How much faster is writing cursive than block letters?

It isn't.

There is a time in every man's education when he comes to the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; and that science isn't something that happens only to other people.¹ For me, that moment came when I read Ruth Daniel's excellent essay testing whether salting pasta water makes it taste better.² Before then, it hadn't occurred that I could isolate assumptions that I have in my life, and well... test them.

One assumption I've long held is that cursive is faster to write than block letters. I handwrite a lot of things, so this is an useful question to ask. Cursive has a lot of downsides (harder to read and transcribe; harder to transcribe using OCR technologies), so any speed differential is super important.

I decided to test this by doing a little experiment. The results surprised me.³

The basic idea was to be very simple: choose a text, write it in both cursive and block lettering, and then compare how long it took to write. However, in order to avoid bias due to hand fatigue, I chose two texts to write from, instead of one, and alternated the order.

I go into more detail below, but it's mostly straightforward. I only did one clever thing: To prevent myself from seeing results partway through, I used voice recordings to determine how long each trial took.

Experimental Plan

Materials needed (specific material used):

• Two texts of equivalent length and similar content (Gettysburg Address and "We Shall Fight on the Beaches" closing⁴)

• Clean paper of a consistent type (Printer paper)

• Consistent writing utensil (Pilot G-2 07 Pen)

• Recording device (cell phone)

• Quiet, well-lit space with a comfortable writing surface (two distinct rooms)

• Coin for randomization (or other method; I searched "Flip a Coin" into duckduckgo.com)

Setup:

1. Using a coin flip:

2. Choose the first text (Gettysburg Address)

3. First writing style (Block lettering)

4. Set up comfortable writing space with minimal distractions

For each combination (style & text) in the order "first text, first style; first text, second style; second text, second style; second text, first style":⁵

1. Start the audio recording (or keep a voice memo running between trials)

2. Read through the entire text once

3. Write the warm-up sentence ("The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog") in the upcoming style

4. Say "start" and begin writing the test:

5. Write at a natural pace, aiming for clean writing without being overly careful.

6. Immediately after finishing transcribing the given text say "Stop"

7. Between trials, take breaks:

8. 5-minute break between different styles of the same text⁵

9. Take a longer break between texts

10. Make any extraneous notes as necessary

Analysis:

1. Review recording to determine exact length of writing

2. Compare speeds between styles

The results can be summarized in the table below:

Condition	Order	Time	Wordcount	WPM	Notes
Gettysburg + Block Letters	1	8:39	264	30.5	Music in background
Gettysburg + Cursive	2	9:32	264	27.7	Music in background
"Fight" + Block Letters	4	4:33	141	30.1
"Fight" + Cursive	3	4:29	141	31.4

Experimental screw-ups

• I'd forgotten I had a music alarm set, so music started playing in the middle of the first trial. To replicate, I did that as well with the second trial.

• The 3rd and 4th trials were conducted in a different room, on the same day, but later

Picture of results:

The block lettering seems more legible at a glance.

My cursive doesn't seem to be any faster: This surprised me. I expected cursive that was going to be quite a bit faster, and I became more convinced of this as I conducted my experiment. However, when I actually tallied the results, there didn't seem to be a large difference either way.⁷ Cursive may even be a little bit slower, but that's hard to say.

The results are only valid to me: There's quite a bit of variation in individual writing styles, so it may be different for others.

Psychological factors are important:

• Using the voice memos was good because otherwise I would have skewed my writing speed to some extent

• Cursive felt much less slow and more pleasant in the moment. I was convinced that I was going to find a huge discrepancy.⁸ I really didn't. This might be important. Perhaps cursive is less fatiguing, or I like it more?

Limitations:

• Fatigue definitely played a factor here:
• We see that the second style is slower in both text samples
• A five minute break was likely too short
• The transcription task may be different than day to day writing
• This was not a composition task. It may be that cursive feeling more fluent leads to more fluent thinking and thoughts. Which leads to a higher overall Words Per Minute.

What's next?:

There are a couple of directions to go in. One is to investigate whether I can write more quickly with a mixed cursive-block style (as several studies suggested was faster; see footnote 7).

The experimental idea I find more interesting is to investigate any effect within my journaling. The experiment would be to randomize on different days which style I was using, and track a) the amount of time I spent writing b) the amount of words I wrote and c) my percieved fatigue. There are some limitations with this design, but it might still hold some valueable insights.

This went better than I expected. Midway through running this experiment (which took around a day to run and write-up), I thought that I was wasting my time. But I ended up with a result I completely didn't expect.

Let me know if you want to replicate this experiment, and let me know how it goes!

Notes: