I’m a crosser of 7s and an underliner of the cents in dollar amounts.
My biggest thing, and I’m not really even aware of it when I’m writing, is that I switch frm cursive to printing and back again. One of my friends (before e-mail was so common) would say that my letters were incredibly easy to follow - because I switched from cursive to printing or printing to cursive when my train of thought changed.
One year of my elementary school education, fourth grade, was in France. The rest was in the United States. The bottom line is that sometimes I write in European style, with crossed 7’s and flagged 1’s, and sometimes I don’t. During one physics lecture in college, there was a variable denoted by a capital O. To avoid confusion, I started crossing zeroes. Problem with that was that my zeroes started to look like theta’s or phi’s. Consequently, I don’t cross zeroes in math notes, only in science ones. I also do the printed Q in cursive writing thing.
Somewhat LARGE, messy letters, leaning to the right. The G and J with a straight downwards line. The i and j look very much alike. Strange M.
No crossed sevens.
[Descartes afore D’Horse Thank you for the laugh. Great name]
I spend a lot of time thinking about lettering, fonts, writing, and so on. I doodle with words instead of pictures (my latest nerd activity has been doing ambigrams). My handwriting actually kind of sucks, but last school year I put some effort into making it more legible. Not with slower writing and more precise letters, but by changing my letters. My lowercase a has the hat. I do it in one loopy stroke instead of two. In fact, I do lots of letters in one stroke, for time–d’s (kind of ‘lyric’,actually) g’s, p’s, r’s. I don’t dot my i’s, never have. m’s and n’s have no straight line at the left. Just upside-down bowls. I serif my t’s, which helps readability. Sometimes, I have big caps and small x-height. I usually serif my caps. Sometimes I go all-out and serif most letters. My f’s are a tall, skinny S with a crossbar. The three strokes of my K’s don’t meet in one point, but the lower right stroke meets only the upper. I cross my z’s (UC only, unless it might be confused with a 2.) My one has a hat, and I cross my sevens. I got this from German class. My 3s have angular first two strokes, then a big bowl on the bottom. I cross my zeroes
I never use cursive, except for signing my name. I write all letters and digits in one stroke except these: A E F H I(at the beginning of a word) J K Q T X Y Z f i j t x y z 4 7
I cross 7 and Z, both uppercase and lowercase. My lowercase A has a hat. The outer stroke of my F goes up and right, not left and down. My lowercase N looks like a backwards uppercase N ( |/| ), but smaller, and my lowercase M looks like an extended lowercase N ( |/|/| ). My 2 is loopy, and it can look like a lowercase “gamma” when I rush.
I’m right-handed, but my writing slants to the left. I don’t know why; I’ve just always done it that way. When I write in ink, it results in a lot of smudged letters on the page and a big ink-smudge on the outside of my right pinky finger, since my hand curls around the pen.
And by the way, Zenster, I mean no offense, but I’ve always found it kind of annoying to read the handwriting of people who seem to consciously use nonstandard symbols, &c. Each one will sort of jump out on the page saying “Look at me! I’m unusual!”
Oh man, I’m such a hypocrite. As soon as I hit “submit” I realized that I write (and type) “etc.” as “&c.” because when I was studying Samuel Johnson in college I thought it looked cooler that way.
Mea culpa.
same here. i once got brownie points on an in-class essay we had to write because the person editing my paper enjoyed my upper-case Ds…
my quirk is that i don’t dot my lower-case i’s half the time…there was a time when i didn’t dot them at all.
when writing script, i write my lower-case Fs almost like one would write a figure eight…loops up and around counter clockwise, then loops down below the line clockwise…ive never seen anyone else write them this way, i feel like i created it…they’re fun, too
I write my upper-case J’s backwards - instead of having a very large, rounded, back-facing loop, they have a very small, spikey, forward-facing loop.
Initial or terminal lower-case t’s are crossed with a large loop formed without lifting the pen from the paper as I write the word. This results in the initial t having a big loop with the tail to the left and the loop facing forward, and the terminal t having a big loop with the tail to the right and the loop facing backward.
Most capital letters, I can’t even remember the proper cursive forms, so I end up writing bastardized, swirly print capitals.
Capital G’s have a tail descending from the front, so they look rather like C’s with a 7 hanging off the lower hook.
