Monday morning poll written in bed

[andrewducker]

[Poll #1460336]

Comments

[andrewducker]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090919/ap_on_re_us/us_cursive_angst

Apparently 15% of people writing in the SAT write in cursive, with the remaining using print. I haven't hand-written anything longer than "Bob phoned for you." in about 10 years.

[cdave]

Ah, the poll could have been clearer. I've not hand written a _paragraph_ for a long time. But write A4 pages of bullet points several times a week.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

Not enough options for Mad Men!! I want freaking awesome man!! You finally getting round to watching it?

[dalglir.livejournal.com]

When I'm writing notes for myself, I write in bad cursive. When I writing stuff that other people need to read, I write in caps. I probably actually write about once or twice a month. I almost always have Notepad or my PDA's scribble pad to hand whenever the phone rings and when I'm writing on the PDA I use Grafitti shapes. I've never watched Mad Men.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

I write something most days a week, but not every day. I vary my writing depending on who's reading and what I'm writing, too - I print when I'm writing my email address for example, but write cursive for everything else around it..

[jinxremoving.livejournal.com]

I have never seen Mad Men, curse your binary thinking.

I spent my youth cultivating numerous handwritings. Nowadays my default is print; I've got a nice cursive, but it's rarely called for any more since handwriting in general is rarely called for.

[andrewducker]

You'll notice that a mere 13 of 34 people have answered the Mad Men question - you are not alone :->

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Yep, same here. The problem with those sorts of polls is that if you accidentally click either radio button, I think you have to cancel out of the poll and start again if you wish to leave a "no selection" reply

[red-phil.livejournal.com]

I answered 'BAD' not realising it was a film.
I just thought you meant men who were mad.

[andrewducker]

It's a TV series - Madison Avenue advertising company in the 1930s. Very stylish, staggeringly well made, not a single "nice" character in the bunch.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

thought it was 50's or 60s? Not that I have seen it.

[andrewducker]

You're right - it's the 1960s.

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

Funnily enough, I answered yes, not realising it referred to a film. I was thinking of Murdock.

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

Anyone not watching Mad Men should have their fingers broken, that'll teach them to waste time thinking about handwriting when they could be watching Mad Men.

That said, I write cursive if it's for me or isn't that important. If someone else needs to read it then I'll probably print because my handwriting is terrible. And I write a fair bit at work, since I have to review stuff that other people have done, and scrawled post-it notes are the way to go.

[sttatus-quo.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen enough of Mad Men to form much of an opinion.

[ashfae.livejournal.com]

My writing is somewhere between cursive and print, it's truly about half-and-half depending on the letters.

No clue what Mad Men is.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

Same here with the writing and Mad Men.

[randomchris.livejournal.com]

1) Both depending on whether I want other people to be able to read it
2) Do you mean in one session of writing or in total during the day/month/week/year?
3) Never seen it
4) TICKYBOX

[andrewducker]

I meant "at any point during this time period".
And I don't do tickyboxes if radio buttons cause more comments.

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Even if they offer a more accurate result?

No idea about Mad Men; never seen it. Did well at the Primetime Emmys last night, though.

[andrewducker]

The point of Good/Bad polls isn't accuracy (such a thing would be impossible considering I'm asking a random sample of my friends who aer happy to idle away time filling in random polls) - it's the discussion in the comments...

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

Printing. Hasty printing. Usually, hasty printing on a grocery list or my Tablet PC... which makes the handwriting even more wretched.

-- Steve voted "Bad" for Mad Men because it's bad for him; the quality is excellent, but it sparks homicidal rage at many of the characters...

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Writing is a terrible way of generating text. It might hang around in some legacy contexts for a while, and I'll bet some diehards will maintain it's a good way of developing hand-eye coordination for fine motor control long after it's of any practical use. (The same sort of people currently argue for teaching Latin because it's good for learning logic and grammar.) But really, it's an obsolete skill that will dwindle to insignificance within my lifetime. I hope. :-)

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Congratulations: that is the most idiotic statement I've heard this month.

[andrewducker]

Would you care to offer some kind of rebuttal?

[dapperscavenger.livejournal.com]

I think it's more likely to evolve into an art. It can be beautiful.

[heyokish.livejournal.com]

My writing is a bizarre hybrid of cursive and print--because some letters join more pleasingly and quickly than others. I've got a special illegible version, too, for when I'm taking notes that I don't want other people to be able to read over my shoulder or across a meeting table. I only ever print when transcribing something from another language, where I have to read individual letters rather than whole words.

Oh, and fountain pen all the way, as it's quicker and less tiring than the death-grip-pressing-nonsense of biros.

All my current study notes are handwritten, and I'll probably draft my essays by hand too, because I build things differently with a pen than a keyboard. And with big damn papers/documents at work, I almost always start with a handwritten outline.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

looks at poll. (takes same.)

looks at comments.

concludes: Several people have already talked about what didn't work for me in the poll.

Cursive for private writing, block capitals for legibility (including me).

Mad Men GOOD, but I feel like they're flopping around this season. Maybe it's just because it's the first I've had to follow every week.

[robling-t.livejournal.com]

I'll join the chorus of "depends whether I'm the intended end-user": my cursive borders upon illegibility even to me, so anything that needs to be deciphered by other parties such as addresses on parcels gets printed out in smallcaps. I scribble disjointed notes to myself all the time, but a certain percentage of them are a bit more like tying a string around my finger to remember something than actual functional text...

[darkoshi]

I write in a fast cursive scrawl for myself. If I want someone else to be able to read something, I generally write in a slower half-cursive, half-print scrawl, leaving out some of the shortcut strokes I'd otherwise make... but I'm still usually too impatient to write slowly enough for it to be neat, and so it sometimes is still difficult to decipher. Except for addresses on envelopes - there I take care to print legibly to make sure it gets delivered to the right place.

I don't usually write whole sentences, but I write a lot of notes, both at work and home. If what I'm writing is something that I think will be useful to have a year or more from now, then I type it into a text file. Otherwise, for temporary notes I just put it on paper.

[luckylove.livejournal.com]

When I write things by hand it's half and half. Half cursive half printed even within one word.