Writing by hand is good for your brain

I <3 Stephenson's earlier works: Snow Crash, Diamond Age, and even the lesser stuff (the university one, In the Beginning There Was the Command Line, etc.) were all incredibly well written, and I'd strongly recommend them.

But Cryptonomicon started to go in the wrong direction (though it was still good), and after that he completely lost me by writing 1000 page books that require you to learn half of an entirely new language he made up! His success seems to have made him completely lose the magic (of writing well) that he once had.

As such, I'd take any advice he gives with a mountain of salt. It's like getting advice from a "has been" former athlete: it might be good advice from their glory days, or it might just be junk they spew in their obsolescence.

This post makes me feel old

"Sure, doing X the old-fashioned way is slow, inefficient, and inconvenient in a hundred minor and major ways - but haven't you considered that it might, on an incredibly shaky connection with low effect sizes and uncertain causality, be better than your brain?"

Sorry, but no. I trust that "the Old Way is just Better in an invisible, unproven way" about as much as I trust any other "appeal to tradition".

I like Neal Stephenson's writing, but I wouldn't take this advice seriously.

All well and good for folks without hand issues.

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

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?

>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!!

Very little young people are writing by hand nowadays :( Mostly vaping xd

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.

Do crosswords count?

I mean, I love writing with fountain pen and I do it every day, but I have _read_ Anathem.

More like old habits go hard - heh

I don't think that the research is as conclusive as the article makes it out to be ( I know he links ).

I would consider this: maybe useful, do it if you find it entertaining.

Remember when serious debugging meant at least an inch of greenbar?

> I’m not an expert on how the brain works, but I can say that,

Aaaaaand time to tune out.

Decent article.

No notes.

HN should add downvote option.

Great!

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Always boggles my mind that some people can't write cursive. So you write each letter one by one?