I read the cursive thread, http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=120126
with great interest. My cursive handwriting is awful, but I attribute it to being left handed and being taught by a teacher that didn’t have a clue as to how to teach left handed handwriting. Later in life I found that when you write cursively with your right hand the script flows naturally, but when you write with your left hand your hand covers up what you’ve just written.
Hmm. If I write with my left hand, in English, I find that I can’t see where I’ve written and it makes it hard to figure out where the rest of the letters should go. If I’m writing Japanese (top to bottom, right to left), it comes out just fine. In fact, when I was taking Japanese I’d write the English stuff with my right (which is what I normally use for writing), and do the more formal Japanese writing with my left… and my lefty Japanese was more readable than my righty English.
I was once told by a neurologist that true left handed people are very rare. If a person is a real lefty they will not drag their hand across the page when writing. They should write just like a right handed person only with their left hand. Sometimes wires get crossed and kids start using their left hands to draw and write. Leading parents and teachers to belive they are left handed. I don’t have a cite. It’s just an interesting conversation I remember having.
He told me I was a true lefty after watching me write. But I use my right hand. I tend to grab everything with my left hand and when I write I pull the paper to the left. Which leads to me getting ink sumdges all over.
I’m fairly sure that a lefty dragging their hand across the paper is not a result of being an ‘untrue’ left hander. It’s just because paper is geared towards right handers. Perhaps some left handers can do it without dragging, but that’s probably got more to do with individual stlye. For a left hander to write like a right hander, they would need to start righting from the right to the left.
Lucky that they fit in with the rest of society then!
Your statement is confusing. Lefties *should * should write with our left hands but somehow avoid dragging across the page. If we write left to right, how could is this possible?
For myself, my cursive is good - better than most righties. OTOH, it was terrible when I was a kid. It only developed into legibility in my late teens.
My cursive is pretty enough that someone once hired me to write the addresses on her wedding invitations. I taught myself with the help of a set of diagrams showing how to form each letter. Considering how ill equiped most teachers are to deal with lefties who knows what my cursive would look like if I’d learned it in school.
Other than signing my name, I cannot remember the last time I wrote anyhing in cursive. Other than just random notes written on pads, most of my writing is done on the pc.
Coated papers such as greeting cards are a pet peeve because I almost always smear the ink as I drag my hand to the right. It looks so professional.
I think Dagny is referring to the way righties move the entire hand when forming each letter. Most lefties (that I’ve noticed - myself included) tend to move only the fingers to form each character, the hand only sliding to the right to progress to the next letter. Personally, I think cursive is the creation of some right-handed devil bent on torturing left handed school children. (Remember those erasable pens? Arrgh!!) The only time I ever use it is when I sign my name. Any other handwriting is in print.
Useless leftie story: I only do a few things with my left hand, like writing & eating. Most other things I do with my right, like using scissors. My mom, realizing that I was a “lefty”, would always buy me those “Lefty” brand scissors for school. As a kid, I didn’t realize these things were built backwards. I thought I was just inept at paper cutting, since they would just fold the paper as opposed to slicing it. Took me a while to figure it out…
Yeah I was a bit slow back then. New smiley in 3…2…1… :smack:
I’m a lefty who drags his hand through his writting. This is simply because our language reads left-to-right. My wife is an right-handed Iranian. Farsi reads right-to-left, yet I’ve noticed Iranians don’t drag their hands through their writting. They hold their pens in an (to an American) unusual position. Their hands are held beneath their writing. They learn to write this way in childhood. There aren’t enough lefties to make this kind of thing popular in the west.
I’ve tried holding my pen in several different ways: the thumb, forefinger and middle finger grip with the body of the pen resting against the web between my thumb and forefinger, between my middle finger and ring finger with my thumb holding it against my middle finger and finally with my thumb about halfway down the pen and my middle and ring fingers near the tip. The second method is the one that I use most often and tires my fingers the least.
I’m a leftie and I do practically everything with my left hand, including dragging my hand across the page when I write. My handwriting is also so bad that I sometimes can’t even make out what I wrote. When I write backwards, which I used to be able to do fairly well, my hand doesn’t drag through the letters, obviously, but it’s also no neater.
That’s me! I use to think I was so wierd because, although I’m left handed, I never held a pen/pencil like other lefties. But more like right handed people.
As for the OP, my cursive is not bad, but my printing sucks.
I’ve always blamed my very poor handwriting on my being a lefty, explaining to people that we don’t see what we’re writing until it’s too late to fix it; whereas righties see the entire word as it forms.
My other explanation is that, as a lefty, I have to push the tip of the pen toward the direction it’s heading (i.e., to the right), but righties simply drag the pen tip so that it follows the hand (and the rest of the pen). What this means is that righties don’t put so much pressure on the tip of the pen. So lefties are actually writing contrary to the design not only of the way we write letters, but also contrary to the design of the pen. This becomes especially clear when lefties try to use a very soft, felt-tip pen: I ruin these in just a few lines, as they can’t hold up to the pushing (rather than pulling) action.
Regarding lefthandedness–I’ve always heard of the two types: those lefties who hook their hand around so that the heel of the hand is a bit higher (on the page) than the fingertips, vs. those lefties (like myself) who simply hold their hands in the exact mirror-formation to that of righties and deal with very smudgey hands and paper and bent-tipped felt pens (I use roller-ball type only now–these make me happy).
Here’s my own useless leftie story: I sail quite a lot; one aspect of sailing and boating is tying knots and other ropework. One morning I was trying to tie a “rope grommet”. This is basically a seamless circle, made from one strand of rope. The way to make a rope grommet is to untwist a length of rope (if you look at a bit of rope, it usually is made up of three strands twisted into one) and retwist a single strand into a circle. (It’s a lot easier than it sounds.)
I spent half an hour this particular morning trying to twist this one damn strand into a grommet but for reason it kept screwing up. I was at almost at the stage of tearing out my hair when I realised that because I am left handed, I was twisting the rope in the wrong direction! It had never occurred to me before that even the composition of rope is suited to right-handers, but it is. Strands of rope are twisted anticlockwise, which naturally suits a right-hander. Damn them!
My left-handed brother writes mainly in cursive, and it’s not terribly neat but that’s because it looks like the messy handwriting of our right-handed dad.
His main problem is teachers complaining that he uses the “back” side of notebook paper.
Ahhh…I feel honored to delurk myself in thread dedicated to a subject near and dear to my own (lefty) heart.
My cursive handwriting resembles writing on an Etch-A-Sketch.
All through grade school I was tormented by teachers who tried to convert me to right-handedness. Did this happen to any other lefties or did I just go to a particulary sadistic primary school?
After I reached a certain age, they gave up on me and introduced me to a new form of torture–those itty-bitty one-sided desks that are designed for right-handed people.
And I don’t even want to discuss the joys of being forced to use sissors with my right hand. To this day, I still can’t cut in a straight line.
I’ve always wondered if my teachers got paid commission for each lefty they converted to right-handed-ism.
Never had them try to convert me. I did have problems similar to Dragonblink’s brother, though. I would turn in spiral notebooks that were written beginning with the back page. Teachers hated it. But it seemed only fair to me, especially when we were required to use them.
