My cursive is quite nice. My printing is serviceable. We should post pictures. I’ll do some later if I have a chance.
gorgeous. people comment on it.
It isn’t always legible, but even when it’s not, it looks pretty.
I learned a few forms calligraphy (kind of, or at least as well as an 8 or 9 year old can do calligraphy) at about the same time I was learning cursive, and the two bled into each other. Plus, I changed my handwriting deliberately so that if read by a handwriting analyst (who had happened read the same book I’d found) looked at it, they’d be fooled into thinking whatever I thought people should want their handwriting to show.
Quite often I will be writing a check and a person about my age will comment “You went to Catholic school didn’t you?”
We were all indoctrinated in the Palmer Method by Sister Mary Lorenza
Is that code for “I can’t read my own handwriting.”? 
There are orangutans with better handwriting than me.
I have great handwriting skills, and can do blockprint signs fast, no need for pencilling in guides; great spatial skills with that. Interesting is that my blockprint handwriting is very much like my Dad’s, who I did not grow up with. But, he has really great spatial ability, too, and we can both look at a car to be packed, the stuff to be packed, and then pack it very organized. I think the two skills are related, a mental balancing of spatial relationship.
I sucked at Algebra, but aced Geometry, same sorta thing.
I am herky-jerky with typing, though, and always prefer to handwrite when working out ideas. It works out faster that way.
My handwriting and printing is horrid.
Amazingly horrid.
My cursive is terrible, to the point that I often can’t read what I wrote several days ago. So I do a modified print sort of thing.
You would never guess my name from my signature; since it was necessary to sign my signature many times a day some years ago, my signature became a disjointed scrawl.
Oddly enough, I can do graphic lettering for signs quite well. Odd.
My handwriting is not only bad, but also weird. I have the most bizarre handwriting I have ever seen. I have no idea where I picked it up, but it is just crazy and bad. It looks like I am trying hard to write fancy, but failing horribly.
The thing is, I am not trying to write fancily at all. I am just trying to print neatly, and it comes out in some weird, nightmarish, lefthanded crappy mess.
My handwriting is pretty good, when I take the effort. Sometimes I’ll begin printing as I’m taking notes–but cursive really is faster. I was consistently horrible as a child–thoughts moved too fast, hand moved too slow. Since then, I’ve even done a bit of calligraphy for fun.
And I can type really well. (Well, “keyboard.”) Although I put in many a year on typewriters before I ever touched a PC. Or a Word Processor (anybody remember those?)
I’ve long been fascinated by handwriting. My dad split the scene while my sister and I were still in grade school, writing on that paper with a dotted line between the two other lines, so it kind of shocked my mother when my sisters “natural” handrwiting was nearly identical to our father’s.
Years later she read an article which indicated that your handwriting is dictated in some ways by the musculature of your hands. Seems logical I guess.
I myself was a member of Mrs. Carlson’s chicken-scratch club in second grade. My handwriting didn’t much improve through school, and was most notable for being tiny.
Several years later I decided to make an effort to improve it and have developed a very pretty cursive handwriting which I use to write cards and letters and anything someone else might need to read. If I’m taking notes at a conference it reverts to tiny chicken scratch.
I learned cursive in elementary school but never used it after, oh, 7th grade or so. I print everything (except my signature).
If I were to try to write cursive now it would take me a long time and a lot of effort b/c I have to actually think about how to make certain letters and link them together. They certainly do not flow out of the tip of my pen.
But I can print as fast as most people write cursive. And it’s pretty legible.
My handwritting is quite pretty, when I’m writing notes I usually write in a style that is something between cursive and print. I will waver into one or the other depending on my mood. It’s easily legible. In fact, my SO frequently has me fill out forms and such so that whomever is on the receiving end will be able to read them.
My signature if full of loops and swirls.
Left-handed, with ADD and essential tremor. My writing is relatively good, but only because I write under EXTREME tension, so much so that every 30 sec or so I have to stop and rest my left hand and forearm.
I’m another one whose penmanship is so bad that even I can’t read it. My printing is horrendous, too. Plus I make all of the letters very tiny. I don’t know if it’s the ADD, the poor fine muscle control (I can’t even thread a needle) or just the fact that I can’t stand writing but I never improved after the initial penmanship class in 2nd grade and it went downhill from there. Epileptic chickens with muddy feet leave clearer messages. I may not be the fastest typist in the world but I know that at least it can be read.
Horrible. Small, cramped, spiky and all the letters look the same. Like a drunken spider crawled through the ink. Has been since I was tiny.
I think it’s because I learned to read before I went to school, and learnt to write about the same time by just making a stab at the letters I was reading, I was about three or so. So, self taught penmanship means weirdly formed letters and by the time I got to school they couldn’t break me of my habit. My cursive is usually legible only to me, but my printing is legible if I use capitals.
I got penmanship primers, special lined paper, fountain pens, special shaped pencils and finger rests, extra handwriting homework… the works. None of it worked. I have perfectly good attention span, good fine motor skills, steady hands, I just never could make my handwriting pretty.
I’m a doctor, so now at least I’m in good company. I dictate or type anything meant to be read by other people, and print anything I have to write in patient notes.
Slight hijack: Have you ever encountered any problems with your own or other doctor’s penmanship when working on patient records? I’d hate to think how many patients I would kill because people couldn’t read any medical notes I wrote.
I have atrocious handwriting I have lots of trouble reading it and sometimes I have to treat it the same way I treat unfamiliar word in books guess based on context. But once I got into the working world and people have to be able to read my notes to work efficiently I adopted my dad’s style of writing which is all caps printing with size being the true capitalization. My signature is bad by design when I was in Junior High a friend of my convinced us all that our signatures needed to be impossible to forge and so we practiced for a week to make them bad. Well mine stuck and when I started to apply for college my parents made me change it so I wouldn’t get rejected for a slob then end result was that my first letters are distinct even through I write a capital D as a 8. I have no idea how I passed the hand written essays throughout school.
I’ve been complimented on the legibility of my handwriting.
What I hate are pEoPlE wHo keEp SHIftiNg bEtWEen caPiTOL & lowEr CasE when they write.