There weren't standardized spellings in English for most of history. It's not spellcheck missing, it's a different attitude towards writing and language. Also they thought a cursive z was just...
With no spellcheck, there might be irregularities in spelling.
(Referring to historical writings and OCR readability.)
There weren't standardized spellings in English for most of history. It's not spellcheck missing, it's a different attitude towards writing and language.
Also they thought a cursive z was just flat wrong for their little "draw the letter here." I couldn't get it to recognize it at all.
My standard writing is a cursive-print blend depending on how I'm feeling, but I guess I lean hard toward a very curly cursive q, and it took about 5 tries for the widget to recognize it.
My standard writing is a cursive-print blend depending on how I'm feeling, but I guess I lean hard toward a very curly cursive q, and it took about 5 tries for the widget to recognize it.
I do a blend of cursive and print but figured I'd try a pretty textbook cursive z. No go. Idk if it proves the point or they didn't include it because it's not common. A couple of the cursive...
I do a blend of cursive and print but figured I'd try a pretty textbook cursive z. No go.
Idk if it proves the point or they didn't include it because it's not common. A couple of the cursive samples used it but few
Really well put together webpage/piece on how writing styles changes by generations. I don't think the Gen Alpha writing style is that different from millenials, but I do know that for me my...
Really well put together webpage/piece on how writing styles changes by generations. I don't think the Gen Alpha writing style is that different from millenials, but I do know that for me my writing shifts more towards Gen Z when just trying to write quickly.
Also, hot take, but cursive sucks. I was taught it in school and never used it outside of those classes. It's awful to read and honestly inefficient.
Cursive can be more efficient if you're experienced with it enough to write quickly and the result is legible, since not picking up the pen can be faster. There's a reason stenography, which was...
Cursive can be more efficient if you're experienced with it enough to write quickly and the result is legible, since not picking up the pen can be faster. There's a reason stenography, which was designed to maximize speed/efficiency, doesn't involve picking up the pen. That said, much like stenography, it's not really a necessary skill nowadays. My personal standard writing style definitely has some weird mixtures of cursive and print in places when I'm trying to write as quickly as possible.
The writing utensil also makes a difference. Cursive makes a lot more sense if you're using a fountain or dip pen. It plays into how they make marks on paper and pushes against how ballpoint pens...
The writing utensil also makes a difference. Cursive makes a lot more sense if you're using a fountain or dip pen. It plays into how they make marks on paper and pushes against how ballpoint pens in particular -- which need a lot more pressure to make a mark -- do it.
There's also different kinds of cursive. Italic cursive is basically just joined up print. For some reason the US got hung up on hard to read, hard to write, calligraphic styles (primarily the Palmer method mentioned in the article), while Europe was more likely to teach Italic. If you write enough with a fountain pen and you're used to printing you'll eventually develop an italic cursive style on your own. It's that natural for the writing implement.
I don't like fountain pens myself -- I've disliked how they feel on the paper and prefer a specific gel pen -- and while there are some differences in the cursive I was taught from European...
I don't like fountain pens myself -- I've disliked how they feel on the paper and prefer a specific gel pen -- and while there are some differences in the cursive I was taught from European cursive, the lowercase letterforms are quick and easy to write (even with normal ballpoint pens, in my experience). The uppercase letterforms are a bit overly ornate, but in my personal writing style I always print capital letters.
Gel pens aren't the same as ballpoints. They use a different kind of ink that lets them glide over the paper more like a good fountain pen. I'm guessing the ones you've tried were poor quality and...
Gel pens aren't the same as ballpoints. They use a different kind of ink that lets them glide over the paper more like a good fountain pen. I'm guessing the ones you've tried were poor quality and scratchy instead of smooth as a result. (Note that good in this case doesn't mean expensive, there's just a difference between a decent writer and the kind of crappy novelty pen you'll sometimes find in art supply sections that are about the easiest ones to find in an actual store in the US. As an example of a cheap but decent pen, one of mine cost all of $5 at a Walgreens of all places, and it writes surprisingly well.)
I've tried fountain pens at stores in the past (and not at art supply stores), and I have never encountered one that even approaches the frictionless feel of my favorite gel pen. While it's...
I've tried fountain pens at stores in the past (and not at art supply stores), and I have never encountered one that even approaches the frictionless feel of my favorite gel pen. While it's possible there's some mystical fountain pen out there that does meet my needs, I'm not particularly interested in searching for it, as it's certainly not common enough to be easy to find. I have no problems writing in cursive with the pens I already use.
