I had shit handwriting until my junior year of high school when I decided that it would help me take better notes if I wrote it out more clearly. I’ve had bad handwriting just because I didn’t want to take the time worrying about it…I have been drawing since I was a little kid and have always been very good at it, so it’s not that my draftsmanship skills were off, it’s just that I didn’t care about letters. They weren’t important to me the way drawing pictures were.
In my junior year I started writing in big, rounded, deliberate script. The script was very good and legible, but it looked cartoony and deliberately artistic, more like a logo font than everyday handwriting. I didn’t care, though, and kept doing it. Eventually it got smaller but stayed clear, and people started thinking the stuff I wrote belonged to girls because of the “girly” handwriting.
If you want to write better, just be more deliberate. Approach each letter individually. Begin writing in a large font to practice and hone the clarity of it.
I am (I know this will come as a shock) left-handed. I am also a child of the eighties (born in '74), and have illegible handwriting.
It wasn’t based on newfangled teachers de-emphasizing reading and writing: I was an excellent reader as a child, and many of my teachers emphasized reading, and they also emphasized writing. I had a special writing instructor for awhile, maybe an hour a week or something, who worked one-on-one with me to improve my writing. I had teachers who marked me down by one or more letter-grades on assignments due solely to my crappy handwriting.
I suspect it has something to do with my difficulty with drawing, with my difficulty in visualizations. I underwent some sort of cognition test when I was a small boy (6 or so), and a few years ago I found the psychiatrist’s notes. Apparently I scored well in most categories, except in things like rotating shapes, where I scored on the low end of average. The psychiatrist noted that I probably would have scored far lower, except that I was translating the shape-rotation problems into word problems, solving them as word problems, and translating the results back to shapes (I’m guessing it was something like, “Okay, this triangle has a pointy bit up here, and none of the ones below have got a pointy bit on the bottom except this one, so that one is it,” but I’m not sure).
I do remember that I had to teach myself very deliberately things like which way the top of the six pointed–and this was fairly late, like second grade. As late as the fifth grade, I was surprised that I wasn’t allowed to flip letters into their mirror image in cursive as part of my unique handwriting style.
In seventh grade, I took typing. I think it was the most useful class I took in all junior high.
I don’t know if you’d be interested in reading these articles I found the other day while looking for handwriting materials for my daughter: Zaner-Bloser handwriting. There’s one on left-handedness and a couple on how handwriting contributes to brain development.
As a child of the seventies I have the same problem dispite having been taught propper writing with a fountain pen etc. Though lack of care has something to do with it I have found that even when I go to great lengths to make something legible it may contain non-distinguishable characters (4s like 9s, 6s like 0s etc).
When I write something down by hand it is for me to read, if I write something for others it is almost always a computer document or email.
I get compliments all the time on my neat handwriting, but like cormac262, I basically print in all caps. However, I can print damned fast and it always looks neat.
The trick is practice and as a kid, it was just kind of fun to doodle with various pens and create odd looking letters. Eventually, I created my own style and it has stuck. Anybody who knows me can tell the birthday card/Christmas card etc. is from me just by looking at the handwriting from 30 feet away.
Slight hijack: does anyone know of a program that will allow you to scan in your handwriting sample, and then use that as a font for your computer/documents?
My terrible handwriting is easy enough to explain – my sister taught me to read more than a year before I started kindergarten, and I taught myself to print by copying type from storybooks.
Because I had been printing for a long time before it came up in school, I developed a somewhat idiosyncratic method that I couldn’t be broken of. (My printing is very tidy, though.)
Cursive script? I hated it. It didn’t look “right.” So unless I was absolutely forced to, I just kept right on printing. Then, in 1982, I got my first computer.
Consequently, if I try to write cursively today (which I almost never do,) my handwriting looks like what you’d expect from an uncoordinated seven-year-old. For years I was ashamed of my printing because it served to remind me that I couldn’t write cursively, but I get a lot of compliments on it. It has a sort of absurd precision that screams “A nerd wrote this!”
