What you all missed was the gorilla that walked through the video while you were focusing on the letters.
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Boy i’m going through variations of capitalized letters and its amusing how i learned some of the weirder ways of writing certain letters. For T i use the top left one
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Back in the day i had it locked down on how to nicely write cursive, i especially loved writing the capitalized versions. But as i moved onto high school and notetaking became more demanding and fast my writing never recovered. I write horribly now, and exclusively in print with some minor cursive mixed in.
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Yep; speed was part of the reason I began integrating printed capital letters.
I still write in cursive, if it’s anything more than a short note.
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Taking notes in my science classes pretty much ruined my handwriting. My teachers were assholes that would cover material super fast.
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This is absolute bullshit.
I got it right, here’s how: I thought about how I write a ‘g’, figured that they wouldn’t be asking the question if it wasn’t the other way, and guessed on the serif (which I assume means ‘remembered the serif’).
The reason people get it wrong is because they do know how to write a g. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. In both printing and cursive the lower loopy part of the g connects to the upper circle on the right. In typefaces like this it connects on the left. I don’t know why I didn’t notice that before, but it has nothing to do with writing.
The real result of this experiment is that it actually doesn’t matter, and if you turned all the g’s in this font backwards people would still read it just fine.
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I think the point that they were maybe trying to make is that the looptail g is the canary in the coalmine - it’s the letter that basically no one writes by hand, so our relationship with that letter is a harbinger of our potential future relationship with all letters, if/when we mostly stop writing by hand
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Oh!!!
That makes so much more sense. And it does actually make sense. Whew, I knew I was feeling crazy for some reason.
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I arrived at this conclusion by thinking “this article is super dumb”, and then trying to come up with a more reasonable interpretation, then double checking the text to see if it made sense.
I’m still not even sure if I 100% back their study design - you’re right that I looked at the four candidates and picked the one that most closely matched the way I write the letter “g”, so that potentially confounds the ability to extrapolate this to a post-handwriting future
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Did you have Mrs. Perlenfein, too?
In parochial school we were taught Palmer cursive, but, serving that, we were forced to ditch ball point pens for fountain pens (the type using ink cartridges). The nuns were right; ones hand was much more relaxed when using fountain pens, and that resulted in better (less forced) cursive.
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Yeah, I was left in the “this is too dumb to be real” stage and didn’t get to thinking of a way it could make sense and it left me feeling discombobulated.
I agree that the study design seems to confound a lot of issues, though. Like I said, I got it right by thinking of how I wrote a g and then thinking, “it must be the other way”. Basically the fact that the question was being asked alerted me that something was up. That’s really hard to factor into the analysis of the outcome.
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Nope. “No Child Left Behind” killed, along with the arts and recess.
What I’m about to say is going to make the parents out there nervous, but I dropped out of grad school when I ran out of money after the '08 crash. I was getting a Master’s in Teaching! Bwa-ha-ha-ha! Anyways, on one of my research papers, I found out that cursive writing is easier for dyslexics because the letters are linked, and it’s harder to ‘flip’ the entire word. Also, serifed fonts are easier for dyslexics, because the serifs, to a lesser degree, keep the eye moving along instead of back-tracking ‘against the grain’.
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But many aspects of letterform design are still based on the way we did write by hand, or at least the way a right-handed scribe would draw those letters by hand. If you’re drawing a closed loop with your right hand you’ll probably start at the top and make a clockwise circle to close it. The #3 version would be the most natural to draw that way if you were to make it by hand.
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It is? Well, I’m listening! 
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I prefer to think of my seismographic cursive handwriting as ‘secret’ handwriting, like how Da Vinci wrote in mirror-writing.
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Yay, I got it right. I decided to rely on recognition memory without overthinking it and the 3rd g “looked right” so I went with it. Reading letters relies on automatic pattern recognition processes, so overthinking it interrupts those processes and is less likely to get you the correct result.
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So many variations… F that!
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The cursive Q has always blown my mind.
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This is something I figured out long ago in art class. Recognizing something/someone uses different mental skills/brainpower than knowing what something/someone looks like to the degree that you are able to make a recognizable drawing of them - even a quick sketch.
It’s the same thing to a certain extent with this funky typography lowercase g thing. 
It seems that there is an inherent brain function that allows us to recognize things/people without observing and memorizing the minute details of their appearance in order to know what/who they are. It’s a basic and seemingly inborn survival skill that most people possess.
It’s also something that my native-born Chinese professor expressed when he said that there are some complicated and rarely used written characters that he could recognize on sight, but which he’d never be able to write without having a clear example of the character in front of him.
What some people consider to be the mysterious talent of drawing a likeness is actually someone having the interest to take the time and make the effort required to really look at something/someone to the point of seeing and understanding the proportions and relationships between the visual elements that they want to reproduce graphically.
If someone shows you a photo of a well-known public figure and asks you if you know who that person is, and you say, “Of course, that’s Tom Hanks,” that doesn’t mean that you know what Tom Hanks actually looks like, to the point of being able to sketch a recognizable likeness of him. Two related but different skills.
Same thing with that funky lowercase g, (which BTW - if anyone’s still reading this or cares, I did get right the first time too).
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