Speaking of 7s, I crossbar them when they are in a phone number, web address or other multinumeral situation where they might conceivably be confused with a 1.
My ampersands are as Zenster describes.
I don’t know how accurate this is, but according to several handwriting analysis sources, they say that left slanting writing (in either the left or right handed, though more so in right-handers) is usually an indicator that you’re shy/not quick to trust others/or not quick to let people get to know you. In extremely left slanted writing, there is often a past occurance the writer doesn’t want anyone to know about/made the writer be less trusting.
Conversely, the further right the writing slants, the more people-oriented you are, more trusting, talkative, etc. If your writing slants way to the right, it’s an indication that you might be a little too open/trusting for your own good. The slants are ranked as F (yours), A, (straight up and down), and B, (slight slant right) C (larger slant right) D (extremely large slant right).
For the most part, I’ve found that the slants are usually a fairly good indicator (though certainly not fool proof). I’m a B-C slant, and it’s right on.
That’s exactly how I hold mine, except I write right-handed. People are always at me, saying I’m “holding it wrong,” too, but it works.
I write my capital Fs backward - they look almost (but not quite) like European 7s. (Which is a huge problem with the palm pilot, but most people figure it out.)
With double s’s, the first is very tall and skinny and the second is normal size (a “Congrefs shall make no law…” kind of look) Single s’s are about half way in between.
Yeah, I looked at a book of handwriting analysis once. It was full of samples of the various kinds of writing under discussion. The only two examples that slanted leftward were a woman who was born with no arms and wrote with her toes, and a man who was on death row as a convicted rapist/killer.
That was when I decided handwriting analysis is bunk. But I have had a few people look at my handwriting and say, Gosh, you must be unfriendly" or something along those lines.
I tell them to kiss off.
The combination of typing most of the time and being left handed has left me with very poor writing. I write live a cavewoman.
I have either really gorgeous script or complete chicken scratch, depending on my mood. My Homepage and the Crap site both prominently feature scanned handwriting of mine. I really have NO consistent writing, my letter styles change at random as does the slant, no slant, to left or right, cursive print or a mixture of both. My handwriting has no weird quirks because I generally have several ways of making a particular letter and there’s no ryhme or reason why I use one over another.
What really weirds people out is that I have two seperate signatures. One for the business name and one for my tax forms. And they honestly look like two different people wrote them.
I’ve been this way for years.
Hmm… my handwriting is mostly printing, but if I’m in a hurry it turns into a gloppy cursive-y style. The only time I ever write in cursive is for my signature.
I also have a little “tail” sort of thing on the front of my m’s that I developed when I was learning to write Cyrillic.
I can and do use the & ampersand, and often the @ (each) when in a hurry.
<looks at piles of paper on desk>
Mine’s generally horrid but I have two distinct styles. One is for things I expect other people to be able to read which is still bad but most people can figure it out. For notes written just for me it’s almost a different alphabet. I’m left handed and was never taught how to write properly as a kid (my first grade teacher was one of those backwards thinking people that thought lefties were evil) as a result I’ve developed my own versions of a lot of letters that are easier/faster to form left handed.
Oddly, or maybe not, no one can read my note style of writing, but I can without any problems, but it’s almost as difficult for me to decipher my “neat” handwriting as it is for other people!
With examples and accuasations like that, perfectly understandable! (And I agree with you, a good bit of handwriting analysis just seems ridiculous). I can’t believe the publisher would choose such negative samples, when so many people have left slanted writing. How insulting.
The sites I’ve read emphasized that it’s usually only an indication of shyness, if anything, and in some extreme cases (usually when the left slant appeared all of a sudden in one’s writing after years of being right-slanted or straight up and down) might indicate abuse or relationship/family problems. For all types of writing they’d give bad and good examples of what a given trait might mean. It’s too bad the source you were reading would focus so much on the most extreme, unpleasant and unlikely significance of a trait…especially when it sounds like some of the people who’ve given your writing a once-over have come to similar conclusions themselves because of such information. Making the leap from making possible tendancies towards shyness = unfriendliness is not the case at all.
When I was a teenager and into being straightedge, I started topping all of my “dotted” letters with a small x instead of a dot.
Strangely, I’m now 27 and haven’t broken myself of the habit.
