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.
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.