I’m right-handed but as a kid I used to do weird tricks that involved using both hands writing different things at the same time, like writing the words “upside down” with one hand while the other hand wrote the same phrase but with the letters actually upside down. (Including the various permutations of backwards, forwards, etc.) I haven’t done those fancy tricks in decades though, and doubt I could pull them off without practice.
Out of curiosity I just tried writing with both hands at the same time - writing “right” with my right hand and “left” with my left - truly at the same time, not alternating. That was easy, although the handwriting in my left hand looks like that of a six-year-old. And I’m wondering if I found it easy because everyone can do it without difficulty - I’m sure a few posters will chime in to say they can do it too.
Didn’t vote in the poll, because I couldn’t accurately pick one of the choices.
I’m effectively right handed now, sort of. My mother told me I was left handed as a preschooler, but read or heard somewhere about schools making people use their right hands, and trained myself to be right handed over her objections. As some partial evidence for this, when I try to do something for the first time, I often try at first to do it left-handed; and I can do most things with either hand, though the right is more skillful at anything I do often.
I don’t see how I could have trained myself to switch hands if I’d been really strongly handed in the first place, though; so maybe what I naturally am is almost ambi, but with originally a slight bias toward the left hand that’s been more than cancelled out by training my right hand to do most things far more than I’ve trained the left?
In practice by now I’m effectively right handed, but try to make a point of keeping my left hand/arm at least minimally in practice, in case I ever injure the right one and can’t use it. My left hand handwriting is the cursive of a young child who’s just learned cursive, and is slow – but my right hand handwriting has gradually become nearly illegible over the years, whether in printing or in cursive, so the left hand’s version is actually considerably more legible – I just checked.
I’ve never tried to use a left handed scissors, though I can use a left-handed hand weeding tool. I can use some right handed scissors with my left hand as well as with my right, but not others – maybe the one on my Swiss army knife is actually an ambidexterous scissors? I can use those with either hand.
I’m left-handed for nearly everything, and right-eye dominant. Seems I’m wired very weirdly.
Years ago, when I played golf, it was right-handed, possibly due to the scarcity or non-existence of lefty clubs. Haven’t golfed in 30 years, but if I picked up a club, it would probably come back to me.
I’ve tried writing with my right hand, and it was even more illegible than with my left. My computer mouse is on the left of my keyboard, but I don’t use “left hand” mouse button arrangements.
The weird one is I can paint (walls) and “cut” trim ambidextrously. This is very useful when up on a ladder!
Extremely right-handed. My left hand is there to be a place for my wedding ring, and to keep my watch from falling off.
Well, not that bad, but I’m way more dextrous with my right than my left. Good thing I don’t play any instruments.
For many years I thought I was ambidextrous, because I do some things with my right hand (eg write) and some things with my left (eg throw), but it turns out that’s not what ambidextrous means, and indeed most people have a bit of sidedness ambiguity for some activities, so in the end I realised I was not special at all.
Oh, then i guess I’m left handed. But I’m right armed, and my right eye is dominant. And i write okay with my right hand, probably as well as i wrote with my left hand in first grade.
I do reach with my left hand for work requiring fine motor control, though. So i guess by your definition in left handed, and not ambidextrous.
I just didn’t want people thinking, “well, I do some things with my left hand and some with my right, so I must be ambidextrous!” and skew the results. Because I feel like true ambidexterousness, as defined as ‘doing the same things more or less equally well’, is rare. So I chose writing as a fine motor skill that typically indicates handedness at a young age as an indicator, and even said, “if you can write equally legibly with both hands”, not “equally well”. So you may very well be ‘officially’ ambi, puzzlegal.
I mean, it’s not like it’s a scientific poll. I was curious to see if Dopers would show a higher percentage of lefties than the general population (at 10%) and the results so far seem to be bearing that out, currently at 23% lefties with 103 votes in. But as @Napier pointed out upthread, it’s a self-selected poll, which may attract lefties more than righties.
i mean, like everything else, it’s a spectrum. I am left-dominant for tasks involving fine motor control, but my right hand is also very dextrous (ha) and I can train myself to use it for most anything. That being said, I use a mouse left-handed (except for video games, where that’s a pain – and it hurt me in video games that I’m using the wrong hand) and for whittling and writing.
I do ordinarily use right-handed scissors. I made a conscious decision in kindergarten to eschew the crappy old left-handed scissors and use the new, sharp right handed ones, and taught myself to use scissors right handed. So yeah, that’s just an accommodation to a right-handed world.
But by the time anybody’s posting on this board, they’ve got years of experience during which they almost certainly trained one hand to write and not the other. So I don’t think you can deduce whether somebody’s naturally ambidexterous based on whether they can write equally legibly with both hands; at least, not unless they’ve been doing their writing equally or close to equally with both hands all along.
And I’m still not sure what you’re going to do with me, who writes almost always with my right hand, but whose right hand handwriting has deteriorated over the years into near illegibility; while my left hand produces much slower, but much clearer, handwriting that looks like a child’s.
I’m not going to do anything with you; it’s a self-selected, unscientific poll.
I just tried to set the definition of ‘ambidextrous’ as ‘writing equally legibly (not even equally well) with both hands’ as a reasonable guideline to filter out those who may say “I write as a lefty but use scissors as a righty, so I must be ambi”.
But I still think some people may be genuinely ambi, but have trained one hand to write and not the other; and so most will write much better with the trained hand than with the untrained one.
I would actually have thought “equally legibly” means pretty much the same as “equally well”, and I agree that as a highly-trained skill, it’s not the best determination of handedness. I’m struggling to find a really good option, though, where people are actually free to choose a hand, and aren’t strongly pressured by society, families, the built physical world… Maybe, which hand to you prefer to pull weeds with?
Maybe you are – most people who CAN write with the right hand are taught to do it that way. I wasn’t in large part because I broke my wrist immediately before my progressive Montessori school started to teach writing skills.
Ah, throwing a frisbee is interesting. I throw backhand (the more common across-the-body throw) with my right, and I throw forehand (sidearm flick) with my left. I’m not very good at either one.
