Interestingly I had the opposite journey, I am a Young so they didn't bother to teach me cursive in school, so in high school when I got into fountain pens I taught myself italic hand so that my handwriting would be more legible and easier to write with it -- but just recently I got tired of the two-stroke 'e' and taught myself Zaner-Bloser instead, lol. I do definitely see the drawbacks you mentioned though, after I started getting more casual with my writing I noticed 'l's and 'e's becoming quickly indistinguishable

Not knowing what Zaner-Bloser script is, I asked AI for a visual explanation which didn't help, so I gave it a photo of my own writing, turns out my writing is Zaner-Bloser but with slight modifications that, according to AI, make it more readable~

I do wonder what do y'all think: https://assumed-nuisance.odoo.com/web/image/product.product/...

+1 for the rollerball recommendation.

It's hard to describe what it's like using something like the STABILO worker after using ball-point pens for years. Compared to a ball-point it feels like the ink is jumping out of the pen, and I was accidentally joining words together for about a week. They are also much less fussy to care for than a cheap fountain pen, and much cheaper than a good fountain pen.

I'm a lefty, so fountain and liquid ink are out due to smudging. Unless I use a hook grip (also known as overwriting). Which, come to think of it, was probably why I was so bad at taking notes until notebook computers came around.

I am afraid to ask what the parameters are of "an Old", for fear that I may fall into said category.

> In text, as in code, I prefer to optimize for easy reading rather than faster writing.

Author here!

It really depends on what you write.

When I write something for others to read, I type it or (on special occasions) write it one letter at a time with a calligraphy pen.

I’m the only intended reader for almost all of my handwriting (personal journal, article drafts, exercises, and notes). In this setting, it’s much more natural to optimize the script for enjoyment, convenience, and speed. But even then, I think my script is still quite legible.

Easy reading is achieved by typesetting later if needed. Writing by hand is painful and slow and it makes sense to optimize for the write operation as much as possible

I read the backtrack free "pretty" as "pretly" at first; it adds cognitive load to understand it as intended.

No experienced reader reads letter-by-letter. These issues are not really problems, because you read whole words by sight and are not usually confused by whether a letter is an "i" or a "j".

It also makes writing more difficult --- the doubled-up pen movements help get ink flowing, esp. on certain letters at certain angles, esp. w/ a fountain pen.

If it's just for note taking, it's no different than learning shorthand, since you are the only one that has to be able to read it.

I wonder to what extent this is just habituation to styles that do not do what they are doing.

If I might, modern people tend to find cursive difficult to read. This depends somewhat on culture (nastaliq is the default in Iran) but is a kind of generalized trend that holds for most modern developed countries (see gyousho and sousho almost disappearing in daily use in Japan outside of menus and signage and - increasingly rarely - formal letters). It's not as if, I think, that when these older forms were more common that people struggled to read them (at least, not anymore than individual handwriting typically causes problems).

People who grew up writing cursive also often struggle with older scribal hand (though less so than someone who did not grow up with cursive), say from 1500s-1700s. Again, I think it's unlikely that the writers of those hands were so constrained by medium and technology (or cultural norms) that they chose to write in a way that was deemed inaccessible. (One might, if not attenuated to it, say that sousho is akin to deliberate cultural obfuscation, but my experience suggests that you quickly learn to recognize the patterns in kuzushiji.)

In the case of CJK scripts, brush pens haven't changed. Fountain pens are perfectly adequate for cursive (though some nibs were developed that differ specifically to make them even more suitable). For nastaliq, as for naskh, a reed pen is fine for both. (Modern pencils, ballpoints, and typical modern Western-tipped FPs do struggle to give nastaliq the line variation needed for a legible result). For Western scripts, pens and their tipping simply hasn't changed much beyond a decrease in the flexibility of nibs in FPs. (Something which also varied historically - pens oriented at most shorthand styles always had hard tips, excluding those shorthand styles that incorporate line-width variation which was meant to be achieved with a flexible tip.)

So my thinking is this is mostly something that comes down to 'are you used to it' and shifts in this area have a lot mroe to do with culture than anything else.

There are of course two other matters.

First, how easy something is to learn - I think the only place this is a consideration is sousho of the scripts I've mentioned (even with nastaliq's hundreds of thousands of possible ligatures).

