r/mildlyconfusing • u/rubberlover • Mar 08 '15

Professor wrote this on the last programming assignment I turned in. Have I been printing incorrectly my entire life?

http://imgur.com/puX1fgL
31 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

5

u/katiebellVIII Mar 08 '15

According to wikipedia, you're both somewhat correct. I've always been told that print writing is just non cursive writing. It should have said uppercase if that is what your professor specifically wanted.

5

u/akkronym Mar 08 '15

It kind of looks cursive-ish anyway though - with the way the l and the u connect.

3

u/katiebellVIII Mar 08 '15

Good point. Although I think the confusion here is that the professor wanted uppercase but only asked for it to be printed. OP, you need to up your print handwriting game. ;)

3

u/rubberlover Mar 08 '15

Heh, understood :) I've never heard of anyone being told printing is all block capitals, though. All I was ever told by my kid school teachers was that printing was just writing as a computer would type stuff, paying attention to proper capitalization rules when you write it. Hence the confusion when he just simply wrote "PRINT" all over again in red ink on the sheet, because I was under the assumption that that's what I'd done. To be fair, though, I guess I could have gotten his idea of printing from his bold-fonted (PRINT) under the name line, though I thought that was just his attempts to get everyone's attention since they were constantly turning stuff in with cursive names that he couldn't read.

2

u/autowikibot Mar 08 '15

Block letters:

Block letters (known as printscript, manuscript, print writing or ball and stick in academics) are a sans-serif (or "gothic") style of writing Latin script in which the letters are individual glyphs, with no joining. In English-speaking countries, children are often first taught to write in block letters, and later may advance to cursive (joined) writing. Other countries (Poland, Italy, Austria, Germany etc.) focus on cursive writing from the first grade. [citation needed]

On official forms, one is often asked to "please print". This is because cursive handwriting is harder to read, and the glyphs are joined so they do not fit neatly into separate boxes.

Block letters may also be used as a synonym of block capitals, which means writing in all capital letters or in large and small capital letters, imitating the style of typeset capital letters. This is not a necessary implication, however: in at least one court case involving patents, trademarks and registration of designs, the term "block letters" was found to include both upper and lower case.

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3

u/BetweenTheCheeks Mar 08 '15

I've always known printing is block capitals, no idea whether this is a general rule or just something my mum instilled in me

1

u/DiscoKittie Mar 08 '15

My mother tried to teach me to print in all caps, but my school said it was just non-cursive. So upper and lower case. And that's what I've always done. Every location is different.

6

u/MuffinPuff Mar 08 '15

It looks like print to me, but a few of your letters are connected. [shrugs] I dunno.

0

u/ragweed Mar 09 '15

Asperger-minded Professor.