Re: OT More pens

On Tue, Jun 10, 2003 at 11:16:51AM +0200, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> Strange. First, teachers who teach how to write in France *always* write on
> the blackboard with that same cursive handwriting.
Christophe, if their handwriting looks like your Azak ecriture, then it
is a lot more sensible than our (American) cursive which is taught slanted
and with leading connecting lines even for the first character in a word.
Maybe that's why she was able to write the same thing she was teaching.

I have a story about that - I used to get C's in handwriting when I made
the letters the way we'd been taught to make them (big, ugly, and slanted).
Another girl in class, who was lefthanded, was always praised by the teacher
for her handwriting.  One day I snuck a look at her neat, straight-up-and-
down cursive, and copied it (I'm right-handed).  My grades immediately
went up.

To recap: I was penalized for writing as I'd been taught and rewarded for,
on my own, changing my writing to something other than what I'd been taught.
Why couldn't they just teach what they wanted us to do in the first place?

> Second, I've never
> connected in my head writing with printing. It seems to me just natural
> that what you do with your hand should be different from what's printed on
> books. It's not the same thing after all.
Of course our handwritten printing doesn't look exactly like what you'd
see in a book - it doesn't even stay unconnected much of the time.  The
letters in my printing run together, but with different ligatures than in
handwriting due to the different pattern of the strokes.  (For one point,
since I cross my t's and f's as soon as I write one or a pair of them, the
crossbar then joins up with the following letter, especially if it's an i
or e.)

If I had a scanner, I'd scan in some of the notes littering my desk here
at work.  "after ship, u98140 <---> u98402 IPs, /26 to u98232, iconfig"
doesn't make much sense to the world at large, but it does illustrate
some of my ligatures in printing :)

> Also, I find blockwriting difficult to read and tiring. Cursive *flows*
> better for my eyes.
A lot of the responses to the Slashdot article someone else mentioned said
just the opposite.  What all parties seemed to be missing was that ease
of reading has a lot to do with practice (provided that there is a certain
basic level of regularity in the script being read :)

Amanda