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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: 2) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @01:55PM (1 child)
I don't ever recall being taught it. I was also never taught the strokes to properly form capitals, only lower case writing. Everyone else I knew as a child would use a simple loop or even a '+' for an abbreviated 'and'. I disliked this so much that I carefully studied the printed ampersand and learnt to write it myself.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by Nuke on Friday April 06 2018, @03:07PM
I ws taught to write a stylised "Plus" sign instead of an ampersand. It started with the downstroke, then curved halfway back up and to the left, then finished with the horizontal stroke to the right. We were told (at primary school) that it was quicker and easier to write than an ampersand, and more people understood it.
That was bullshit on all counts. In my mid teens I did a complete revision of my handwriting font and one aim was to minimise reversals and pen liftings AFAP, for speed and smoothness. Even all my upper case chars can join to the following character. Among other things I therefore adopted the printed style of ampersand.
In fact my optimised writing looks rather old-fashioned, for example my capital "E" is like two stacked "U"s pointing to the right and my lower case "r" is like a lower case "n" with a tiny loop at the top left, as was used in copperplate.