Interesting that most women I’ve met have completely legible signatures, nearly the same as their handwriting, whereas most men I’ve met have completely illegilble signatures.
Myself, I first started to to develop my signature in Grade 9, when I got my first real “official” document, my Social Insurance Number (class project was to have the whole class apply for their SINs. Crafty way of getting us in the government’s talons … ) It was close to my regular handwriting (cursive), I then started to notice my dad’s signature closely, and his was more illegible than mine. I then started using his as a base, and got mine down to a pretty good scribble that only I know how to reproduce (I hope). Even though my first name (David) has 5 letters in it, they get melded all together so that the first part of my signature just looks like a capital D, only I know where the individual letter parts are. Mwhahaha and all that. (Even as I write what looks to all intents and purposes like a capital D, I’m spelling the individual letters in my head as I do.)
Hard to describe.
In the middle of grade 12 I suddenly switched from handwriting (as my teachers had started decreeing my handwriting was nearly as illegilble as my signature was becoming) to printing (in smallcaps. An adult friend of mine did it and I thought it was cool. Strangely, 20 years later, my smallcaps writing is becoming quite illegible now too.) My signature is now pretty much the only thing I do in handwriting.
my signature is pretty good, a few difficult to decipher letters, but all in all decent.
My regular handwriting OTOH is atrocious and I even have a hard time reading it if I have been away from the scribbles for too long. I have to type up all my notes if I think I will need them in the future. Its gotten progressively worse over time.
I just noticed something, when I sign my name, I write “David H Kendall”, but since the first name gets melded together in what looks like a capital D, my signature (if you can actually make it out) would look like DHkendall (a lower case k is easier to write than an uppercase K quickly I’ve found)
Which means, for the past 25 years or so, I’ve been writing my (current) internet username as my signature :eek:
You know you’ve been on the Internet too long when you start signing your internet username to things and don’t realize it …
I can’t forge my wife’s signature but my seven year old daughter can. (Another thing to worry about when she hits high school. Thanks) She (the daughter) showed me one she’d done and I could not tell the difference.
My first name is perfectly legible, but my last name is more or less a wavy line. It used to be much neater, but years ago I had a job that required me to sign my name 30 or 40 times each day. After a few days of that, I decided a change was in order. My last name is rather long, so all in all it probably saved me quite a bit of time each week.
Heh. I seem to have a talent for being able to copy peoples’ signatures. When my mother was terminally ill and I was taking care of the household for her, she refused to sign power of attorney over to me, but knew that I signed her name on checks when I did the grocery shopping (back before debit cards were so ubiquitous). I could sign her name with no detection that it was not her signature; likewise, when my older sister and I worked in the same call center, we could imitate one another’s handwriting, and each turn stuff in done under the other’s name.
Good thing for the law that I’m not inclined towards a life of crime, huh?
I don’t know … the job market’s not the great at present… Purely hypothetical, if I could ‘acquire’ some two hundred year old paper and ink, how’s your Thomas Paine?
I chose “Not very: There are some completely identifiable letters, but also some squiggles and loops” in the poll, but there’s a caveat:
When I sign legal documents, letters, or checks, you can read the first letter of my last name clearly, possibly make out the next two, and the end of it is just a straight line.
When I’m signing books, I try to make the entire name legible. They’ve purchased my book and want to turn it into a memento. The least I can do is make it readable–and I try to add a little note, too. It may almost always be the same little note, but it’s more than just a few squiggles.
It depends. If I’m signing the tiny box on the back of a new credit card, I tend to take care. If I’m just signing normally, it’s just J-squiggle. Which makes me wonder why I’ve never had a problem buying with my CC, since my regular signature never looks much like that on the card.
My signature is bass-ackwards. Usually with most people you can read the first initial or the first couple of letters and then it all goes to shit. My first name is sort of a hodgepodge, but my middle initial and last name are totally legible. And if you are paying attention, you can figure out what my first name is–it sort of reads as Elzbth.
My first name usually comes out pretty legible but my last name always seems to come out as a single capital letter and a bunch of illegible squiggles.
Then, it was a big loop for the “A,” a big loop for the “O” and an inexplicable third loop for my middle initial (“R”) and I moved the pen up and down enough times to roughly approximate the letters in my first and last names.
Then it became a big loop for the “A,” between 4-6 up-and-downs for the remainder of the letters in my first name, then a big loop for the “O” and a line.
Things get all raggedy at the supermarket, where the pad they ask you to sign on has like a 2 fps refresh rate, so I just sign with a stick figure there.
I’ve got some things working against me. I’m left-handed, my dad was a Dr., and I had to sign my name literally a hundred times a day during the early part of my career. So, my signature is just a J-straight line/M-straight line. It looks like an autograph…
My “official signature”, used on checks and forms, is just my name written in my regular cursive handwriting. It’s perfectly legible (or so I like to think). The crap I scrawl on credit card receipts is another story, but I think that’s true for a lot of people.
My college roommate’s signature was the same as her printed name. On forms, “Print Name” and “Sign Name” looked exactly the same, and printed not cursive.