Unsolicited infodump warning: Yeah, in general, gel pens are going to feel the 'glassiest'. Fountain pens evolved as a technology in the world of dip pens, where you were scraping either thin...
Unsolicited infodump warning:
Yeah, in general, gel pens are going to feel the 'glassiest'. Fountain pens evolved as a technology in the world of dip pens, where you were scraping either thin points or flat edges of metal against paper with maybe a drop of water to lubricate it, and the commonplace use of them (and thus market impetus to follow trends) ended about sixty years after their invention. Alternately, gels were the culmination of nearly a century of oil-based ballpoint designs.
Fountain pens are a lot smoother than traditional ballpoints (and most rollerballs) thanks to their polished tips, but they rely on capillary action to deliver water-soluble ink to those tips, and the ideal segment on the line between "enough ink to mark the page clearly" and "just dripping" is narrow. The components which regulate that flow are calibrated on the micron scale, and then we've got to consider the ink viscosity, the shape and size of the tip, the paper texture, and technique!
Compared to a disposable ball-bearing-and-cup full of god-knows-what grease, there's just no shot. However, a properly maintained and tuned fountain pen (not a store display model, outside of specialty shops) can match that experience. Most people who use fountain pens prefer the feedback from the paper, though, so you'd have to try pretty hard to find one that meets your standards.
Traditional cursive forms (Spencerian, Palmer) basically assume the mechanical properties of nib pens, however. The focus on building a well of ink which is then traced into a letter shape and dragged into the next, without losing momentum always felt deeply incompatible with the shape of a ballpoint and the pressure needed to use one. Consulting the evolution of cursive styles from the late 18th through the late 19th centuries is illustrative.
Apologies if this was more irritating than interesting.
PS: Going to post this, I scrolled down a single comment and saw that your standard-bearer pen is a Pilot G-2. With that in mind, meeting your personal standard of smoothness is much more achievable than stated earlier. It's still a whole thing, with maintenance and some technique adjustments, so please don't take this as advice, but for under $50 online you could probably find a fountain pen and ink that you would find superior.
I appreciate the trivia! I probably won't seek out a fountain pen anyway, since even for less than $50 I don't want to spend money on one without being able to try it and thus know I actually like...
I appreciate the trivia! I probably won't seek out a fountain pen anyway, since even for less than $50 I don't want to spend money on one without being able to try it and thus know I actually like the feel of it, but the information about how they work is genuinely interesting.
What gel pen? I just last year I learned how fantastic gel pens can be. The unfortunate part is finding a Parker G2 refill with gel ink is tricky. Also I prefer 0.7mm, which is also tricky to...
What gel pen? I just last year I learned how fantastic gel pens can be. The unfortunate part is finding a Parker G2 refill with gel ink is tricky. Also I prefer 0.7mm, which is also tricky to find. I’m currently using a Parker brand G2 in the LTT scribe driver 0.7. But the place I found them no longer carries them, so I’ll have to look for alternatives.
I use the Pilot G-2 almost exclusively. But I constantly lose pens so I don't generally get refills. I also prefer 0.7mm and those are pretty common for the Pilot G2 as well, most places will sell...
I use the Pilot G-2 almost exclusively. But I constantly lose pens so I don't generally get refills. I also prefer 0.7mm and those are pretty common for the Pilot G2 as well, most places will sell both 0.7 and 0.5.
I was taught cursive first, and it's what comes naturally to me now (and easier to read). I written much faster in cursive, as I don't need to lift the pen of the paper as often. It also looks...
I was taught cursive first, and it's what comes naturally to me now (and easier to read). I written much faster in cursive, as I don't need to lift the pen of the paper as often.
It also looks prettier to me.
So I think it might just come down to what you're used to...
Yep, I don't really get why cursive is still taught in school. If you're older than 18 and write in cursive, people look at you like you're a a bit weird or immature. There are certainly benefits...
Yep, I don't really get why cursive is still taught in school. If you're older than 18 and write in cursive, people look at you like you're a a bit weird or immature.
There are certainly benefits to learn and practice cursive, especially when you're young, but I think it should be considered like latin: it's a language that is interesting to learn for several reasons, but no-one would use it to communicate in an everyday setting.
Gen x here. I write notes everyday because I find that the simple act of writing stuff down on paper helps me to retain information. More over, even if it is way slower than typing (and I can be...