Second, are the people around you accustomed (culturally) to the hand you are writing in, and how hard is it for them to adapt if they are not. Broadly speaking, people are not accustomed to reading much cursive in general these days, let alone one that varies from the recent hands of the area. So generally if one is writing for coworkers say, one would do well to simply write in print or at most a semi-cursive style.

In that regard the more that something deviates from its print form, the harder it will be to read for them. This ultimately comes down to interpersonal consideration - if you're writing for yourself or people who are regularly reading/writing cursive, I don't think the author's changes will be a significant issue beyond a short acclimatization phase that does not extend far beyond the phase that would be needed to adapt to an individual's personal quirks in a hand that has had some recent sway in the local area (and those hands do differ by country/area, quite a lot). (As a tangent, some of these tricks of the author's are commonplace in specific historical European hands.)

This reminds me of build-time optimizations increasing compile times for faster performance at runtime. A tradeoff I could make without a sweat in prod, but not so much during development, at a certain scale. It feels like a dichotomy almost unavoidable in life.

Also the x thing is common knowledge in India, and maybe most countries with Independence days. I switched to backtrack though.

What a rabbithole ;) TIL about "Stiefography". I wonder how useful this is. I remember math lectures - typically, our prof used the white^H^H^H^H^Hchalkboard, so I could just write down things fast enough.

There is evidence that typing is actively bad for memory rentention compared to writing things down with a pen. I wonder where Stenography falls in this continuum.

> The drawback with more phonetic systems like Gregg is that one has to learn entirely new ways of spelling words.

The point of the phonetic systems is that you don't have to ‘spell’ words at all: what you say is what you write.

(Then there are briefs, of course, but those are for additional benefit.)

Yeah, I originally expected this to be about a cursive variant which could be plotted as a single-valued function or something.

I’m surprised, as the whole points of it are speed and duration (less cramping, less energy when moving the wrist). Discrete lettering is simply slower because it requires more motion.

Same story, except that I could stop writing in cursive after middle school as nobody in high school could be bothered to demand it. The only remnants of my cursive writing days are as part of my signature.

If I need to take notes by hand, I definitely prefer cursive writing (though I have my own variations & preferences, for example I write almost all capital letters in the print versions). I never saw a reason to learn to draw a more type-like font by hand, so that definitely feels much worse whenever I decide to do it (e.g. for filling in certain forms).

I think it is rare to hate writing in cursive, in the sense that it is almost always optional these day, so the only people doing it are fans.

I don't hate writing in cursive, It's simply that I do it so badly that I use printing for almost everything except my signature. I deeply admire people who write cursive well. It is a beautiful form of communication.

I had a penmanship teacher in high school advise me to use printing because at least she could read it. I suspect that it pained her to give me that advice, but for me it was a gift.

That's how I was taught to do it, and I always found it weird because it looks like an S and a C, while in my language it's pronounced in exactly the opposite way. We don't have many words with Xs in Italian, so I probably never "simplified" it in my hand writing and I still draw it that way in the rare occasions I write in cursive.

>I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them

Having studied Russian in college, I assumed that all Cyrillic script included a line over the т, because otherwise readability goes to hell. Is my impression here based on (a) an opinion of my Russian prof expressed as a universal rule or (b) a thing that's universal in Russian specifically, but not Belarusian Cyrillic or other similar contexts, or... something else?

I'm inferring from your post that you are a native user of Cyrillic who has also learned English. I'm the reverse (well, at least I took Russian in college; I was never fluent then and remember almost nothing now). Something interesting happened to my cohort of Russian learners back then, and I wonder if it's common for folks going the other way.

After we got comfortable with writing Russian in cursive, we found that Cyrillic letters worked their way into our English script. Often, we wouldn't even notice, even when reviewing our notes later. I discovered I'd done this when I loaned some political science notes to a friend, and he couldn't read them because I'd unconsciously mixed Cyrillic and English script. I could read them fine, and so could my Russian-class friends.

We mentioned this to our Russian prof, and he laughed and said it happened to people every year, but he could never figure out who would be prone to it. Sometimes it was top students; sometimes it was people who were struggling.

