Every single human being I know, bar one (my high school history teacher) has better handwriting than me. Even my eight and nine year old nieces!
Sometimes I get the people who ork the cows to write stuff on the whiteboard for me. I say “My writing is terrible, can you write this for me?” Appreciating the implied complement they drop their orking duties for a moment and say ‘sure’ or ‘glad to’.
I am left-handed. But I’ve seen beautiful handwriting from lefties (one of my nieces included).
I told my well-educated and wise step-dad, and he said the trick is to practice over and over writing the same letters. And eventually they get good at it.
But the cynic in me knows that human beings are notoriously bad doing what their teachers tell them and practice highly uninteresting things like handwriting… So why is good writing so seemingly universal? Most people’s jots, scribbles, notes are like looking at sheet-music compared to mine. Mine is an embarrasment.
I’m an intelligent bloke. I write stuff occasionally. I sometimes even try to make it look neat. But even the most important document that has a requisit to be handwritten ends up looking like an eight year old boy did it with his ‘other’ hand.
You’re a child of the 80, aren’t you? The prevailing opinion among teachers (and among powers-that-be) was that such old-fashioned thingssuch as writing and reading could be glossed over. This has very much changed now. But if you want to learn to write ‘correctly’, you will need to do the same amount of work to equate to daily classes from ages of x through y. Not a pleasant thought.
FWIW, I dealt with a letter today clearly from a ‘senior’ gentleman - immaculate copperplate, in inkpen throughout. It was a very strange thing to see in that situation.
Child of the eighties, yes. I was born in the very last year of the seventies.
If my teachers neglected to impose forced handwriting practice on me during lesson time, they certainly made up for it by making me do ‘lines’ in detention afterwards. I was a slacker. Maybe that is the answer to my question (I was a slacker), but wasn’t everyone. North-West England schooling being what it was in the eighties.
If your handwriting really bugs you, get a copy of the book “Teach Yourself Better Handwriting” by Sassoon and Briem. ISBN 0-8442-3780-9. It’s $13 new from Amazon, but I got mine cheap on Half.com.
It teaches you a simplified form of italic handwriting – you can adopt a little, or all of its letter forms and joining methods. You DO have to practice, but after the first few days when you’re doing basic shapes, you can pretty much practice by just consciously using the ‘new’ letter shapes while doing whatever writing you do normally. Grocery lists, to do lists, whatever.
I can’t say my handwriting is a thing of beauty, but when I began…well, all through college I’d come home from lectures and immediately type up my handwritten class notes, because if I didn’t do it while they were fresh in my mind, I would never be able to figure out what the notes said. Now, my handwriting is still not wonderful – no one would mistake it for calligraphy – but I’m not ashamed of it any longer, and anyone can read it easily at a glance. And that’s the main thing, right?
Well, on these boards, most members work with cow-orkers. So the act of ‘orking’, something practiced on a cow, is commonplace.
And now for the boring bit…
[sub]It has become a habit to shift the ‘-’ in ‘co-workders’ one place to the right, as was the result of less-than-perfect typing skils originally, because ‘cow-orkers’ is ever-so-slightly wittier[/sub]
Two possiblities come to mind. Both my inability to play sports and my good handwriting is because of an astigmatism that went undiagnosed until age nine: the world beyond the 3-foot realm was a blurr, so my fine motor coordination was developed at the expense of gross motor coordination. If you were farsighted as a child, the opposite may be your case.
Or, if this isn’t a neuromuscular dysfunction, perhaps, as you noted, it may be out of sheer cussedness, albiet subconsciously. Having spent years in printing, deciphering customers’ instruction on proofed copy, and then in pharmacy doing the same on doctors’ prescriptions, I tuly believe that bad handwritingis simply bad manners: “My time is more important than yours, so our communication will be more about your getting the information than my conveying it.”
StarvingButStrong I think I’ll take your advice about getting the book.
It doesn’t ‘bother’ me as such, I’m not self conscious about it. I just wish I could write something and then look at it and not think ‘ugh’. I enjoy looking at the swishy curvy notes of other people. I want to be able to see my own notes in the same way.
Many people can do ‘illegible’. What I do though is ‘quite legible, but ugly’. The illegible scriblings of other people ‘look’ better than my legible notes. I’d rather have ‘illegible’ than ‘ugly’
Since your problem is not legibility but aesthetics, maybe you should take a calligraphy class. A calligrapher would probably be able to quickly identify what you are doing that keeps your handwriting from flowing.
You might want to take a class in calligraphy. It improved mine a good bit and was interesting at the same time. Heck, you can even earn cash doing calligraphy for weddings and such.
I blame my bad handwriting on computers. I just never write anymore. It got really bad at one point during school, where I was using a Palm Pilot with a keyboard to take notes and writing papers on the computer. I had to sign my name or something one day and realized that the pen felt very foreign in my hand, because I hadn’t used one in so long. That was the low point for my handwriting. It’s gotten a bit better since then now that I have a job that requires more writing.