Gen x here. I write notes everyday because I find that the simple act of writing stuff down on paper helps me to retain information. More over, even if it is way slower than typing (and I can be quite fast for I had a class about how to use typewriters back in the days...) it is flexible, I can write sentences, then switch and draw something, then put a side note, etc... I know u can do something similar with an app but the flow is not really good.
Said so, while I have learnt how to write cursive (actually that was the way you were expected to write during the tests or when you made your homeworks) I have seen that I really suck at that nowadays... I can be incredibly fast at writing letters in cursive but then I struggle to understand what I wrote if I try to read me back after a couple of days...
So maybe... the youngsters are not wrong :)
Writing things down is so much helpful in everyday life. I write my thoughts down from time to time, not even to remember them, but just to take the time to figure them out clearly. It's so easy...
Writing things down is so much helpful in everyday life. I write my thoughts down from time to time, not even to remember them, but just to take the time to figure them out clearly.
It's so easy to go back to the root of an idea when it's written right there.
I (Zillennial) do find that I pay better attention when taking notes on paper, but I suspect this has more to do with the bevy of distractions available on a laptop or tablet that aren't an option...
I (Zillennial) do find that I pay better attention when taking notes on paper, but I suspect this has more to do with the bevy of distractions available on a laptop or tablet that aren't an option in a notebook.
This was a neat page, but I'm not sure how much I believe it extrapolates - the sample size was only 90 people and they were all in Singapore. This did give me time to reflect on handwriting,...
This was a neat page, but I'm not sure how much I believe it extrapolates - the sample size was only 90 people and they were all in Singapore.
This did give me time to reflect on handwriting, though. As a lefty millennial in the USA, I got to learn printing and cursive, and cursive was horrible because I had to "push" the pencil and ended up with a gross graphite-covered hand at the end of every day. Over time, I switched to ballpoint pens with ink that doesn't smear, and, because I write very quickly, I created a cursive scrawl that's meant to go fast - it's not the cursive I was taught, but I can write it quickly. (I use more of a print when it needs to be read by others). I've found too that my writing has changed over time, so that my r's and h's have come out a bit differently for speed (but I couldn't explain how). I did weirdly learn Russian cursive in university, and that has affected my real cursive (where I want to throw in a Russian t or n if they come up, probably because they're written so differently and it took a lot of thought to learn them).
The reason why I'm skeptical of the handwriting analysis is that I read a lot of handwriting from other people in class growing up - many people had chicken scratch like me, but a lot of people (especially girls) had bubbly print (with hearts over the i's! in high school!). My older sister uses bubbly print, my younger sister has a motor disability and has a print-like chicken scratch, my mother is full-on cursive, and my father uses all-caps print. We all went to grade school in the same city. I think there may be some general generational traits in training...but I think we also write based on what we're trying to do with our writing, our physical traits, and cultural influences. It was a very big deal for girls in my middle school to write notes with multicoloured jelly roll pens, and you wanted your writing to look legible and cute! I even modified my a's around this time for quirkiness, and it stuck permanently. So I think I'd like to see a larger sample and read more about the "smaller" reasons why people write the way they do, versus these broad generalizations from small samples.
My biggest challenge with historical documents is usually the long s (ſ). I know what it is, I can read it, but it makes me pause every time. Add its weird rules and ligatures like Æ which are no...
While OCR works well for recent handwriting and printed documents, it often struggles with historical materials. Older scripts are full of flourishes and stylistic quirks that confuse automated systems.
My biggest challenge with historical documents is usually the long s (ſ). I know what it is, I can read it, but it makes me pause every time. Add its weird rules and ligatures like Æ which are no longer used and it’s no wonder OCR struggles, that’s probably not the kind of text it was trained on.
I feel like the handwriting input should have had the user write the same sentence they were using, or at least a word or two that uses the letters they wanted. Writing a single letter is more...
I feel like the handwriting input should have had the user write the same sentence they were using, or at least a word or two that uses the letters they wanted.
Writing a single letter is more deliberate than writing each letter within a word.
There weren't standardized spellings in English for most of history. It's not spellcheck missing, it's a different attitude towards writing and language.
Also they thought a cursive z was just flat wrong for their little "draw the letter here." I couldn't get it to recognize it at all.
My standard writing is a cursive-print blend depending on how I'm feeling, but I guess I lean hard toward a very curly cursive q, and it took about 5 tries for the widget to recognize it.
I do a blend of cursive and print but figured I'd try a pretty textbook cursive z. No go.
Idk if it proves the point or they didn't include it because it's not common. A couple of the cursive samples used it but few
I thought I was ist really bad at writing it on my phone, I couldn't get it to recognize my z either!
same with a z with a crossbar...
