Running some errands for my dad today, and he doesn’t have a phone that texts, so he called me and I wrote down a list of what he needs. Having typed 99.99% of everything I’ve written for many years now, I was amazed how terrible my handwriting is these days. I mean, it was was never very good, but now it’s barely legible.
Compounding the problem is my close up vision has gotten really bad, so I can hardly see what I’m writing. I have cheater glasses, but I only use them when I absolutely have to, and even if I want to, it takes forever to find a pair despite the fact I have several in various spots throughout the house.
I have a tremor that only gets worse with age. Writing isn’t something I can do anymore. If I go to the doctor’s office and they ask me to fill out paper work, I have to ask one of the office assistance to fill it out for me.
It sucks. I can’t write in greeting cards, can’t mail a letter… It’s very frustrating!
How bad? Basically non-existent. The only handwriting I can do is to sign my name, and that’s only because it’s more of a reflex than actual writing. And it’s illegible. At least it’s better than how my doctor signs prescriptions, which is basically a little squiggle. Anything I write by hand is printed, not cursive.
Same here. My handwriting has always been atrocious. I’ve heard the sarcastic ‘are you a doctor’ joke literally hundreds of times over my years.
The only thing I handwrite these days is lists, especially if I’m writing down a list of something that I’m being given over the phone and just have to hand to another person. Luckily, most of the people that have to read my handwriting have been doing it for long enough that they’re able to decode most of what I write.
And to make it worse, that hand cramping tends to set in pretty early on (I almost certainly hold the pen wrong and way too tightly). If the list is more than a few items long, my handwriting goes from bad to worse pretty quickly.
It’s funny how many people don’t seem to understand that writing better isn’t an option for me. Maybe if I sat and practiced over and over or took some kind of classes, but I’m not doing that. One of the things I hear fairly often is ‘why don’t you just rewrite it so we can read it’ to which I have to explain that if I rewrite it, it’s not going to be any better, if anything it’ll be worse because I’ll be starting off with my hand already tired/cramped. Besides, it’s been shitty since I started writing over 35 years ago, it’s not going to magically be legible now.
Yeah, bad. I was never shown how to properly hold a pen, so my writing has always been a bit scrawlish. The only thing written and not typed now are grocery lists, it seems, so the scrawl has gotten really bad, and I tend to make egregious spelling errors. Add to that the fact that I’m now wearing a thumb splint as part of my arthritis therapy and even my printing is now illegible. My crossword puzzles look like a four-year-old did them.
I never really used cursive for anything outside of elementary school. I print in all caps, but I still use upper and lower case, if you get what I mean. I always got praise for my printing, especially from women, who were amazed a guy could write so neatly.
Now, after 20+ years of mostly typing, it’s deteriorated a lot. I don’t get cramps, but if I write too long I start to feel like I’m holding the pen wrong. Even if I look, it seems I’m holding it wrong. All the writing I do now is short to-do lists or grocery lists. I even just have my wife sign for both of us on birthday or xmas cards.
Absolutely appalling. I CAN print very legibly and neatly IF it’s something that needs planned out and I concentrate on doing it right but just writing something down? Looks like chickens bokboked through their own shit. I had to sign something the other day and even my signature is fucked up.
What with tremor and disuse, my hand printing is pretty close to nonexistent. I type pretty easily, but for things that need printing by hand I get somebody else to help me.
As with others, it was never GREAT, but was legible. I basically have 2 types of writing: one which is legible and intended to be re-read later, possibly by someone other than me; and the other is a scrawl which I even might have difficulty deciphering out of context. Sometimes I find myself scrawling notes to myself or something. If I run across it later out of context, it can be a chore. But when I wish to write notes on x-mas cards for example, my writing is pretty legible.
I do have a tendency to write in a manner similar to how my mom described her writing, “Just get the first couple of letters right and then add approximately the correct number of little bumps”!
One thing I have to avoid is trying TOO HARD to write legibly. When I’m doing that, I find myself forgetting how to spell simple words or even form some letters.
