Microblog Memes

personally i'm left handed so school-taught cursive was much harder for me to write and t never got faster than block-letters (not sure what to call it, to me handwriting means non cursive and i would specify cursive but i know in other parts of the world that's different so in this message i'll use "block letters" to specific non-cursive) assuming i ever needed to read stuff again.

but i think the main reason people hate it because a lot of people have terrible cursive handwriting. if it took the writer 25% less time to write but it takes the reader 2x as long to read... that's fuckin annoying lol. i'm all for people using it for their personal notes but there's a LOT of people who shouldn't be using cursive for anything anyone else has to read.

I used to do data entry for the post office and the number of people who addressed their letters with terrible cursive was way too high. the OCR could interpret most block-letter handwritten addresses but it couldn't handle as many of the cursive ones because the characters are more ambiguous. often to read people's cursive you need to use more context (ex. disambiguating through the words around it) which just isn't possible for an address.

for people using "block letters" the OCR would only fail on like, cards for grandma addressed by little kids and times when the scan cropped out the edge of the writing. but we got tons of shitty cursive handwriting.

i later delivered mail for the post office and the distribution of block-letter vs cursive style handwriting was very different - more block-letter than cursive. making the overrepresentation of cursive amongst illegible addresses during my data entry time even more significant. it's not a perfect sample data set but i keyed thousands of letters per day during the data entry job and when i did delivery i'd say dozens of the letters i sorted were addressed by hand most days so it was enough enough to give me strong opinions.