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Re: OT More pens

From:Amanda Babcock <langs@...>
Date:Tuesday, June 10, 2003, 14:05
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