m...
To clarify my point, I am fairly sure the issue is not fountain pens requiring less pressure to write with than everything else, but rather ballpoint pens requiring more pressure than all earlier pen technology. I have not used a dip pen myself, but I can't imagine it would require pressure to write.
In other words, all of the writing tools in common use since ~1950 make it easy to separate your letters, but before the ballpoint pen became commonplace, every writer had had the experience of using a pen that makes connecting letters easier than separating them. That's the experience most of us today are missing.
Dip pens do not require more pressure than fountain pens.
However, most nibs for dip pens cause more friction on the paper, because they do not have the balls that are typically welded on the ends of the nibs for fountain pens, so writing with a dip pen usually feels scratchy.
So there is an extra force from friction, but it is lateral, not a vertical pressure.
Gel pens require less pressure than classic ballpoint pens. Classic rollerball pens with an absorptive reservoir usually require even less pressure. Liquid-ink rollerball pens together with fountain pens require the least pressure.
I agree that with a high-pressure writing tool like a ballpoint pen it feels more natural to write disconnected letters, while with a low pressure tool like a fountain pen it feels better to write with connected cursive letters, without raising the nip from the paper.
Despite this, while I was still in high school, I transitioned my handwriting from the cursive style that I was taught as a small child to printed-like letters, even if I was using a fountain pen and I have always preferred the writing tools that require the least pressure, so fountain pens and liquid-ink rollerball pens are at the top of my preferences, while ballpoint pens with viscous ink are at the bottom.
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