July 13, 2026
Dot-gate in the pen fandom
Backtrack-Free Cursive
One writer declared war on dotted i’s—and the comments got gloriously petty
TLDR: A writer tried to reinvent cursive so words can be written in one smooth stroke without going back for dots and crosses. Commenters immediately split into camps: some said the problem is overblown, others nitpicked the letter examples, and a few turned it into a full-blown shorthand and vintage-script debate.
A handwriting nerd dropped a surprisingly spicy manifesto: English cursive is sabotaged by its own letters. The villain? All that annoying backtracking—going back to dot i’s and cross t’s after you’ve already started the word. The writer even brought receipts, comparing English and Russian text and claiming English needs way more of this pen-chaos. Then came the big makeover: a custom cursive style designed to keep words flowing in one stroke, with a redesigned t and x inspired by Russian handwriting and even Swiss shop logos. Yes, this got delightfully specific.
But the real entertainment was in the peanut gallery. One commenter basically shrugged and said, isn’t this just one backtrack per word if you add the dots and crosses at the end? Instant buzzkill energy. Another jumped in with a classic comment-section correction: what about the Cyrillic letter ф? Suddenly this was less “beautiful penmanship” and more “citation needed, professor.” Meanwhile, one reader flexed national handwriting pride by asking if the mirrored-c version of x wasn’t just… normal in France.
And because no internet discussion can stay normal, the thread quickly escalated into shorthand evangelism, with one fan insisting true writing bliss comes from full-on cursive shorthand systems. Another tossed in Sütterlin as an option, lovingly describing it as “level-0 encryption” because almost nobody can read it. The vibe was half stationery club, half linguistic cage match, and fully hilarious.
Key Points
- •The article defines backtracking in cursive as returning to partially written letters to add marks such as dots on i and crosses on t.
- •It compares English and Russian cursive and states that backtracking is much more common in English than in Russian.
- •Using Russian and English versions of *Crime and Punishment*, the author reports 51% of English words need backtracking versus 6.4% of Russian words.
- •The article notes that pen lifts can reduce the mental burden of pending strokes but interrupt continuous writing flow.
- •The author presents a custom cursive style based on SmithHand, including single-stroke revisions for letters such as x and t.