It recognized my z with crossbar just fine.
Really well put together webpage/piece on how writing styles changes by generations. I don't think the Gen Alpha writing style is that different from millenials, but I do know that for me my writing shifts more towards Gen Z when just trying to write quickly.
Also, hot take, but cursive sucks. I was taught it in school and never used it outside of those classes. It's awful to read and honestly inefficient.
Cursive can be more efficient if you're experienced with it enough to write quickly and the result is legible, since not picking up the pen can be faster. There's a reason stenography, which was designed to maximize speed/efficiency, doesn't involve picking up the pen. That said, much like stenography, it's not really a necessary skill nowadays. My personal standard writing style definitely has some weird mixtures of cursive and print in places when I'm trying to write as quickly as possible.
The writing utensil also makes a difference. Cursive makes a lot more sense if you're using a fountain or dip pen. It plays into how they make marks on paper and pushes against how ballpoint pens in particular -- which need a lot more pressure to make a mark -- do it.
There's also different kinds of cursive. Italic cursive is basically just joined up print. For some reason the US got hung up on hard to read, hard to write, calligraphic styles (primarily the Palmer method mentioned in the article), while Europe was more likely to teach Italic. If you write enough with a fountain pen and you're used to printing you'll eventually develop an italic cursive style on your own. It's that natural for the writing implement.
I don't like fountain pens myself -- I've disliked how they feel on the paper and prefer a specific gel pen -- and while there are some differences in the cursive I was taught from European cursive, the lowercase letterforms are quick and easy to write (even with normal ballpoint pens, in my experience). The uppercase letterforms are a bit overly ornate, but in my personal writing style I always print capital letters.
Gel pens aren't the same as ballpoints. They use a different kind of ink that lets them glide over the paper more like a good fountain pen. I'm guessing the ones you've tried were poor quality and scratchy instead of smooth as a result. (Note that good in this case doesn't mean expensive, there's just a difference between a decent writer and the kind of crappy novelty pen you'll sometimes find in art supply sections that are about the easiest ones to find in an actual store in the US. As an example of a cheap but decent pen, one of mine cost all of $5 at a Walgreens of all places, and it writes surprisingly well.)
I've tried fountain pens at stores in the past (and not at art supply stores), and I have never encountered one that even approaches the frictionless feel of my favorite gel pen. While it's possible there's some mystical fountain pen out there that does meet my needs, I'm not particularly interested in searching for it, as it's certainly not common enough to be easy to find. I have no problems writing in cursive with the pens I already use.
Unsolicited infodump warning:
Yeah, in general, gel pens are going to feel the 'glassiest'. Fountain pens evolved as a technology in the world of dip pens, where you were scraping either thin points or flat edges of metal against paper with maybe a drop of water to lubricate it, and the commonplace use of them (and thus market impetus to follow trends) ended about sixty years after their invention. Alternately, gels were the culmination of nearly a century of oil-based ballpoint designs.
Fountain pens are a lot smoother than traditional ballpoints (and most rollerballs) thanks to their polished tips, but they rely on capillary action to deliver water-soluble ink to those tips, and the ideal segment on the line between "enough ink to mark the page clearly" and "just dripping" is narrow. The components which regulate that flow are calibrated on the micron scale, and then we've got to consider the ink viscosity, the shape and size of the tip, the paper texture, and technique!
Compared to a disposable ball-bearing-and-cup full of god-knows-what grease, there's just no shot. However, a properly maintained and tuned fountain pen (not a store display model, outside of specialty shops) can match that experience. Most people who use fountain pens prefer the feedback from the paper, though, so you'd have to try pretty hard to find one that meets your standards.
Traditional cursive forms (Spencerian, Palmer) basically assume the mechanical properties of nib pens, however. The focus on building a well of ink which is then traced into a letter shape and dragged into the next, without losing momentum always felt deeply incompatible with the shape of a ballpoint and the pressure needed to use one. Consulting the evolution of cursive styles from the late 18th through the late 19th centuries is illustrative.
Apologies if this was more irritating than interesting.
PS: Going to post this, I scrolled down a single comment and saw that your standard-bearer pen is a Pilot G-2. With that in mind, meeting your personal standard of smoothness is much more achievable than stated earlier. It's still a whole thing, with maintenance and some technique adjustments, so please don't take this as advice, but for under $50 online you could probably find a fountain pen and ink that you would find superior.