I’ve always had terrible handwriting, and back in the early 60s teachers complained mightily about it, but it never did any good. I blame it on the fact that I think much faster than I can write, and I don’t have the patience to slow down and write legibly.
I also agree with **Smeghead **that I get far less practice at handwriting these days, and that has definitely taken a toll on my already marginal writing.
Another agreement with Smeghead and Twoflower - I use a pen so rarely that it literally hurts my hand to write a page of text. I can type almost as fast as I can compose, but handwriting’s much slower. So except for those increasingly-rare occurrances where you have to handwrite, I don’t.
My handwriting, therefore, has become entirely illegible. I have to individually craft every letter if I need to read it later – if someone else needs to read it later, it’s hopeless.
My signature has decayed to illegibility as well, because my real name is rather long – so I “scribble” to get it over with.
I couldn’t write worth a damn in the 1960s as a kid & I still can’t today. My brain is immediately three of four words ahead of my pen and so the rest of the word after the first letter just turns into a jiggly line trying to catch up. In college years ago (still before computers were widespread) I switched to writing in block letters as my cursive was useless. My block lettering sucked then and still sucks today for the same reason.
My handwriting is probably similar to yours Lob, more legible than most any other human on the planets’, but looks like it was written by a 5 year old. Might I ask if writing cursive is physically exhausting for your hand? In grade school when they were teaching us, we had to rewrite a single printed page in cursive; the other kids would finish it in a few minutes, while it would take me several hours and my hand would hurt like hell.
I am now again fighting this in art, as I need to be able to draw long flowing lines in a single stroke that perfectly match what I am tracing, but it is near impossible to not end up with a line that doesn’t wobble horribly.
As of yet, I have no solution to report, but during summer vacation I suspect I will be doing little else except practicing that.
Another lefty checking in. For years I struggled with terrible handwriting. I was always the last one in class to graduate to the next writing implement or paper style (thick pencil to thin pencil, pencil to pen, coarse wide lined paper to fine white blue lined paper).
In uni, I discovered that the only way info was sticking in my head was to write very careful notes that I could read later, and by sheer force of will, my handwriting eventually got better. I don’t do full classic cursive, with some printed adaptations for things like b, r, s and many capitals, but I’ve been complimented many times on my handwriting in recent years and people that dont know me well express surprise that I’m a southpaw.
My other bit of advice, is get a fountain pen. Failing that, a good quality ball point, but a fountain pen will be better. I have a Lamy Safari with a Left hand nib (no joke, it’s just the angle at which the nib is ground). Spend some time learning to use that and the elevated quality of your handwriting will naturally follow. Oh, and I have less problem with ink smears on my hands using FP ink than I do from ball point ink.
Lob, TimeWinder has hinted to it (at least for me) - you are trying to write too fast. I, too, write (cursive) pretty much illegibly. But I can pretty much type as fast as I can think. Handwriting (legibly) is very slow, and I have to gear down what I want to write to write well. So instead I’ve tried to speed up my handwriting, and it has gone to hell (defeating the whole purpose of writing as a means of communication ;-).
If I need to “write”, I tend to print, in all caps no less. This certainly comes out more legibly. It, too, is much slower than typing, but I am able to “handle” it - I don’t try to print any faster. I think the reason for this is that you need to lift the instrument more often (the whole reason cursive was supposed to be more efficient) as you write, and that tends to pace you better.
So my theory is that: you type fast enough to keep up with your thoughts. So you also try to handwrite at the same rate - thus causing the result to become unintelligible. I’m betting if you slowed down, your writing would improve. After signing a bunch of checks during my montly bill-paying session, it will occur to me that even I wouldn’t vouch that those were my signature. So on occasion, I’ve tried to practice just on my signature. And it is only if I slow down that it becomes legible.
I gave up on cursive so long ago I couldnt write a sentence in it today. I agree with the brain far to fast for the hand theory. if I slow waaaaaaaaaaaaay down I can make my writing readable to others, at full speed I often cant read my own.
I do know a few people with worse hand writing than mine though.
Sage Rat, I’ve taught Art before, so I have some suggestions.
The first is that you are probably gripping your pen/pencil too tightly. This would cause your hand to hurt and take longer for you to do your writing. You can try to make a concious effort to hold it in a lighter grip. You can also get one of those foamy cushions that makes your pen fatter and easier to hold.
In drawing, if you’re having to draw a slow line, you’re probably doing a contour drawing. In this exercise, a smooth line is not the quality you’re looking for. A contour line drawing is supposed to show all the little bumps and burbles of the edge of the object that you’re drawing. Smooth lines are usually seen more in gesture drawing, where speed is of the essence. For a smooth line, you move the pen quickly over the paper.
If you’re still having trouble with your hand hurting and your line not being smooth, one thing to try is to change your grip. Instead of holding your pencil like you would for writing, hold it like you would hold a stick you’re going to poke something with. Speaking of sticks, a technique I’ve used with students who were having a really hard time overcontrolling their pencil was to tape or rubber band the pencil to a stick and making them hold the stick, standing at least two feet away from their paper. Drove them nuts, but it also got them to give up their death grip on their pencil.