Released to the public in 1969. I’ve been told I’m supersmart by enough people that I’m willing to assume it’s true. I don’t think of myself as abnormally bright, but then again I wonder why so many of my peers don’t think as quickly as I. I just figure they’re lazy. Whatever.
My handwriting is awful. Ever read the lyric sheet from Pink Floyd’s “The Wall?” The stuff that looks like it was scrawled by a madman? That’s me. Some letters, like lower case g & y simply don’t resemble the commonly accepted forms. Nobody taught me to make them that way, it’s just how I ‘interpret’ the letter as a graphic. Individually, my leters are quite attractive, but each letter looks like it’s written in a different font so the overall result is “sloppy.” It’s HARD for someone else to read my writing but I can read it like newsprint. No matter, all of the important stuff I do is written on a computer so all I have to focus on is getting my message across clearly by paying attention to the “important” stuff like grammar, spelling, punctuation and word choice.
I could improve my handwriting I suppose, but it just doesn’t seem like a priority. I get praise in my work for being unusually efficient–that’s because I can look at the entire workflow for my job and eliminate unecessary procedures on a case by case basis on a level that others aren’t comfortable with–that’s just how my mind works. It’s the same mental process that keeps me from giving a damn about my handwriting–nobody has to deal with it but me when I’m at the store looking at my grocery list, so why spend time on that when I could instead be doing something useful like hiking & thinking, or cranking up the home brewery?
It could be dysgraphia. Not diagnosing anything here, just throwing it out there. I had and still have many similiar problems, and I was dignosed with this in middle school. IANAD yadda, yadda, yadda. ;j
I used to work for a genius lawyer-financial guy who was the perfect gentleman except that his extreme shyness and high intelligence kept getting in his way. As a result, he often seemed dry, eccentric and aloof. The effect was underlined by his almost ostentatiously shabby appearance and - most of all - his handwriting. It was an incredibly crabbed, compressed semi-shorthand, often beginning a word legibly but then trailing off into a squiggle. It was as if his vast, hyperthyroid Ivy League brain was turning over so fast that it truly didn’t care whether mere normals could keep up.
The wierd thing was: I could read his writing. Somehow or other it was, if not legible, intuitively understandable. For instance, I seldom had to ask his help in transcribing a memo.
I think some people just have better/worse handwriting than others. Sometimes the problem is physical (fine motor control issues), sometimes it’s a matter of laziness, sometimes it’s because the person grew up writing with the “wrong” hand, etc.
My handwriting was always neat, but when I was 12 we moved to England and my teachers would not let me write in cursive. They said it was too messy, even though I’d always gotten "A"s in penmanship in the States. So, I started printing – like everyone else in my class (but not all caps, like some have mentioned). Everyone seemed to have their own “style” of writing, and mine wound up kind of rounded but very neat.
When I was 14 we came back to the States, but in high school they no longer cared whether we wrote in cursive or print (as long as it was legible). So I kept printing, though most of my American classmates wrote in cursive – and even when they did print, my handwriting was very different … more stylized. These days, the only time I use cursive is for my signature. I’ve only had one complaint, from a boyfriend in college who said he had a hard time with my handwriting because it was so rounded (and sometimes letters are squished together). To my knowledge, though, he’s the only one who’s ever had a problem with it: I tend to get compliments on my handwriting.
I have been complimented on my handwriting many times, but at least some of those compliments are because doctors are expected to have illegible handwriting.
It’s interesting to read that many of you feel your handwriting deteriorates when you don’t write for a while. I find that the more I have to write, the worse my handwriting gets, unless I deliberately take it slow and careful.
In general, guys tend to have worse handwriting than gals, both in terms of legibility and aesthetics; I would be interested in hearing other people’s speculation as to why this is.
My handwriting is bad. I often sit while on the phone with customers and practice writing to try to relearn, but it’s awful.