It is amazing how little one needs in the form of correct spelling in order to decipher text. First and last letters around scribbles of approximately the correct length, with a few up and down marks to suggest tails on other letters, and you’re good.
Fortunately at my work it is 80% typing and 20% writing.
Form after form as it is very security intensive including carbon paper
I use gel micro tip pens and good ol’ BICs.
Always had good handwriting and so I consider it a blessing in disguise.
Penmanship is a thing of the past.
When I see some of our older passengers filling out forms in slow beautiful cursive I feel sad for that lost art.
My English teacher used to crack us over the knuckles with a ruler when we messed up on the spacing and connecting lines. Two pages minimum per day.
My handwriting is horrible but it has always been horrible. I can’t say that it’s getting worse, though when you’re already at rock bottom there’s not much further down you can go.
My father was a doctor and he taught me how to write, so I use that as an excuse.
My signature has been an unrecognizable scribble for years. I blame work and having to sign a lot of documents for that. When I was 20 you could at least recognize some of the letters. That was gone long before I reached 30 (I’m getting into the high 50s now).
Hasn’t changed much. As a kid, I was always conscious of the fact that my writing, while clear and legible, wasn’t as pretty as that of many other girls. There was a specific style many of them seemed to share that I just couldn’t imitate. I put more effort into things I expected other people to read (book reports, letters) than things that were just for me (lists/reminder notes, journal entries), and very occasionally had difficulty deciphering my low-effort, for-my-eyes-only script, but no one ever complained about not being able to read my more deliberate writing.
My job involves making appearances in a fast-moving court. When I started, we had paper files, and I used my good handwriting on the court appearance sheets. Now we have electronic files, but I hand-write notes on essential info from each hearing before typing it into the system, as there are occasional issues with time-outs and losing data, and I use my lazy scrawl. I can still read it. Mostly.
Same here. But, my non-cursive handwriting has deteriorated as I’ve aged. I can tell I am losing fine motor skills in my hands.
I do still sign my name in cursive, and I’ve always done it in a readable way, forming every letter (including middle initial). But, even though it’s only 4+1+5 letters, I feel like it takes too long to write. I find myself thinking, “Oh geez, this again? Loopdy loop, and then the thing, and loop again, and now the big letter and more things and loops and…” You get the picture.
My handwriting isn’t what you’d call beautiful, but it’s definitely legible. I took remedial handwriting in seventh grade, and it looks the same as it did back then. I send a lot of handwritten letters to assorted relatives, which keeps me in practice.
I’ve had multiple store employees compliment me on how well I can write my signature with my pinkie on an iPad, too.
I’ve completely given up on cursive. I’d used it so seldom I basically forgot some of the letter shapes. But my regular printed writing isn’t too bad when I slow down and think about what I’m writing.
I switched from cursive to printing when I was in about 8th grade. My cursive was awful and ugly. I’m 61 now and it’s still legible, though I would hate to have to have to write a lot.
I’ve always had trouble reading my wife’s handwriting. I’m not even sure what it is that she’s doing that makes it so difficult. It’s like she takes shortcuts with some letters of the alphabet or something. If she ever leaves a note telling me she’s leaving me for someone else, I’m likely never to figure it out because it will look like “Deakr Chestreimy: I am luwrinj yon fot Damniat. We arn in luwe.”
My handwriting was screwed from the beginning. My older sister and cousins taught me writing before I went to school, so I developed a scrawl of my own. I remember that in first grade, we had to do many calligraphic exercises to prepare for writing neatly in cursive, but that was already too late for me. My handwriting grades in primary school were always my worst.
I gave up writing cursive after college, when most of my writing became typing on a keyboard and most handwriting were notes for myself. I used to always have a notebook at work where I took notes and calculations and filled many of them during my time of working. Now that I’m retired, the only times I’m writing with a pen is when I take notes during a call or sometimes when I write cards (I’m an avid participant of the Dopers’ postcard exchange) or a letter, which I still sometimes but rarely do. My printing is still somehow legible, even for others. But even my shopping lists I nowadays type on my phone.
