[pcdandy]

I think the real problem with handwriting is the way it has been thought in school. Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do. (On the other hand I quickly learned to type fast as I enjoyed playing games + writing personal documents on my computer and wanted to do all of that as quickly as possible.)

The funny thing was that some years later in 2016, I became highly interested in learning other writing systems for fun (and which I talk about on a blog of mine at [1]), which eventually also evolved into a newfound obsession with handwriting that I still practice today. Its really changed the way I see the written word and is a good way to remind oneself how letters on a screen are really the culmination of a few thousand years of scribes iterating through the older sharp, rigid and awkward letters and gradually evolving them into smoother and more fluid forms which can be drawn much faster by hand.

[1]: https://alternatescriptbureau.wordpress.com

[Swizec]

> Growing up in mid 2000s Australia, I recall it being thought largely as a rote learning exercise in which one repeats the same letters over and over again without much context, which isn't a particularly exciting thing to do

Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me. Yes we learned handwriting by rote repetition of letters in the first few months of first grade. But then we started writing real things.

Even in college we were still expected to write essay answers on a piece of paper by hand. In high school we wrote entire essays – up to 1500 words – by hand at school for our literature exams. All our notes in class were handwritten at every level of schooling.

Laptops started becoming a thing in college and most people quickly realized digital note-taking is far too clunky. You need the expressiveness and speed of handwriting to truly capture an idea.

Hell even today I always have a notebook next to my keyboard when I work. The seamless transition between writing, drawing, and scribbling is unparalleled.

[pcdandy]

> Growing up in 90’s and early 2000’s Slovenia, this sounds strange to me

Perhaps my memory of primary school's a bit fuzzy in this regard, but the point I intended to make was that handwriting was an unpleasant but necessary thing I had to do to get through school and was not something I particularly enjoyed for this reason. The English literature exams were always the worst because of all the darn essays I had to write by hand. On the other hand, me and my cohort got free school laptops from the Australian government in Year 9 [0] which were great for note-taking in class and took the pressure off the need to rely on my at-the-time mediocre and slow handwriting. While having some significant restrictions including the blocking of external programs and an Internet filter that blocked Facebook, many of us enjoyed hacking these laptops to make it run games or other programs we were not supposed to run, lol. Also we got to get them unlocked and keep them after graduating high school.

These days I see much greater value in having good handwriting, and as others have said around, handwritten notes actually help with memory recall far greater than a typed note ever will. Typed notes still have their place as they can be searched much more quickly than handwritten notes, but I found that handwritten notes are much better for notetaking important and critical procedures (e.g. on-call incident response) so that they can be remembered better. Always good to have not just 1 notetaking option, for sure.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Education_Revolution

[pests]

ah yes, the notepad-as-a-mousepad technique