My problem is linking letters. If I write a word, in print, I still end up with letters linked together, often in unreadable ways. My lowercase r looks exactly like a v which looks exactly like a u. If I put a little tail on the u so it doesn’t look like an r or v, it looks exactly like an n. Everything’s too narrow and pointy and joined and argh!
I did recently successfully change from snowman 8 to figure 8 8. I was proud of that. My numbers are readable. Woo.
I had the answer written down here, but I can’t read it…
My handwriting has been awful since grammar school in the 1960s (the only D I ever received was for penmanship), well before computers came along to screw up handwriting. I like the computer age, since I can type more legibly than I can write.
I have AWFUL handwriting. My mother and my two sisters have beautiful, round, perfect writing, my dad and I have this illegible hen scratch.
My writing has always looked awful, ever since I learnt how to write. Trying different pens, spending my Summer holidays as a child (1 hour every day, 5 days a week for 7 years) practising penmanship, none of it made a difference.
I have 2 theories.
I learnt to read and write aged 3. While my peers were learning their letters at school, I’d already got past that phase so the teachers used to let me read and write unsupervised so they could teach the rest of the class. Since I knew what I was writing, and I could read it, it never occurred to me to change it. Once I’d got into that habit, it wouldn’t leave.
Handwriting is a way of expressing personality. I’m not very neat, think at high speed and care more for content than appearance. This is all pretty obvious from my high-speed scrawl. My sisters are methodical, neat perfectionists, and their handwriting shows that too.
Well, IMHO- they teach handwriting all wrong, and at a wrong time. First, they should teach printing, and keep the kids printing (other than their signature) all through grade school. Then realizing that handwriting is really just a form of calligraphy, and is more of an art than something nessesary- teach it as a option in HS.
What we tend to do in America is start teaching the kids to print, then rush them into handwriting, which keeps their printing bad. I have also hear that it can retard reading progress to do so.
I have crappy handwriting and although I am ambidexterous I was “groomed” to write with my right hand. Born in '72, I am an 80’s child and we learned this damned style of cursive called “DeNealian” (spelling) that made matters worse. Once I started just using my left hand I realized my problem, I should’ve been using it all along. My left hand writing is much nicer than my right handed.
I don’t know if that’s your problem or not but it’s a thought. Funny thing, I also figured out that the same problem was affecting my tennis game. Ambidexterity is a bit confusing.
I’m simply too impatient to try to write neatly. I’ve been this way ever since grade school. My teachers must have all hated trying to read my poor handwriting. I always got low marks for eyestrain-inducing penmanship, combined with my tendency to write small in order to conserve space and use less paper. Now that I am an adult and don’t have anyone grading me for my handwriting anymore, I care even less about the legibility of my handwriting, though if I expect someone else to have to read it I will try to make it legible for the other person. I can barely decipher my own scrawls and scratches. Almost everything I write these days is on the computer, so my handwriting has deteriorated even more.
That’s still around? We used Zaner-Bloser back in the late 70’s/early 80’s when I was in elementary school. Seems to have worked- while I routinely got horrible grades in cursive writing back then, my writing has cleaned up and is pretty good looking these days- I was writing out notes for myself at work and had several people compliment me on how legible and nice my writing was.
My longhand writing still looks more or less like the Z-B letters too, with the exception of a few that I’ve modified because they were slow and intricate (their capitol F, for example)
I don’t buy the “brain faster than pen” argument. I can type as fast as I think, yet I have pretty good writing as well, even though I can’t write nearly as fast as I can type.
I think it’s a matter of practice- I had much the same situation as ** Argent Towers**, except that I didn’t make it bigger, I just concentrated on writing like they taught me in school, and as I got better, I got faster.
One good thing about writing and it’s inherent slowness is that it makes me think about what I’m writing and how I’m going to end the sentence ahead of time, because I can’t just backspace or cut/paste to fix it. I definitely write “better” if I write it out.
Sometimes the problem is physical (fine motor control issues), sometimes it’s a matter of laziness, sometimes it’s because the person grew up writing with the “wrong” hand, etc.