I was just starting my morning by having a cup of terrible coffee and making my to-do list for the day. I wrote 'Wednesday" at the top in such lovely script that it almost surprised me – usually my handwriting is terrible, with big, fat letters and sloppy curves.
I try to write well, especially since I’m a writer by trade, but I typically dislike my own handwriting. How do you feel about yours? Do you have to write a lot by hand every day? I keep notes in a work notebook, but all my real writing is done on a keyboard.
And if you have kids, are they learning/have they learned cursive in school? I heard tell a few years back that cursive was fading out…
My handwriting is ok. I have an odd style, I don’t write any lowercase letters, only tall Uppercase letters and smaller uppercase letters following. I wasn’t always like that, I kind of just fell into the habit in middle school or something. My wife’s best friend has the most amazing handwriting. It looks as if she took a ruler to make each letter. I’ve never actually seen her write, so maybe she does. Maybe i’ll scan a copy of something she’s done some time, it’s truly something.
As far as cursive, I was taught, I am 29 and as far as I know it is still taught here but I couldn’t say for sure. My cursive is decent I guess, nothing special. I type more than anything else like most people. In fact if I have to write more than a page now, my hand cramps up because i’m not used to it like I was.
Mine is horrible. I’m left handed and a Nun tried to get me to write right handed in the first grade.
I muddled through until the my freshman year of high school when I bought a typewriter. And by typewriter, I mean a heavy old Royal manual typewriter. This was in 1968. In my sophomore year of HS, I took a typing class which had electric IBM Selectric typewriters. That was nice!
My job in the military required me to print almost everything. My printing is OK now.
When PCs came around, I had an advantage as I knew how to touch type very well by then.
The only thing I write in cursive is my signature. Otherwise I print if I can’t use a computer.
If I use a fountain pen or a shaffer my handwriting is acceptable, with a ball point it is not readable by even me. When printing I can slow down my strokes enough to be legible.
My handwriting was never good (another lefty here!), but it’s gotten far worse since I started doing most of my ‘writing’ on a computer keyboard. The upside of that is that the quality of my handwriting doesn’t matter very much any more.
My cursive is so bad that I stopped using it decades ago (except for my signature, which is mostly illegible). The muscle memory is so far gone now that I can’t even do it anymore without thinking and writing very slowly - and of course it still looks like crap. I now write almost exclusively in capital block letters; I pretty much use lower case only when I’m writing down a password.
I’m left-handed, which might have something to do with it. A coworker who is left-handed is still able to write cursive, and it looks almost as crappy (and crappy in the same way) as mine did before I stopped.
I would describe my handwriting as functional. It’s not pretty by any means, but the style that I’ve honed is based on speed more than anything else. It is still perfectly legible to me and other people don’t seem to have too much problem. (If I’m writing for other people where it’s a concern, I’ll slow down a bit.)
Even when I was trying in school, I could never come up with handwriting that looked attractive. Maybe I have defective motor skills or something, but I’m not unhappy with how I write.
My handwriting was pretty good until I started doing all my regular writing on a keyboard. Now, when I occasionally need to scribble something out by hand, I find that it has deteriorated to the point where it looks as if I went a few too many trips through Primer’s time machine. Or had a stroke.
My handwriting is still pretty good if I take the time to focus on what I’m doing, like in a note on a greeting card or something short like that. I wouldn’t want to try to write a whole several-pages letter (as people used to do), I think my hand would get very tired.
I also do a lot of printing, all caps, and I think that looks pretty good too.
Roddy
I had remedial handwriting (cursive) up through 7th grade, and hated every minute of it. On the other hand, my handwriting, while not attractive, is totally legible, so at least the time wasn’t wasted. I do still practice it, since I write (in cursive) a letter to my parents once a week, and also keep a diary.
I hate it, it’s barely legible. Didn’t used to be, back in the day when I was a student and hand-wrote my essays, but now it’s awful. I make my husband write most of our cards and things because his is lovely.
I like my handwriting. My friends (and even strangers who see my checks or shopping lists) comment on how beautiful and readable it is. I owe it to my mother, who had a distinctive, beautiful hand. I worked hard over the years to perfect mine to be as lovely as hers. My family tells them they can’t tell them apart, which freaks them out. They receive a card from me in what looks like my mother’s hand, and my mother’s been gone for 14 years.
It’s pretty bad. I picked up a weird habit of how to hold a pen or pencil for writing, and now no matter how I try, it’s either almost illegible or I’m incredibly slow and it’s not too bad.
For most things, handwriting saps my mental energy and creativity. Over the summer at Odyssey I realized that this does NOT apply to marking up a printout with revision notes in pen; my Inner Editor loves this, (whether it’s my own story or one I’m critiquing for a friend,) and I can usually figure out what I meant later, even if nobody else could.
My handwriting (cursive or printing, it doesn’t matter) is terrible. I often can’t read it when I go back to it later. It’s always been bad- starting in elementary school and on up through taking the bar exam, when I somehow wrote clearly enough for my essays to be read. I actually write very little on a day-to-day basis now, but when I do I really have to concentrate on it. It looks like it was written by someone with Parkinson’s. I envy good handwriting.
I love my handwriting, but it’s much better when I’m in regular practice. In college when I was taking notes by hand for a couple hours every day, it was beautiful. People thought it was a printout.
These-a-days, when I only write out grocery lists and only then when the printer is on the fritz, it’s not so perfect.
I write in full cursive, by the way, and modeled my capitals on the font Belphebe.
My block printing is reasonably fine, other than the fact that I don’t tend to leave spaces between words in any reliable way. On good days, it reminds me of comic lettering (though nowhere near consistent enough to land me a job w/ DC or Marvel, if they even still do hand lettering).
The longhand… well, it’s legible, if I’m slow. Pretty it ain’t. There’s also the complication that I did a lot of longhand while I was in Russia, and Russian/Cyrillic longhand uses lots of characters that are quite similar or identical to English/Latin characters… except for entirely different sounds. So I often find myself struggling with that, these days.
