I learned 10 finger typing when I was 8 in school (42 years ago), and have been glued to computer since then ; if I write something, or even sign something, it is complete gibberish, even to myself. To me it looks like those last stages of dementia scribbling, but I know that's not it because it was like this since I was 12 or so; my teachers couldn't read my writing and it affected my grades.

I’m the same way, and between that and the fact that I can type 120+wpm, makes me angry every time someone expects me to write something. Making dirt smudges on dried tree pulp is as archaic and outmoded as carving marks into bones, and in my view has no place in modern society outside of art.

I’m pretty sure most modern mathematics research takes place on pencil and paper or chalkboard. It’s too tedious to typeset everything in the research phase. It’s also way harder to draw little diagrams or new invented notations on the computer.

If mathematics was as young as programming, it wouldn't use any fancy symbols and make everything ASCII compatible. Though that wouldn't solve diagrams...

> in my view has no place in modern society outside of art.

For a lot of use cases I agree, but no place is to ... abrupt in my opinion. Computers for sure have a multiplier affect in many cases. But when you really want to think something trough it's advised to slow down. For those cases paper and pen is the perfect medium.

And I have a personal preference when making notes with pen and paper about hikes and climbs I'm working on/doing. But that's just me

> But when you really want to think something trough it's advised to slow down. For those cases paper and pen is the perfect medium.

Or chalk on blackboard/marker on whiteboard. A marvelous way to get thoughts flowing that just don't seem to otherwise.

Funny how it almost becomes its own language, legible only to the subconscious

Same goes for my signature, I almost get anxious when I have to sign something on paper.

No worries, signatures are expected to illegible scribbles.

Same. Over 20 years (note taking especially) it is reduced to scribbles. The value of it is the time thinking while writing it mostly, though todo's are longer lived.

If your todo list is, or needs to be long lived, I think you might have more problems :D

I make notes on paper as the act of writing makes it stick about in my head longer than it would if I typed typing them out; though similar to you there's better penmanship from a spider that fell in ink.

Long lived may be tomorrow/a few days :-) And struck through. And written at any angle on the paper. Definitely not a codified method for me.

I like this 'my handwriting is write only'.

when i was 18, i looked at notes from my new coworker / manager and asked him how he learned to write that nice. He told me that he struggled writing cursive and just started writing letter by letter (print letter style?).

I changed my 'font' on that day and suddenly i was at least able to read what i wrote!

Interesting.

We grew up learning to write separate letters.

Cursive was taught only very briefly as a way of telling us tgis also exists but don't bother too much about it.

Nevertheless, cursive is where the speed is. University times I was writing at the speed of the professor chatting and still having it halfway readable even for others - even though the looks of it were tending to the Arabic (I'm Latin). Good times, now I can barely scratch a shopping list before I break my wrist.

Same here. And not only that, years of keyboard and mouse usage have done some damage to my wrists and nerves and it's actually painful for me to write.

I believe that pain comes from misplaced expectations. We remember the times when we were fluent writing, or see it in others, and expect our hand to follow the same pattern with the same speed. So we push too hard. We should realize instead our hands must re-learn to write at this time, drawing the letters so slow like the small children do.

Still. I will always be notetaking (and doodling) during meetings as it helps me not fall asleep and makes it look like I am paying attention.

Same here.

Use boox or remarkable! You get both advantages of having the writing experience and their automatic recognition turns your scribbles into text!

Decades of typing, and now my handwriting is more of a cryptic art form than anything readable

Even my mother who is 68 has severely deteriorated handwriting. Nobody writes by hand in a Western country since the smartphone.

It's interesting that for decades, technologists were stubbornly predicting that the paperless office was just around the corner:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paperless_office

These predictions were famously overoptimistic. Paradoxically, paper consumption went up for a long time instead, because printers became cheaper or better, and wysiwyg word processors made it far easier than type writers to produce complex documents, with pictures and diagrams and tables.

But approximately since the smartphone era, printer usage indeed seems in sharp decline. The paperless office, at last, became reality. Just a few decades later than expected.

If I could get a digital music stand that worked well and wasn't expensive I'd get rid of a lot of my print. (I need one for the piano, one for the keyboard, one for each kid into music, so cost is very important!)

I feel like even if I try to write neatly, it’s like my hand has forgotten how

So you can't explain something to people on a whiteboard? I've been typing since I was a child but I'm still perfectly able to write legibly. If I thought my handwriting was that bad I would try to fix it as not being able to whiteboard would be terrible.

Many of us don't do physical whiteboards anymore. I diagram a lot, but all of it is online. Apart from own satisfaction, there's no reason for me to get better handwriting. (And there lots of things more satisfying than that) Addressing a letter once a year without a printed label, I can use block letters.

Try Kate Gladstone's "Handwriting Repair" course:

https://handwritingrepair.info/

the biggest thing which helped my handwriting was switching away from ball points to either felt tips or fountain pens.

Getting a Newton Messagepad also helped markedly, and since then I've been using tablets w/ Wacom EMR styluses where possible (NCR-3125 running PenPoint (donated to the Smithsonian by the guy who bought it) through a Samsung Galaxy Book 3 Pro 360) and applications such as Nebo or Write by Stylus Labs.

You can fix it if you want to.

By the time I graduated from school, my handwriting was pretty bad. I could read it, but nobody else really could. Then I got a Palm Pilot and it's primitive handwriting recognition forced me to slow down and make better letter forms. At the same time I devoted a little effort to improve my cursive as well.

It's stuck with me and my handwriting is still fairly easy to read. My block caps look like something off an architectural drawing thanks to Palm's Graffiti system beating me up nearly 30 years ago.