(It was in this era that I ended up pretty much abandoning cursive, because Cyrillic never crept into my printed handwriting. 35 years later, my cursive is abysmal.)

Did you end up mixing script in your native handwriting inadvertently?

> I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them

I used to do it as well! But I gave up on it for the same reasons I described in the article: impaired working memory.

> лишили лилии

That’s a tough one, but I think it’s possible to make it legible with careful choice of spacing to indicate the groups: the distance between the strokes within a letter should be noticeably smaller than the distance between letters.

> I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.

I also like this variant of ∂, though I eventually switched to the version with a descender. It doesn’t annoy me because it introduces only a short pen lift.

> I always underline ш and write a line over т

Interesting. I think this style completely died out in Russia, I wasn't taught it and never really seen it outside of some old letters and documents. Interesting to hear it survived in Belarus

Eve can probably just take a picture and ask her AI assistant to read your Sütterlin?

> With traditional cursive you do your upstroke, lift the pen, place the dot (or short short stroke), reverse and do the downstroke.

I do it like this, backtracking to add a dot doesn't seem so bad when you're lifting the pen anyways and it doesn't break the flow.

It's been a minute since I've had to write very quickly, but I'd imagine if necessary this step can be skipped. Would have to try it out.

>But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards.

Interesting, I'd never really heard of it being done any other way. I suppose it occurred to me that it could be done otherwise, but I'd more or less assumed the "all in a batch at the end of each word" way was all but universal. (When writing at speed -- trying to keep up with an overflowing buffer -- this tends to lead to all the 't's in a word sharing one long crossbar, and the dots floating somewhere high and right of where they should be, depending on how far I'm lagging behind the verbal "point of focus", if that makes any sense.)

That’s addresses in the blog post:

> One way to remove backtracking is to lift the pen immediately instead of waiting until the end of the word, as if doing italic calligraphy. Pen lifts alleviate the mental queue problem and give a chance to readjust the palm, but they break the writing flow.

Right, but multiply that by half the total number of words, and it's a lot.

Hey, that's the same one I was taught in the Netherlands in the late 80s! It seems to have been replaced with an English-style in recent decades though, is that the case in Germany as well?

Got taught this one in Sweden in the early 90s. Not too surprising though, as much of the Swedish school system used to be modeled on DDR...

I encountered that on exchange to a Gymnasium in the '90s. I liked it better than the Palmer I learned in the US.

How do you do t without backtracking?

> Wouldn't the ф as well?

Not if you write it as qo for lower case and oJo for capital.

> Isn't that what everyone is doing, or are we Frenchmen the exception? > For reference if the author reads this, we write the latin x exactly like the cyrillic х, i.e. reverse c, bottom-left to top-right diagonal, normal c.

I was taught script in the US and Italy as a child, and never learned it like this.

I learned to write x this way during undergrad - supposedly for fluidity and speed but I think I just liked the way it looked

There are such: Macrons are required in the Māori language, and probably other Polynesian languages written with Latin script.

In German the Umlaut started as a quicker way to write ae, oe and ue. Perhaps develop your ideas from there?

Victor Borge pronounced his punctuation marks. O:-) https://duckduckgo.com/?q=victor+borge+punctuation&ia=videos...

In school-taught cursive, the uppercase A is written with a single stroke, but the upper element in Б, Г, Т and others need a separate stroke. The full alphabet sheet: https://upload-995750d0fd20690d889c7a976af524b6.hb.bizmrg.co...

What version of Chrome do you use? The images are encoded in .webp for compactness; I hoped that most of the browsers in use support this format, but I might have to go multi-source after all.

I'm on Vivaldi on mac and images are fine here. So... maybe an extension or something else?

> The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.

Also, Bulgaria used to own all the land in the world, but because Bulgarians are very kind people, they gave some of it to other nations so that they have a place to live too. Thank you, Bulgarians!

Church Slavonic is a South Slavic language and so is a cousin of East Slavic language like Russian or Ukrainian. Russian borrowed a lot from Old Church Slavonic but doesn't descend from it. It's like the influence of Latin or Norman French on English.

> The Russian language itself comes from Old Bulgarian / Old Church Slavonic, as does Serbian and other "Slavic" languages.

That's some interesting nationalistic propaganda, never heard that one before