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xkcd #2912: Cursive Letters
(imgs.xkcd.com)
Alt text:
๐ ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฒ๐ท๐ด ๐ฌ๐ช๐น๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ช๐ต ๐ ๐ฒ๐ผ ๐น๐ป๐ธ๐ซ๐ช๐ซ๐ต๐ ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ฎ ๐ถ๐ธ๐ผ๐ฝ ๐ฏ๐พ๐ท ๐ฝ๐ธ ๐๐ป๐ฒ๐ฝ๐ฎ, ๐ฝ๐ฑ๐ธ๐พ๐ฐ๐ฑ ๐ต๐ธ๐๐ฎ๐ป๐ฌ๐ช๐ผ๐ฎ ๐บ ๐ฒ๐ผ ๐ช๐ต๐ผ๐ธ ๐ช ๐ผ๐ฝ๐ป๐ธ๐ท๐ฐ ๐ฌ๐ธ๐ท๐ฝ๐ฎ๐ท๐ญ๐ฎ๐ป.
My cursive looks like a 10yr old wrote it, which is about the last time I actually wrote in cursive
I hate that they still teach it in schools. It means that for about 3-4 years per child, you get birthday and Christmas cards and you can't read them.
It's not noticeably faster and it's certainly not neater. Just let it die.
Also writing speed doesn't really matter anymore. Most situations where writing speed used to matter now needs typing speed instead.
I don't buy this. I take notes on paper all the time, what am I going to have my laptop or phone in my face during every conversation?
What are you doing that having a pen and paper is normal but your phone or laptop isn't?
I work in habitat restoration. I spend a lot of time outdoors, but most of my notes are just from my normal meetings. If I'm on my phone taking notes, I have to stare down at my phone and it takes me out of the meeting. I have ADHD and find my phone very distracting. But I can write quick notes on paper without having my head down.
I also just prefer physical notes. I have tried everything under the sun with digital note-taking, but nothing beats the flexibility and reliability of pen and paper. I have a great binder-based note-organization system.
I am honestly shocked that so many people NEVER use pen and paper notes? It is very normal in my field.
Congratulations on finding a single exemption to the rule.
The rest of us are living in 2024
Your tone is condescending as fuck, so I don't know why I'm bothering to reply because you'll undoubtedly just shoot insults at me too, but... I live in 2024. I work in tech, too. I almost exclusively use paper as a note taking, problem solving, and brainstorming tool. Digital tools simply don't compare in my eye. There is an inherent freedom of immediate expression and a special mental retention value that comes with pen on paper that I have tried and failed to sufficiently replicate on a computer despite attempts of great effort. I'd definitely prefer if I could instantly backup and organize and search and sync without a scan+tag process, but it's all inferior to me. The most capable people I work with also have a shockingly common tendency (>65%) to share this preference, too. I envy the others' ability to work purely digitally, but do notice how they spend substantially more time and effort in "administrative overhead" with their digital knowledgebases in comparison to my analog squishy world, to just end up producing similar overall output.
Not really, a lot of people work outdoors in some way. It's not as unusual as you think, you are just in your own bubble lol
I find this fascinating. Props to you, of course.
Speaking for myself, my handwriting is far from elegant. In university (40+ years ago) I developed a sort of mashup of cursive and printing, since speed of transcription was fairly typical.
I adore the look of top tier handwriting. I even got into calligraphy when I was in HS.
Since my career has taken me deep into the world of tech, Iโve become twitchy at the possibility of a single point of failure, ie, one copy of something is equivalent to no copies of something, 2 copies of something is equivalent to 1 copy, etc.
As such, Iโll take casual note (eg, my to do list for my ADHD) using Google Keep, so that I can access it and update it from my phone or one of my laptops. For the grocery list, itโs Alexa. For professional notes, itโs a combination of Obsidian and Syncthing.
Speaking of Obsidian, I first learned of it while watching a video of anPhD student describing her massive manual note taking system, following a particular system manually, and then discovering Obsidian.
In your case, yeah, I see no reason to change. It works for you.
Yeah, paper note-taking does mean scanning right away when you're back in the office. But the reality of field work is that you might lose the data if you took them on a tablet, too. I've worked jobs where there was no service until we get into the office, so the data just lives on the device until it is uploaded.
I am using Obsidian for a particular project, I'm using it to organize a history research project I'm working on! I think it's a cool tool, I would just go crazy if I had everything organized on my computer. I end up hyperfocusing more on the organizing system itself, or get distracted on the computer/phone... and the physical notes I can make cute and aesthetic much more easily which makes me feel warmly about my to-dos. I tried to do a digital PDF notebook with hyperlinks and everything, but I just felt like I was spending too much time fiddling around with on my note-taking and organization.
Paper stationary is a lot more popular in Germany and Japan, oddly enough. A lot of jetpens products come from those countries ... the most sought after notebooks are Japanese and Germans have great pens.
