handwriting
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Writing by Hand
There are those who bemoan schools’ decisions to stop teaching cursive, and those who welcome the decision with keyboard in hand. John Oppenheimer, writing for the New Yorker, talks about writing to his daughters at summer camp using cursive, even though…
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Songs of Our Lives: Guns N’ Roses’s “Paradise City”
When people asked what I was going to do after high school, I said, “Leave town.” I wasn’t kidding. I hadn’t applied to a single college.
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Reading Writing
A delightful, short essay at Atlas Obscura describes how handwriting in colonial America was packed with information about the profession, or trade, and class of the penman/woman. Reading was considered spiritual, and taught separately from writing, which was highly self-conscious, revealing,…
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Pen, Paper, and Prose
You can run on and on because writing by hand does that, makes your sentences long and serpentine, like a river whose ending you don’t see until you turn the last bend. Over at Read Her Like an Open Book,…
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Handwriting is Dead; Long Live Handwriting
Type is the same, instance after instance, and the font you choose today will look the same when you type in it again tomorrow. The same is not true for crafting prose or poetry by hand, each looping connection between…
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Known Pleasures
In the wake of So This Is Permanence, a recently released archive of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis’s notebooks, Jillian Mapes reflects on why artists’ scribblings mean so much to fans: “It’s a human reaction to see handwritten things, as…
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Handwriting Matters
A new scientific study has demonstrated that learning to write by hand before learning to type helps in developing children’s brains, and the benefits stretch from childhood to adulthood memory-wise. Psychologist (and Rumpus interviewee) Maria Konnikova explains on the New York Times: Cursive…
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Handwriting Is Important I Guess
“During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a “spaceship,” actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called “functional” MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before…