The other thing is, for whatever reason, I feel like I could visualize and “think things out” much better with a pen and pad than doing it on the computer. I like making quick sketches, crossing things out, and moving things around on the page with scribbles and arrows better than on a computer. It’s somehow easier for me to visualize and create this way, even though I spend 40-60 hours in front of a computer every week.
This works best for shorter form works and math/design kind of stuff. Plus I still end up handwriting a reasonable amount of stuff these days. Christmas cards, birthday cards, thank you notes to clients, etc.–anything requiring a “personal touch” I like to handwrite. And then just day-to-day notes. I’m pretty sure almost every day requires some amount of handwriting.
And I’m a bit particular about my favorite pens, but I’m kind of a cheap-o snob. I don’t like the gel pens. I’m just a medium point, classic Bic (the clear or yellow one with the hexagonal, or whatever polygon it was, shape), blue ink. That one just feels nice in my hand. I can grip it well, the medium point is just right for the feel and thickness of the line (I hate the scratchy feel of fine points), it can take some abuse, especially in regards to pen pressure, and the blue stands out nicely against any black-ink printed forms you may be signing and it’s easy to distinguish a copy from an original.
Oh, and I do like those cartridge fountain pens, too, but it’s just easier to deal with the Bic.
If I’m not in a big rush, my printing is pretty good. In a rush, my K’s look like “l s,” r looks like a V, and g and q look the same. My cursive is slow and terrible due to lack of practice, I never use it unless forced.
Thanks to hanging around OTs too much, I’ve learned that the way I hold my pencil is called a “thumb wrap grasp” and it’s classified as an “inefficient grasp.” They tried to fix it in 1st and 2nd grade but gave up since my writing was legible and I kept switching back. The biggest problem with it is that I fatigue more easily while writing, and it also looks a bit weird, but I’ve been doing this since I was 4 or 5 and it’s not going to change.
Its jagged looking and ugly, not smooth looking like other peoples. It used to be a lot better when I was emptying BIC pen after BIC pen onto spiral notebooks in school. Oddly enough, i always noticed that my
September notes were illegible, but by October they were much easier to read. I think that, to me (possibly only re: me), it means that with heavy use, your handwriting skills do come back,
but that you will lose a few steps if you aren’t writing heavily on a weekly basis.
My handwriting sucks. I’m another one who prints in all caps, but even then it’s barely legible. I only write in cursive when I sign my name. My signature is pretty much illegible as well, you can make out a first name, middle initial, and a last name but good luck figuring out what it says. And now with my wrist in a brace for the forseeable future my writing is even worse.
My mother says she had me writing left-handed before first grade and my teacher switched me. I asked my teacher- she said she didn’t. Maybe my sinistral mother just wanted me to be a lefty too and my real side came out in first grade. Anyway, handwriting was hard for me to do all through school. I can definitely print faster and neater than I can write in cursive. This is probably a result of printing notes for students on a chalkboard or whiteboard or overhead projector for 26 years.
People say that I have nice handwriting, but I have to write very slowly and concentrate hard. If I don’t concentrate, my dyslexia makes me forget how to form letters, and what order the letters go in, so everything turns into squiggles.
My brother, however, is 23 and literally writes like a 6-year-old child. Slow, shaky, and letters all different sizes. He doesn’t have any learning difficulties, and can type a lot faster than I can, but his handwriting looks like he’s still learning how to write.
I can write in fairly pretty cursive - but it takes forever. My print is also nice and it’s much, much faster.
I actually have a tendency to steal other people’s handwriting. Say if I’m reading over a friend’s whatever and I notice one particular letter they write in a nice way, I’ll try to incorporate that into my writing. So my actual handwriting is sort of cobbled together.
Mine was bad before the nerve damage… Now it’s awful. At least I can use it as an indirect measure of how bad the nerve inflammation is - when it’s bad, my writing gets smaller.
Mine is pretty crappy & my mom bugged me about it for years. I can write in a small & fairly compact style, but I have a bad habit of mushing my letters together though.
Interestingly, back when the hubby & I had a solid D&D group going, there was a really scruffy, unkempt young guy who always seemed to have a various assortment of stains on his clothes & yet he had the neatest & most beautiful handwriting I’d ever seen. The script was stylishly clean & straight. I was tempted to have him fill out the group’s character sheets so we could easily read them & see who was fudging their character stats!