Iโm not sure I would use a nationโs strong preference/popularity for a particular tech to be the gold standard. Fax machines are, or at least used to be, in high usage over there. Also, they have a quirky preference for doing everything in spreadsheets; deviating from that to use a more appropriate tool is frowned upon. One of the best examples Iโve seen of this is someone drawing up an office floor plan, very detailed, including the cubicles. It was a gorgeous piece, but I had to wonder about the baffling inefficiency of that approach.
That said, I donโt disagree with the notion of avoiding any tool that creates huge overhead of just using the tool itself. Screw that. I love tech, but screw that.
Even where I work now, we try to reduce duplication. And in spite of that, I find myself using a hodgepodge of GitHub, Jira, Confluence, Google Docs, and Google Sheets. Jira and Confluence are slow and bloated, but thatโs where weโre meant to put a lot of our effort. Even so, a table in either of those is slower and more limited than just using Sheets.
Iโve tried various ways of taking notes over the years. So many times Iโve had that โfinally, this is the oneโ moments, only to eventually move on to something else. For a short while there, I was simply editing Markdown in Visual Studio Code (with Preview mode) and committing to GitHub, which was both lightweight and made for quick backups. Then I discovered Obsidian, and around the time worked out how to get SyncThing working.
Iโm not a fan of my handwriting. And Iโve been burnt too many times in university courses, writing something down, only to realise I needed to add another paragraph up where there was barely any room to add a few words. And drawing arrows here and there only works for so long. So yeah, call me embittered =)
Handwriting in university was really the only option at the time, as it would be decades more before the first smartphone would come along. Plus, taking courses in linguistics, Chinese, and Japanese, you needed to be able to capture things that a conventional keyboard just couldnโt manage.
Use the right tool for the job. Which it sounds like youโre doing. Likewise for myself, I think.
I was just saying there are a lot of Japanese/German-made stationary options because they use stationary. It's kind of a bummer because you have to pay extra for them to be imported, and they might not be in English or show important American dates. I wish there were more high quality English-language options available. Even the paper itself is usually shit ๐ฉ
Totally understandable that as a tech worker you would prefer digital note-taking tools!
And just as an aside, sometimes I think engineers focus too much on "efficiency". There are a ton of things that can be optimized for! Maybe having a beautiful office layout diagram makes the experience of looking at and working with the diagram more enjoyable, more memorable, maybe it instills pride in the office workers.
I have a colleague that insists on using pen and paper. He has draws and draws full of random scraps of paper which apparently have important things on them.
He's even gone out and got expensive paper which is apparently made from stones? and is there for waterproof, It does appear to be waterproof but I'm not convinced it's made out of stone. He has a phone and a Laptop, and an iPad Pro with a stylus, and he refuses to use any of them.
You don't really seem to like him very much haha
Yeah because he can never find anything. He knows he wrote it down, but he doesn't know where it is or what it said, and because it's not on a computer you can't just search for it. He's a pain.
Even if he just scanned in the results of his spider scroll at least we'd have something. Although it still wouldn't be searchable because it would just be a picture but I bet OCR could probably do something about that.
You can totally be disorganized on a computer too. My paper notes are organized in a binder by context.
Idk sounds like the guy just has untreated ADHD or something. Life's too short to be mad at someone for being kinda bad at their job. You're all just workers together.
He can be as disorganized as he wants up until it makes my life more difficult. Then I'll be mad at him.
Don't gatekeeper being mad at annoying people.
lmao gatekeeping? calm down ๐
You actually seem to be the one with the personality problem here.
People are telling you their stories, and you're like "no your stories are wrong you're a shit person." What the hell is wrong with you?
Do you mean drawers?
You just prefer it, a notebook won't survive a 50ft fall into water, an iPad with an OtterBox might, even if it didn't my notes will, I just grab another iPad.
No, you're just wrong. A notebook does fine in the rain and water, there are specially designed notebooks for this.
He's not wrong though you just disagree.
He is wrong bc he's saying a tablet would survive the elements better
I promise you I've used both, pretty sure I had to write in pencil for mine and I'm sure you can argue the minutia back and forth all day, however objectively, the iPad is a more versatile writing tool than a notebook.
I disagree with your "objective" opinion lol. The iPad you have to keep charged, can break, they overheat in sunlight especially when you put an OtterBox on them, they might get laggy with big documents. And with paper you can write with any pen/highlighter you like, you can take it anywhere. Tablets are not always the best tool.
What large documents are you keeping in that binder? Your notebook can break, if one iPad isn't charged I grab another one, we've been over this, okay the battery fails; again, it's backed up. Maybe it can overheat in the sunlight (110ยฐf haven't had it happen), maybe you want to keep something extra private. I don't really see the difference between changing writing tools in an app and in person tbh, but I'm pretty sure I can take an iPad almost anywhere. A tablet can do almost anything a notebook/binder can, the same is not true in reverse.
