[customguy]

> Forcing hand written should really not be necessary.

I do think it's necessary. And I felt unsure at first of how extremely strong I feel about this -- I think everybody should be able to write cursive, and even doctors should be able to write legibly, which ALL of them could learn in one single day, an afternoon, if they had to -- but then I did a simple search for "the benefits of writing by hand studies" and now I'm even more radical.

It's like PE or brushing your teeth. Nobody initially wants it, so we, knowing better, force them.

[vector_spaces]

I appreciate the sentiment, as someone who vastly prefers handwriting, but the downfall of this might be the situation we have historically had in the US with math, where the experience of being clumsily force fed this additional material can be so painful that it induces PTSD-like symptoms and a lifelong aversion to the material. A similar phenomenon even occurs with cursive and PE class.

That obviously isn't to say that I don't think people should learn these subjects, nor that we should avoid presenting them at all to young minds. It's just that, as someone who failed math all through grade school and now does pure math research as an adult, I don't think "forcing them" in the sense of introducing yet another high stakes and high pressure set of evaluations to all the others is really the enlightened path here

[WalterBright]

How can you tell if they learned anything if you don't test them?

[zdragnar]

I'm neither fully left handed or fully right handed. I mostly write with my left hand, but it has never been clean, despite doing all of my school work for 18 years with either pencil or pen and paper.

I wish I could have a just spent "an afternoon" to magically make either my printing or cursive better, but it basically stalled out early on and never improved despite years of practice.

[subygan]

i don't at all think it's that obvious / easy.

i was taught cursive in 2nd grade. and my handwriting is gobsmackingly horrible. coming back to stuff I've written after I've forgotten the context, makes it impossible for me to understand what I've written.

and it's not for lack of trying. I spent almost every summer till 10th grade, practicing writing 30 pages a day. and still it gets reset to my horrible hand writing in weeks after school start. at this point, i just consider myself hand writing challenged.

i cannot tell you how much happy i am that, computers have made handwritten exams obsolete.

[techjamie]

I was in the same boat as a kid. My handwriting is so bad, for the essay portion of the state test we had to take one year, they got an exemption and let me use Notepad to type mine out because they didn't want to risk my grade if the person couldn't read my writing. This was in the mid-2000s.

These days I just disclaim to people when I hand them anything handwritten that I'm very aware my writing is terrible, and I will not be offended at all if they have to ask what it says.

[encomiast]

> I think everybody should be able to write cursive

As someone who has hated both reading and writing cursive since middle school, I'm curious what is significant about cursive specifically?

[WalterBright]

Doing work with handwriting helps in learning the material. I don't know why that works, but my experience (and others') clearly shows it does.

[remashedspood]

And I strongly disagree.

The moment I have to write stuff down my focus is gone and I might as well be taking a nap.

And having to read my own handwriting assures I’ll never look at that page, again.

Different strokes

[DangitBobby]

Having to write stuff down made it impossible for me to pay attention to the lecture. But I was definitely more likely to remember what I did write down. Bit of a catch 22

[Larrikin]

Do you acknowledge you're a minority?

I detest writing and have terrible handwriting but have seen first hand that typing or just listening is not as effective. In grad school I sucked it up and just typed up my handwritten notes so they were searchable when I actually needed them to be.

But writing by hand and just reading them over was usually enough.

[encomiast]

That's been my experience as well. I'm just curious about cursive writing specifically.

[WalterBright]

point taken. I learned to take notes by printing by hand, as my cursive was illegible.

[shagie]

It helps with fine motor skills at a time that people are capable of learning them.

... And there are jobs that use those skills.

Correlation between handwriting, drawing skills and dental skills of junior dental students - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22269191/

My dentist, while teaching dentistry commented that if the student did not learn cursive in school, it takes them another 3-4 months of practice in order to acquire the fine motor control for holding dental instruments.

[encomiast]

If anyone is interested, here is a link where you can download the study: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221770027_Correlati...

I few interesting bits — it does involve cursive, but it's Arabic and it's graded on a rubric that includes things like "Presenting the beauty aspects of Arabic writing'. Also, given a sample of 71 students and a p<0.001 means the correlation coefficient only needs to be around 0.40 which means handwriting and drawing may only explain about 16% of the variance of these dental skills. That's not nothing, but given the subjective nature of the test and the confounders (does this handwriting sample really measure motor skills or maybe it measures care and attention to detail, or conscientiousness), I'd be a little wary of using this to argue for education policy.

Still, glad you posted it and glad I read it. It interesting.

[robcohen]

So the logical entailment here is what? That everyone should have the dexterity of a dental surgeon so we can save the 7000 dental surgeons 3 months of training? Am I missing something?

[metalcrow]

What's the benefit of cursive over standard writing?

[cataphract]

What is "standard writing"? Isn't cursive the standard you're taught and then everyone writes however they want?

[Larrikin]

In 2nd grade I was assured by my teachers that all adults wrote cursive and you had to relearn the alphabet again. Then in 3rd grade the teachers all said they couldn't read anyone's handwriting and to print everything.

In high school the most difficult part of the SAT was the honor pledge that you didn't cheat that you had to write in cursive. Nobody writes cursive.

[Arainach]

No. Most people handwrite most things in print lettering, not cursive. I'm nearly 40 and no one in my life writes anything other than their name (signature) in cursive ever.

[encomiast]

When I was in school we started with "manuscript" writing, which is detached letters similar to a typical sans-serif typeface without the two-story `a` and other fanciness. We then progressed to cursive.