>Use cursive

Any good resources to learn cursive?

> If the pen’s ink reservoir is partly empty, so that it contains an air bubble, and if it’s positioned nib down, then, when you go up in an airplane, the bubble will expand as the ambient pressure drops, forcing ink out the nib. Once I figured that out, I got in the habit of making sure my pens were positioned nib up when taking off in an airplane. If I have time I’ll also refill the pen before departure, to minimize the size of the air bubble.

Finally! this was one of those things that bothered me for many years, but not enough to spend time to research :) . Thank you!!

Stephenson mentions the Pilot G-2 Gel, and it is a great pen, especially for left-handers. I've found one that improves on it: the Pilot Acroball. It's a better G-2 and though it might be a bit hard to find at retail it can be found online in all kinds of variations.

What if I told you writing in all caps is even better for your brain.

I'm surprised he didn't mention editing. On a computer this is trivial; on paper you need an ink eradicator, correction tape, or correction fluid. And even those are only good for small corrections. If you want to insert a sentence or paragraph somewhere, that's not really possible with paper.

Also, if you want your text to be published online or printed, it needs to be digitized somehow. Which is a good OCR tool for handwriting, especially if it's not very legible? Just feed scans into Gemini perhaps?

I'm a huge fan of N.S. and what he says might be true, but I have an aversion to writing by hand after being tortured while growing up in the late 80s.

I just couldn't seem to hold a pen or pencil the right way and would always fall behind following along with the rest of the class. I was forced to spend hours at home with worksheets tracing over letters. I was led to believe that if I couldn't write properly I would be a complete failure.

It turns out being able to use a computer and type quickly was a more useful skill.

Surprised honestly we haven't had similar claims for typing on keyboard versus typing on screens or dictation.

Out of all the things I’d consider to help me improve or be more productive, this has to be at the bottom. I actually used to write notes all throughout college, mostly because I couldn’t afford a laptop and would use the school desktop computers when actually writing code. But, I don’t see any degradation from moving to a workflow where I never physically write anymore.

I also don’t understand his stance on using cursive. Everyone that writes quickly develops their own scribble, which they can easily read and doesn’t involve taking the pen off the paper. What’s the point in relearning proper cursive?

All well and good for folks without hand issues.

I wrote almost my entire PhD thesis by hand, with a pencil. When I made mistakes I erased them. My handwritten notebooks contain close to the final version of each chapter (there were, of course, some further corrections after typesetting).

I don't like writing in pen. I like being able to erase stuff. Having scribbled out bits looks messy and gets on my nerves.

Whatever implement you choose, I do concur with the author that writing by hand is good for you.

I don't write much these days, but I do fill pages full of notes, mostly diagrams and other pictures. I don't understand how some people with jobs similar to mine don't use paper at all.