I appreciate the trivia! I probably won't seek out a fountain pen anyway, since even for less than $50 I don't want to spend money on one without being able to try it and thus know I actually like the feel of it, but the information about how they work is genuinely interesting.
What gel pen? I just last year I learned how fantastic gel pens can be. The unfortunate part is finding a Parker G2 refill with gel ink is tricky. Also I prefer 0.7mm, which is also tricky to find. I’m currently using a Parker brand G2 in the LTT scribe driver 0.7. But the place I found them no longer carries them, so I’ll have to look for alternatives.
I use the Pilot G-2 almost exclusively. But I constantly lose pens so I don't generally get refills. I also prefer 0.7mm and those are pretty common for the Pilot G2 as well, most places will sell both 0.7 and 0.5.
I was taught cursive first, and it's what comes naturally to me now (and easier to read). I written much faster in cursive, as I don't need to lift the pen of the paper as often.
It also looks prettier to me.
So I think it might just come down to what you're used to...
Yep, I don't really get why cursive is still taught in school. If you're older than 18 and write in cursive, people look at you like you're a a bit weird or immature.
There are certainly benefits to learn and practice cursive, especially when you're young, but I think it should be considered like latin: it's a language that is interesting to learn for several reasons, but no-one would use it to communicate in an everyday setting.
Gen x here. I write notes everyday because I find that the simple act of writing stuff down on paper helps me to retain information. More over, even if it is way slower than typing (and I can be quite fast for I had a class about how to use typewriters back in the days...) it is flexible, I can write sentences, then switch and draw something, then put a side note, etc... I know u can do something similar with an app but the flow is not really good.
Said so, while I have learnt how to write cursive (actually that was the way you were expected to write during the tests or when you made your homeworks) I have seen that I really suck at that nowadays... I can be incredibly fast at writing letters in cursive but then I struggle to understand what I wrote if I try to read me back after a couple of days...
So maybe... the youngsters are not wrong :)
Writing things down is so much helpful in everyday life. I write my thoughts down from time to time, not even to remember them, but just to take the time to figure them out clearly.
It's so easy to go back to the root of an idea when it's written right there.
I (Zillennial) do find that I pay better attention when taking notes on paper, but I suspect this has more to do with the bevy of distractions available on a laptop or tablet that aren't an option in a notebook.
This was a neat page, but I'm not sure how much I believe it extrapolates - the sample size was only 90 people and they were all in Singapore.
This did give me time to reflect on handwriting, though. As a lefty millennial in the USA, I got to learn printing and cursive, and cursive was horrible because I had to "push" the pencil and ended up with a gross graphite-covered hand at the end of every day. Over time, I switched to ballpoint pens with ink that doesn't smear, and, because I write very quickly, I created a cursive scrawl that's meant to go fast - it's not the cursive I was taught, but I can write it quickly. (I use more of a print when it needs to be read by others). I've found too that my writing has changed over time, so that my r's and h's have come out a bit differently for speed (but I couldn't explain how). I did weirdly learn Russian cursive in university, and that has affected my real cursive (where I want to throw in a Russian t or n if they come up, probably because they're written so differently and it took a lot of thought to learn them).
The reason why I'm skeptical of the handwriting analysis is that I read a lot of handwriting from other people in class growing up - many people had chicken scratch like me, but a lot of people (especially girls) had bubbly print (with hearts over the i's! in high school!). My older sister uses bubbly print, my younger sister has a motor disability and has a print-like chicken scratch, my mother is full-on cursive, and my father uses all-caps print. We all went to grade school in the same city. I think there may be some general generational traits in training...but I think we also write based on what we're trying to do with our writing, our physical traits, and cultural influences. It was a very big deal for girls in my middle school to write notes with multicoloured jelly roll pens, and you wanted your writing to look legible and cute! I even modified my a's around this time for quirkiness, and it stuck permanently. So I think I'd like to see a larger sample and read more about the "smaller" reasons why people write the way they do, versus these broad generalizations from small samples.
My biggest challenge with historical documents is usually the long s (ſ). I know what it is, I can read it, but it makes me pause every time. Add its weird rules and ligatures like Æ which are no longer used and it’s no wonder OCR struggles, that’s probably not the kind of text it was trained on.
That is how I write the S's in my name in cursive. I love the long S and hate the standard cursive Ss
I feel like the handwriting input should have had the user write the same sentence they were using, or at least a word or two that uses the letters they wanted.
Writing a single letter is more deliberate than writing each letter within a word.
Beyond this, it seems intended for people who aren't writing in cursive, where the letter forms could well depend on surrounding context.