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Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by ledow on Friday April 06 2018, @08:21AM (13 children)
I learned cursive.
20+ years ago.
I couldn't care less. I literally lived virtually my entire adult life without having to pick up a pen except to make a signature or jot a post-it style note. I could operate in block capitals without significant effect.
I don't get why you'd WANT to write a typeset g - it's a typeset g for a reason, the same as a typeset ampersand & looks nothing like most people's handwritten version (which can just be a small loop).
Handwriting is dead and on its way out, why we continue to spend years of our children's best learning-absorption time on this nonsense, I can't fathom.
Question: Aside from thing YOU write to yourself, how much of the written content you see in your life is typeset versus cursive? Do you receive handwritten bills? Leaflets? Advertising? Websites? Control panel labels? Cursive novels? Handwritten CV's/resumes go in the bin at all the employers I've worked for. It's got to be way past 95% typeset for even the most technophobic of people unless they work in some niche art. Since Gutenberg, people haven't needed to write the majority of words that exist on paper. Nowadays, they aren't even on paper.
Cursive is a waste of time, and worrying how people write g has to be even worse. The fact that - on my screen - all the g's on Soylent are like my hand-written one is even funnier. I'm sure in the serif fonts, they do use the elaborate version but sans-serif tends not to. Does it matter? Not really. Hell, you could work it out from context in a matter of seconds even if you'd never seen Times New Roman before in your life.
Let's stop wasting our kids time worrying about how THEY write it (so long as they are able to write themselves a short note that should, ideally, be able to be read back) - being able (and being made) to read it several thousand times a day is much more important to their development than destroying their hands to enable them to write it.
I'd also like to point out that I graduated university. In maths. The one subject which I will force myself to pick up a pen and paper when things get complex because you CANNOT sketch mathematical notation simply without planning it out or having a large blank area free-form (sorry, but LaTeX / MathML are for presentation of result, actually doing maths more often requires chalk or pen). But that has nothing to do with cursive.
The last time I used a pen or pencil to write anything other than post-its / shopping lists in block capitals or a signature (that's worthless nowadays because everything is electronic and electronic signatures are basically pointless as they are just scribbles no matter how hard you try) was probably... god... can't even think... years. Maybe a decade. In fact, the last time was probably one of those electronic handwriting-capture pens for a tablet PC. That both dates it, and the fact that I haven't used it since because it was horrible tells you why we aren't all using them instead.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Bot on Friday April 06 2018, @09:07AM (9 children)
> Handwriting is dead and on its way out, why we continue to spend years of our children's best learning-absorption time on this nonsense, I can't fathom.
-Coordination eye hand
-Discipline
-Independence from electronic media
Kids today are basically retards in motor skills and with some exceptions are also dumb (don't show me stats, go see the schoolchildren production of yore instead). You know where they shine? Verbal skills. Now all we need to do is a society where your main occupation is being an actor. Can't do that? teach them to write.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @09:24AM (3 children)
I remember the Good Old Days of the Prussia-based American school system, where it still focused on mindless regurgitation of facts and blind obedience, and where the vast majority of the populace was still profoundly uneducated. But at least it didn't have No Child Left Behind! Therefore, since it was marginally better in one or maybe even a few aspects, it was overall good. Ah, the Good Old Days...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Friday April 06 2018, @11:55AM (2 children)
> Prussia-based American school system, where it still focused on mindless regurgitation of facts and blind obedience
the teacher was the god
the pupil knew it
the pupil did what the teacher wanted until he could break free
Now
the teacher is nothing
peer pressure is everything
peer pressure is not endogenous but driven by propaganda and marketing
the pupil does not know, nor do you
the pupil does what the system wants or suicides
Account abandoned.
(Score: 5, Informative) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @01:40PM (1 child)
The teacher's pressure and the institutionalization that goes on in the school system breeds obedient subordinate workers. The market driven peer pressure breeds obedient consumerists. Both things benefit big business, largely at the expense of the individual's freedom, identity and emotional security.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Informative) by Virindi on Friday April 06 2018, @04:20PM
Yes, obedient drones help BIG business. As in, large bureaucracies that mainly survive because of their bigness.
But it should be added that an obedient, nonquestioning populous hurts the actual market (price vs. quality ratio), and as well small and medium business. In small business being unable to think has a much bigger penalty.
In modern times we have "solved" this with the "huge hype = millions in startup VC" model. Yay.
