An Engineer Redesigns Cursive to Kill the Dot-Your-i's Backtracking Problem

A developer who learned Cyrillic before the Latin alphabet argues that English cursive is quietly miserable to write because so many letters demand backtracking — the pen has to return to dot i’s and j’s and cross t’s, forcing the writer to hold a mental queue of pending strokes instead of thinking ahead. To quantify the gripe, he ran the numbers on Crime and Punishment: the English text needs backtracking on 51% of words (0.68 per word), while the Russian original needs it on just 6.4% (0.066 per word), since only a couple of Cyrillic letters require lifting the pen.

Unable to find an existing script that solved this, he designed his own on top of SmithHand, borrowing from the Russian penmanship he learned in school. The tricky single-stroke fixes: x becomes two mirrored c’s, t gains an auxiliary up-and-left flourish (a mirrored ‘4’ motion seen on several Swiss shop logos), and the stubborn i and j fuse their dots into a tight loop above the midline that flows straight into the stem — with placement mattering enough that a misaligned loop reads as an r or a Greek epsilon. Capitals like T, F, and K got smaller tweaks.

The payoff is both analog and digital. Beyond restoring writing flow, single-stroke words play nicely with stylus notebooks, where undo operates per-stroke — one tap erases a whole word instead of forcing a switch to the eraser tool. After several months of use the author says his letters are still imperfect, but writing English finally feels as pleasant as writing Russian.