To be clear, I’m not discussing vertical signage involving the Latin Alphabet such as this since I’m mainly discussing formatting entire book passages, sentences or even paragraphs of information in that manner in which Chinese, Japanese or Korean allow for that kind of writing orientation found in novels (chapter books) like this:

I’ve shared a excerpt from the first chapter of a book I’ve finished reading in Japanese, but the same writing format works for both Chinese and Korean. Is it because their characters look more “squarish” as they’re logographic meaning the orientation isn’t rigid allowing flexibility on being read either top to bottom vertically or left to right horizontally?


…i’m old enough to have gone through gradeschool when the prevailing paradigm was for teachers to push all students to write right-handed (last i experienced that was corporate policy for all mice to be set up right-handed in the early nineties) so most of my peers growing up cultivated a grab-bag of super-immortal habits and terrible handwriting, to boot…