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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 26th, 2023
  • ...m...@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    0·
    27 days ago

    …i’m old enough to have gone through gradeschool when the prevailing paradigm was for teachers to push all students to write right-handed (last i experienced that was corporate policy for all mice to be set up right-handed in the early nineties) so most of my peers growing up cultivated a grab-bag of super-immortal habits and terrible handwriting, to boot…

  • ...m...@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    0·
    27 days ago

    (look left to mouse, looks down at sideways notebook, looks back to display)

    …so here’s the thing: ergonomically, we hold and manipulate writing implements around 135° from the writing surface, which most-smoothly draws across the page at that oblique angle, pulling your hand outward, back of pen and and hand first, fingers and writing tip last, character strokes moving center-out and top-down so we can see what we’re writing and avoid smudging everything with our hand…left-handed or right-handed, that doesn’t change, and although some lefties struggle to contort their hand around top, stabbing into the paper at an acute 45°, it’s an awkward, uncomfortable, smudgy mess fighting against both ergonomics and mechanical advantage of the pen-and-paper…

    …righties write accordingly, pulling the pen out-and-down, but if we rotate the page 180° (90° from a left-handed perspective) lefties do exactly the same, pulling the pen out-and-down, it’s just that text flows along the down-axis and the rows flow on the out-axis…

    …another way of looking at it is to take that japanese text above and rotate it 90° counter-clockwise: now it flows left-to-right, top-to-bottom…sure, in either case one might counter that the letters are sideways but that’s just a matter of convention in how one interprets the rotated glyphs; books spines are still perfectly legible…

  • ...m...@ttrpg.networktoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•*Permanently Deleted*
    0·
    28 days ago

    …some do, but most either rotate the page ninety degrees to write vertical text right-to-left or they cramp their hands and smudge the paper…

    (not to mention that pushing your writing implement is generally much rougher on both the tool and the paper surface; pens clog + jam, pencil tips break, and paper tears much more frequently)