Doctors have messy handwriting, but I don't think I've ever met a native English speaker who completed elementary school who would pick up a pen and pause, completely uncertain of how to draw a letter of the alphabet. They might make minor spelling mistakes, but I don't think that's closely analogous to the phenomenon the author is talking about.
The "Doctors have messy handwriting" trope derives from the fact that prescriptions often contain a large fraction of Latin terms, chemical names, abbreviations and acronyms that don't parse (and thus seem sloppy/illegible) if you are trying to "decipher" them as English. Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations (esp. now that drafting isn't as emphasized in architecture, engineering, and similar programs)
>>>Doctors don't have significantly messier handwriting compared to similar populations
I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
Please. I still have my medical charts from my childhood, back before the computers. I can barely read the handwriting there, and it's not because of medical terms.
Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
The entire article is an argument to the contrary. It's fine if you disagree with the author's opinion on that point, but it's begging the question to just dismiss it on that basis. They even specifically mention that "this new digitally induced amnesia is not merely a matter of forgetting a few strokes in a rare character", which would be more like a spelling mistake.
What the author describes is a phenomenon like wanting to write the word "analogous" but having no idea how to even begin putting pen to paper. Not writing the word and ending up with "analagous" by mistake.
Do you read Chinese? I do. The examples given in the paper involve forgetting which radicals constitute a character. It very much feels similar to forgetting whether it is “through” or “thru”. They put the wrong component down. They did not forget how to write the set of components in common use.
There are cases, almost certainly overrepresented here, where a character has some truly unique variation that the writer forgets. They know it is different but forget how. In almost all other instances it is a matter of forgetting “is it heart or fire here?” as these two are very similar. It’s like spelling with an i instead of an e.