I don't really have infinite money for new/multiple iPads lol, neither has any habitat restoration job I've worked in.
I don't need to keep large documents on hand in my notes binder. I do sometimes print them and file them in an organized filing cabinet though. It's super fast to find whatever I'm looking for, add post-its, notes, whatever I want to them. And I can read them outside without glare.
I have had my phones overheat in sunlight regularly, just listening to podcasts. Not even that hot, like coastal California sunlight. Multiple devices, over years, it's just something I've accepted that can happen when you're working outdoors.
I already described all the advantages of paper notes. They don't break. You don't need to carry extra batteries around. No glare. I would not take an iPad into thick brush on a hot day, I wouldn't even be able to see the damn screen half the time. But you do you!
I'm not taking notes on any of the idiot conversations I get roped into every day
If you are- have fun, enjoy your pen and paper
Different lines of work. I have to remember a lot of things people tell me ๐คท๐ป
It is noticabley faster if you write with a fountain pen, or any pen with flowy ink.
Possibly, but I know exactly one person who writes with a fountain pen.
I remember wanting one in school, but the value was mostly in being able to flick ink at the other kids.
I know like, four or five people who use them! Depends on your circle. They're an affordable and eco-friendly alternative to disposable pens, although admittedly inconvenient if you haven't got a good setup.
I don't think I've ever owned a fountain pen that hasn't eventually leaked on everything. It's not broken either, it just leaks during the process of normal operations, so no matter how careful you are with it it will still leak.
Modern foundation pens with universal ink cartridges/refillable ones are pretty reliable. The only time one has leaked on me was when I dropped it and broke the pen in half. I had topen body fixed and it still works well.
I'm 37 and can barely read cursive, I hate it. I learned it in primary school, never used it, and here I am.
I play DnD and one of our campaigns got so confusing so our DM made a huuuuge flow chart explaining the story, consequences of our actions, where we can go next, etc. It's all in fucking cursive and I couldn't read any of it so I continue to be confused :)
My kids got just enough cursive in school to learn how to sign their names. Definitely not 3-4 years of it. Maybe 3-4 weeks at the most.
It's definitely not neater for lefties like me who smear our script as we write.
However, OCR input tech on phones and tablets are better at reading cursive than block print. Curiously, my grandson's curriculum in the Solano County School District dropped cursive writing and then picked it up again.
I heard more than a few US states decided to expend a law on requiring it because taught, your grandson might be a victim of such a policy.
I never recovered, and I don't really know how to write print. So i either write cursive at the speed of around one letter per second, produce unreadable chicken scratching, or write very ugly all caps print because that's simple enough and actually readable and faster than trying to produce legible cursive.
I also don't think I handwrite more than 100 words a year though so it's ok
You may want to look into dyspraxia. (Especially so if you have ((or suspect you have)) ADHD or autism, etc.) I think it's way more common than it's diagnosed. I'm the same way, and it helped explain a lot for me, so I thought I'd throw it out there just in case! 'Cause I'm getting those vibes haha!
Yep, I think i even got diagnosed with something similar (tho all i have is a memory of my mom mentioning "fine motor skill development disorder" once, which my brain couldve just made up), I do have autism and probably adhd which I'm still trying to get diagnosed. I looked into dyspraxia a while ago and a lot of it fit pretty well, I still tie my shoe laces in a very scuffed way for example and it took me until I was 12 or so to learn it. And there's nothing I hate more than fiddly stuff with my hands, so I've pretty much assumed I have some form of dyspraxia ever since. Though I had little issues learning to type and can do that pretty fast, and never had any general learning disability, which made me a bit doubtful. If it has high comorbidity with autism/adhd I probably do have it after all.
In any case I am glad I don't have to handwrite a lot anymore lol
What helped me get back to block print after six years of being required to write cursive is a shop/engineering drawing class that required us to use block print for our plates.
Our teacher in that subject taught us how to do block print, paying attention to each and every stroke and in what order we write them. I remember one of our first handful of plates just being the alphabet and some of the often used symbols. That helped us with our penmanship, without shaming anyone who might have had developed bad habits from previous years. Everyone is required to do it, so there's no shame in sucking at it.
Heard it's good to master fine motor skills.
So's Minecraft and Fortnite, and I dare say they'll enjoy that a lot more than trying to remember how to join a p and a b.
It is neater and faster but people cannot read it nor reciprocate. It used to be more or less universal. I like it and use it, but won't if what's being written is for the public.
When I was young my teacher said "If you want to be taken seriously you must use cursive!" She also said I'd never have a calculator in my pocket when I needed it, so there's that.
In my country all the work you do in Spanish class has to be in cursive from your very youth to the year you graduate.