Initially I've learned writing by replicating simple capital letter
shapes (well, block capitals), and later was taught cursive (for both
Russian and English, with loops and ligatures) at school. Never was
good at it, and it was barely legible. Occasionally I've considered
re-learning or otherwise improving it, though there was less and less
of motivation to do so: texts are mostly typed these days, even paper
documents are vanishing. Though from time to time it is needed: there
are occasional forms to fill by hand, and it might be nice to write
important bits of information (for instance, passwords and contact
information) down on a paper, for both security and persistence.
Some time ago I saw the "The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting" article,
which was rather inspirational, though I have expected it to require a
lot of practice and wasn't motivated enough. But yesterday I've
decided to finally give it a try, and discovered that simply writing
in block letters (including lower case ones, with rounded bits and
which aren't particularly awkward to write) leads to much more legible
texts.
Without loops, ligatures, or slant, writing already looks cleaner, and
more attention can be paid to other details. I didn't practice much
yet, but from the very beginning the writing with block letters was
legible; practice should just help to make it neater, more consistent
and aesthetically pleasing (which is much less important than
legibility anyway).
An advantage of cursive writing is speed, but stenography is better
suited for that, and in most cases it doesn't matter these days.
It reminds me of how people are generally first introduced to the
QWERTY keyboard layout, possibly even told that it's all awkward in
order to make typing faster. Or how websites include a lot of junk
instead of focusing on content and its legibility.
In conclusion, yay, finally I can write something that both myself and
others can easily read, using just pen and paper!
