Same here. To make matters worse, I’m a hooking left-hander, so my cursive is extremely slanted and also usually smeared. So I print mostly, using cursive only when applying my signature, which is legible but only because I spent a very long time practicing it back in school.
My handwriting is relentlessly legible. I used to wish I had an illegible signature, thinking it would make me seem more grown up. The legibility thing is a hold-over from lots and lots of childhood practice to try and achieve my mother’s almost font-like perfection. Her style is a combination of printing and cursive, and so is mine. And no one ever has a problem reading it. The only flaw in my handwriting is that my penstrokes are so hard it’s more like I’m carving words than writing them. But the only one that hurts is me, when my hand starts cramping.
I have beautiful cursive. I believe that this is a direct result of both of my grandmothers being schoolteachers, and I take pride in what I do to an almost anal extreme.
I do not scribble notes at work. I don’t dash off messy little notes. Everything I do is legible.
That being said, I don’t spend much time writing. Everything at work is put in to the computer system. I prefer to e-mail rather than snail-mail; but I will (and do) send off snail-mail letters quite often.
First of all, I have to say that some of the most intelligent people I’ve met have horrendus penmanship. And aside from doctors, other professions appear to also promote “letter decay” - especially the physicists and chemists I work with.
Secondly, I’m surprised there’s no draftsmen or engineers in this conversation. We can testify that good penmanship, or “lettering,” as we were taught it for print text, is achievable only through practice, practice, practice.
In high school drafting class, lettering is typically something like one-fifth of the grade of a drawing. Letters have to be perfectly formed, spaced, and sized, and have a consistent line quality. Draftsmen are almost as anal about lettering as calligraphers, and most engineers (at least in my day) took at least one year of drafting training.
I took four. I loved technical drawings of all kinds.
By the end of the second year I stopped writing cursive altogether and used print only just to improve my lettering, since it was limiting my drawing scores.
Also, in college, engineering classes required pages and pages of notes, homework, essay problems, etc. - and not just in text, but equations, schematics and drawings. And it all had to be legible. So I adopted several letter and number forms to make some characters more unique, like the bar through the ‘7’ and ‘Z’ and other contrivances.
Today, 20 years later, I still only print, but I’ve invented my own (perfectly legible) forms for many letters, and sped up my hand even more (thanks to the Uniball Micro pen), to the point where sometimes my printed text looks cursive. I now understand how some of the cursive forms evolved.
I could still never figure out how they got the lower case ‘z’ though…
My handwriting is getting worse and worse.
The thing is that now I only write two things. Notes while I go through voicemail and checks for the monthly bills. If I used my banks internet features more I wouldn’t even write out the checks.
I was taught cursive in third grade and I hated that teacher. I also thougth cursive was a very apt name because I cursed the entire time I was learning it.
Sorry, bughunter. I’m an engineer, but I’ve never had a drafting class–probably just as well, as my native talent for drawing would make a cat laugh. I did quite a lot of preliminary drafts at my last job, but all I had to do was make them clear enough for our CAD specialist to input them. My drafting and particularly my lettering improved considerably while I was doing that job–filling hundreds of pages with wiring diagrams provided considerable practice–but it’s not up to the standards of any real draftsman.
BTW, I bar "Z"s but not "7"s–the latter are easily distinguishable as it is.
My handwriting was illegible, so I improved it. It takes practice, but it’s worth it. Even though I rarely have to handwrite anything, when I have to do it, I can now write quickly and legibly.
As someone who’s been there, I don’t look down my nose at people with bad handwriting, but if I can’t read your homework, I don’t get out a magnifying glass to decipher it–I just write, “Sorry, can’t read this.” and give it a big fat zero.
Funny story: I had to get measured for a bride’s maid’s dress. I had jotted down the particulars: the style number, and the color, which was indigo. I hadn’t taken particular care in writing the color, and I noticed that the girl who took my measurments had copied the color as mango. (You can see how that could happen with sloppy handwriting!) Luckily, I was just emailing my measurements to the bride, and she ordered the dresses. Can you imagine if they’d sent in my form? I can just imagine her unpacked her order of five dark blue dresses. . . and one orange one?
Then again, think of the brides who would actually dress their bride’s maids in mango.
I put myself through architecture school doing drafting for a civil engineer. My printing is almost machine-like, a curse now that I’m in a different profession. Group meetings that require a whiteboard scribe inevitably start out with people pointing at me or sticking me in the ass to get up and write.
I trained at the knee of an old timer who had developed and perfected the most beautiful printing I ever expect to see. His lettering was decidedly NOT machine-like. It was graceful and alive, every shape and stroke infused with the subtle swells and finish of the Parthenon. Stunning.
I’m sure he’s dead now, along with his art.
