Write legibly

[twistsol]

Measure twice, cut once, but write the measurement legibly.

Below is a scan of my notepad for a gate I needed to build for a landing in the garage. The 733mm wide gate I built was a little too short. That number is actually 933. About an hour of work to disassemble it and build it the right size. One of my kids teachers actually passed a note around the class that I had written as an example of poor penmanship.

[capncarl]

I see you are still using lined paper! I usually use a sharpie on the flat, white cardboard dividers found between layers of beer cans in square case of beer! My penmanship teachers fussed at my scratchings and told me to slow down. If I write over 4 lines of text the words get less and less decipherable until I notice it and make myself slow down. I also have a problem mixing cursive and printing. I highly recommend the stiff cardboard! You don’t need a clipboard, you can prop it up against something and read it easily and it doesn’t blown off the workbench like a sheet of paper…. And it comes free with every case of beer!

[Jim Frye]

https://www.gocomics.com/reallifeadventures/2021/09/12

[atgcpaul]

That's a "9"???

I always got As in penmanship in grade school but as I wrote less and less and typed more and more, it was going downhill in college. My lab mates in college couldn't deciper my "D"s on some test tubes and thought they were "O"s. So I spent a weekend to retrain myself on writing "D"s in a different way that made it clear. I can't write them the old way anymore.

[atgcpaul]

https://www.gocomics.com/reallifeadventures/2021/09/12

I remember watching my Dad fill out invoices when I was in 1st or 2nd grade. I couldn't decipher what he was writing and that's when I learned about cursive.

[cwsmith]

Fact of the matter is that bad printing is a problem and I've seen my share. When I was about 14 my Dad told me that he was having some lumber delivered on Monday and that he wanted it moved out of the driveway and stacked neatly out behind the house before he got home from work.. He didn't tell me how much but I just figured for the new garage roof he was building it would only be a dozen or so long, 2 by's. When I got off the school bus that afternoon there in the driveway was 129 of them. I was not quite finished when he pulled up, asking what did I do, put it off to the last moment. I took him out back to show what I had been bustin-my-butt for.

What had happened was that the guy at the lumber yard scribbled down the number my Dad ordered (18 as I recall) and then my Dad corrected the count, the fellow put a line thru the second number and wrote a "9" to the right of it. That got interpreted as 129 !

I used to write 'cursive', as I was taught in school, but when I was sixteen, I got my radio license (not Ham, but Civil Air Patrol, military-style messaging - we'd help out the Military Affiliate Radio Service (MARS) and that required printing instead of cursive. That was in 'all-caps' because it was easier to interpret than upper and lower case. Later when I got a job writing Parts Catalogs we had to list the numbers and part descriptions on a GAPL form which was 80 columns wide and you filled in each space with your printing. (GAPL - Group Assembly Parts List).

When you completed an assembly, it would go to a keypunch operator and a IBM card would be punched for each line, later to be sorted, and printed as a parts list with the illustrations we made. There were some international conventions used in my printing, like a horizontal line thru the middle of the number 7, and of course a slash thru a zero to distinquish it from an 'Oh'. Basically the same as a military message which I had learned years before. However, when I moved to Painted Post, I ran into a problem! There, the keypunch dept. had been trained wrong and their interpretation was exactly the opposite with a slashed zero interpreted as an 'Oh'. Let me tell you that became a bit of an argument and I refused to send any more parts listings to the data center. I found a key punch machine in another dept and had our dept. typist do the keypunch work instead.

When I became a technical writer, I would write my manuscript on a lined, yellow pad, which would then go to a typist. She'd double-space the document for editing and we'd go back and forth a couple of times with errors and Engineering changes. I'd still write all upper case, but to show the difference, I would write capitol letters larger and use the convention of marking it with three under-scores. But no matter how many edits you go through, there always seemed to be a typing error, or an engineering change or addition. You finally get it done and send it off to the typesetter, get the type gallies back and start to paste-up the camera-ready pages and you'd find an error. Then for time's sake, I'd have to splice-in the line change or mortice-in a word in the middle of a sentence. It was extremely time consuming and too often frustrating.

Let me tell you, there was probably no one happier when I got my first computer back in the late 70's. I could type my own manuscript, parts listings,etc. (My first Parts List on that computer [Atari 800] is a whole story by itself.)

Today I still print the same way and it's almost impossible for me to write cursive, because I'm so out of practice!

CWS

[Jim Frye]

About the only cursive I can do legibly anymore is my signature. I lost my cursive ability when I became a computer programmer back in the '60s. Source code had to be printed in caps on coding sheets so the keypunch operators could read them to punch the data into 80 column punch cards. My writing is now done in caps with actual capital letters being larger than the "lower case" letters. Drives SWMBO crazy. The cartoon I linked is truly my Grandkids, since they don't teach cursive in grade school anymore. My 14 year old Granddaughter does cursive, but as calligraphy since she's an art major in high school.

[mpc]

Back in grade school I was one of two kids singled out for hard to read writing - in cursive. I didn't try changing either; we were not graded on it and I would soon have a different teacher for the next grade anyway. When writing, I use cursive almost exclusively as printing is so much slower for me. In college, taking notes, everything was cursive but written very small - I could organize my notes into outline format almost real-time this way and writing tiny was faster! A classmate liked to borrow my notes a day or two before quizzes... he'd always gripe about the "font" size though.