Obedient drones also make uneducated customers of course. Which makes markets work less to drive positive change.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @09:25AM
Not actor, a manager. Good verbal skills and good political defence mechanisms is all you need to become a manager. Just pray the manufacturing jobs don't actually return to USA or you will have big social commotion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @09:31AM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJJUbbnX4Gs [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 06 2018, @03:01PM (1 child)
If you want to teach your kids fine motor skills then use something fun, useful, or both. Cursive is neither fun nor useful. I expect it will become even less and less so, since I can write cursive but struggle to read any written more than a generation ago.
Maybe magic tricks? Slight of hand?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Friday April 06 2018, @06:28PM
Calligraphy! Cursive may be obsolete, but calligraphy is still valued by some for its artistic merit.
Or, any other detailed art...
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Friday April 06 2018, @06:26PM
Kids
todayare basically retards in motor skills and with some exceptions are also dumb...There, fixed that for you.
(Score: 2) by carguy on Friday April 06 2018, @12:46PM
> Question: Aside from thing YOU write to yourself, how much of the written content you see in your life is typeset versus cursive?
Very little is cursive. But, the hand-written letters I receive from an older friend, by post, are among my most treasured. This guy traveled widely in Central and South America and tells wonderful stories. For one example, seeing a Ford Trimotor flying overhead while motorcycling in Mexico, finding the small airport where it landed and getting on the return flight--into a remote canyon which held one of the largest gold mines anywhere. He has lots of stories like that, one of those people that stumble onto adventures. The fact that his letters are in cursive adds immeasurably to his stories.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by edIII on Friday April 06 2018, @07:03PM (1 child)
I'll admit this here... I could never learn cursive. There was a lot of screaming and crying because they thought I was just being obstinate. It took a few weeks of dealing with adults before they figured it out. I really couldn't make any sense of cursive whatsoever. I still can't. It's a foreign language to me, and I have zero problems walking over to somebody and telling them I've no fucking idea what they wrote. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, everything written in cursive, I just smile and say thank you. If it's important I find a friend and have them read it to me.
Cursive is fucking bizarre. As a result, I've only ever used printed characters my entire life, and my signature is a chaotic squiggle that is never the same, not even once.
So this article is incredibly confusing because it is asking about the print version, and not the cursive one right? I cannot make sense of it because I've rarely run into a font (other than the cursive fonts) that I cannot immediately see the letter g. As for the double loop version of the lower case g, yes, I have seen it and know what it is.
Pretty much at this point in my life, if it isn't printed with a terminal font, I find myself spending some time deciphering the symbols.
It goes without saying, that Arabic/Thai written languages are complete Greek to me :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday April 07 2018, @01:04AM
If it makes you feel any better, I often have the same problem despite learning cursive and being able to read it fine. If it's written well, it's fine, but what I noticed is that cursive has this weird "dialect" problem, where nearly everybody writes in their own custom version, with subtly (sometimes greatly) different letter shapes and odd little shortcuts. And the variations themselves differ from person to person, too: sometimes print characters get mixed in; sometimes the cursive letters only marginally resemble what they're supposed to; sometimes the letters are crammed together so tightly it looks like a bunch of curly loops with no meaning; and sometimes it's written at such an extreme left- or right-leaning slant that all the letters only barely resemble what they should.
Worse still, it's usually not just one thing. No, it's a mix-and-match of multiple variations, making someone else's cursive handwriting practically a foreign language, no matter how neat it is. Sure, some of it still happens with block print, but it seems like less of a problem overall for some reason. Might be because block print clearly distinguishes individual characters, compared to cursive's emphasis on writing entire words in a single long stroke. The latter makes it harder to determine where one letter ends and another begins, and probably also encourages sloppiness. Yes, when it's well-written, cursive has that pretty flowing lettering look to it, but making long sustained strokes like that is much harder to do neatly compared to short, decisive pen movements, and I think it makes the writing of people that don't hand-write constantly much worse compared to occasional block print usage. I'll admit that's just speculation on my part, but there are similar problems trying to draw long strokes with many curves vs. single decisive strokes when sketching, so it seems reasonable to me that similar difficulties occur when putting pen strokes to paper for a different purpose.
Only somewhat related, I've always had poor handwriting (both print and cursive), and it got worse as I started typing more than writing, but I eventually figured out that I could improve my printing greatly by focusing on accurately creating letter shapes instead of focusing on the words to write. Basically, I treat it more like "drawing" the characters instead of writing the words. It changed how I write and made a huge improvement to my legibility.