Yeah, Balance, CAD has replaced the art of technical drawing. Most “draftsmen” these days never got the chance to develop their lettering skills - maybe they did a few hand drawings in high school, but they soon moved on to learning AutoCAD, and let the software do the lettering.
And even when I was in college, only ME’s were required to take technical drawing. It was elective for all other disciplines.
Done both.
FairyChatMom would hate me. My signature is totally illegible. But it’s not my fault!
I tried so hard in school to have good handwriting. My writing’s better than it was back then, but not much. I used to sign my name as neatly as I could, but I always thought it looked dorky. So, one day when I was a teenager, I signed it how I thought it should look. Quick, easy, efficient, and good-looking, but totally illegible. Then it hit me: it looked almost exactly like my mom’s.
So what can I say? It’s genetic. 
[sub]At least, that’s what I keep telling myself.[/sub]
Heh. Penmanship. Ask Gunslinger. I refuse to type letters to him, because he’s worth the effort of writing longhand, but sometimes I wonder whether it’s worth the effort on HIS end - I’m certainly not doing him any favors with my scrawls…
I’ve never been able to properly execute a cursive lowercase r or uppercase G. Therefore I have invented my own ciphers for these letters. And the word “it,” in my handwriting, becomes a single loop with a dot hovering above it.
My signature looks more or less like |—||-- C|—|-
Ugh! Bad penmanship is a real sore spot for me. In high school I had a teacher that would put his hand-written notes up on the overhead. He wrote in cursive, and he didn’t cross his “t’s” or ([wayne’s world 2]lower case j’s[/wayne’s world 2]) “i’s.” So it was impossible to decipher most words and if they had a “t” or an “i” or both you might as well forget about it.
I have also looked over employee surveys at a business and taken down their hand-written comments. Ugh! That was awful! People would use abbreviations and I was very surprised to see how poor people were at spelling (now watch, I probably mis-spelled something in the post).
Penmanship is important!
As for me I have nice hand writing. So nice that when in HS I was often told that my writing “looks like a girl’s.” I guess they meant it was legible, so I thought of it as a compliment. However, as I’ve taken more classes that required lots of note taking and started to use the computer more, my hand writing has declined. It’s still completely legible and easy to read, but it has dropped off in quality. The quality of my personal notes taken during class is extrememly poor, because I’m trying to write fast so that I don’t miss any info.
It’s too late/early go to bed Dig!
correction:
He didn’t dot his “i’s” (or lower case “j’s” 
).
I’ve got a kid who has been diagnosed with dysgraphia. It’s a condition where fine motor planning and fine motor control is lacking. Looking at why he was diagnosed with it, I’m seeing why my handwriting is so illegible. It’s not as simple as saying practise, practise, practise for some of us. I wish it was.
I’ll be thrilled if my kid is able to write an entire sentence tidily and legibly let alone worrying about what it looks like. We’re moving to keyboarding lessons in the short term and he will have a laptop in the classroom.
I know that it’s not true for most of us but I guess I felt the need to say that some people have a recognised disability in this area. The dysgraphia overlaps with dyslexia and sensory integration dysfunction and all those other fun diagnoses.
On a sidenote bad handwriting is not indicative of low intelligence. Many, many kids who score in the highest percentiles also have dysgraphia and other neurological conditions.
I have been very frustrated with my own penmanship, and two months ago I began keeping a journal, the purpose of which (at least one purpose) is to practice writing. Even in that short amount of time (only maybe twelve enteries or so) I have seen a definite improvement in the elegance, or whatever, of my penmanship.
I agree that penmanship says something about the writer. Poor penmanship in myself would piss me off. When I see others’ handwriting that looks sloppy, or wobbly, I tend to immediately think “illiterate dumbass” and shortly after that repent and think “maybe they just don’t have the patience to practice modulating the way I did”. I did actually practice creating letters and numbers in a particular way. I decided how I wanted each letter to look, then made that letter over and over like a first grader until it consistantly looked how I wanted it to look.
I capitalize all Rs, regardless of where they occur. Aside from that one quirk, my handwriting runs to minimalist. I used to make funny Es that looked like backwards 3s and for a while my lowercase As looked like typwriter As, but I got past that. People frequently ask me to print things for them that will be sent out or displayed somewhere, so apparently I pass muster in the handwriting department. I do (in my opinion) a fair caps-lowercase-combo, and a quite nice uniform block print when it strikes my fancy. I cannot write in cursive at all, except my own name, which took me forever to work out. A nice cursive D was worth the effort, especially since I have two.
No. If you have a handicap like dysgraphia, then it’s practice, practice, practice, practice, practice, practice.
Sure. And even then you’re very unlikely to come out with perfect handwriting that would pass the Tidy Handwriting Police standards 