I try to type stuff as much as possible; it's easier and faster still. These days, gripping pens or pencils for more than a few minutes makes my hand hurt. My cursive tends to be small to this day; I have to force myself to write larger when putting short notes into Christmas cards.

When I worked, everything us engineers did was filed in "workbooks" for whatever project we were doing. These workbooks showed the equations or methods we used, the source/reference for data, and often explanations as to why we did something "this way" versus "that way." Early in my career (about when the original IBM PC was introduced along with PCDOS) these workbook notes were hand written on "quadpads." Later I typed as much as I could... only writing the equations by hand. The company never had a good equation capable word processor or editor during my career: something that could handle 3 levels of subscripts and 2 levels of superscripts on a single term... that's how Stability & Control quantities appeared in equations. Formal documents and reports often had pages of these equations, showing how to combine values from hundreds of plots, to generate a quantity. For example, total airplane lift was a sum of many contributions: the wing+body from a graph, plus contributions from wing spoilers from another graph, etc. Prior to computers, the engineers would write the equations as neatly as they could and the Office Assistants (OAs) would have to type them as neatly as they could... manually rotating a typewriter platen half-a-line for subscripts and superscripts. Many terms used Greek characters as well so there was still quite a bit of hand-written bits in the final reports. A few folks got fairly proficient at using MS Word Equation Editor... I never did.

CWS: slashes through zeroes - I still do that today; several engineers I worked with did this too. Except on the rare occasions when I write a check these days as slashed zeroes confused a bank decades ago. In your computing days did you use the expression "bang" for the exclamation point "!" character, and "splat" for asterisks? During high school and college years, I had summer jobs at the US Naval Research Lab (cool stuff!); one summer I helped the system manager of the Space Science Division's VAX computer. I used the term "bang" (for a Tektronix graphics terminal command) and he laughed a moment and said "I suppose this is 'splat' then? An IBM'er are you?" No... but dad was. Some countries reverse the slash - using it for the letter O - rather than for the numeric zero. Arg. A European co-worker constantly got tripped up by our reversed convention.

My hand writing or printing would not win any prizes today either. I have a pretty good memory so, when my scribbles might be misread, something in my brain kicks in "that doesn't look correct; I thought it was..."

mpc

[woodturner]

"the expression "bang" for the exclamation point "!" character, and "splat" for asterisks"

and WHEN did people star claiming the Octothorp was a "hashtag"? Not sure we needed the hashtag slang for octothorp ;-)

[atgcpaul]

I knew about "bang" and "splat" but I was this days old when I learned that "#" was called an octothorp. Until recently, I always called it the "pound" sign or "number" sign.

[mpc]

Until reading these replies, I had never heard the term "octothorp." It was always "pound sign" to me; and only recently was it "hashtag" - ever since Twitter clogged up cell phone frequencies. It was even "pound-seventy-seven" when used on touch-tone phone keypads. Phones also changed the asterisk to "star" as in "star-seventy-seven."

mpc

[cwsmith]

mpc,

"spat" and "bang" are not familiar to me, this is the first time I've heard those terms; likewise, Woodturner's point of "Octothorp" is almost equally unfamiliar these days, I do recall the label being used way back in my 1959 highschool Sophmore typing class though. I decided to take a single-semester class in office typing which was quite an oddity for us boys. Everyone else in that class were all girls! While today everyone calls the ' # ' a hash tag, we always referred to it as a 'pound sign'. (BTW, that typing class probably did me more good than most of my other classes. I'm not a particularly fast typists and today with a few numb fingers on my left hand I make a number of mistakes, but over the years, even basic typing skills came in handy.)

CWS

[mpc]

I took a semester typing class in my high school freshman year instead of a P.E. class. I too found it one of the most useful classes I ever took. Being able to type my own stuff in college gave me a significant time advantage over my classmates. Having my own computer (a CP/M 2.2 system using 8 inch diskettes that I built - a few years before the IBM PC existed) with the SuperCalc spreadsheet and WordStar word processor let me pound through engineering homework much faster than my classmates. I had a simple dot matrix printer back then... not exactly "letter quality" printing. But, because my papers weren't full of white-out or correction tape, the professors actually preferred it.

mpc

[atgcpaul]

I do some coding in perl. I get by. Anytime I can, I work "$hit" into my code because I'm immature. My work largely works with "hits" that we identify in our biological screens so it's not completely out of left field.

[LCHIEN]

That's why we don't use metric very much. :-)

If you wrote 36 it wouldn't be misread as 28
and you 'd know that 28" was way too narrow for a gate anyway.

[Jim Frye]

Cursive update: Today, SWMBO went to the BMV to renew her driver's license. There was a sign at the checkout counter that checks had to be made out in print with only your signature in cursive. Further proof of our declining social skills?

[LCHIEN]

Cursive update: Today, SWMBO went to the BMV to renew her driver's license. There was a sign at the checkout counter that checks had to be made out in print with only your signature in cursive. Further proof of our declining social skills?

So does that mean

1. DMV people can't read cursive?
2. Citizens can't write cursive legibly
3. banks handwriting recognition can't read cursive reliably
4. all of the above

And if you have to chose a skill, today, right now, would you rather give up cursive or being able to type on a keyboard?