People (online) have asked me if I do when I write, and I can’t give them a definitive answer since I don’t know what people mean when they say that. How exactly is the hand held when it’s considered to be “hooked”? Illustrations would be helpful, but I didn’t find any on google…thanks.
When people hook to write their fingers are above the words. They write from the top rather than the bottom.
They used to teach left handers to write with their elbows and wrists bent, so that instead of your fingertips away from you, your fingertips would face you. If you hold your pen like that, the motions you need to make to write are similar as if you were right handed…your pen is facing in the same direction.
When righties write, they generally hold their hands with the blade of the palm at 90 degrees to the lines on the page. Lefties would smear the fresh ink this way so they hold the blade of their palms parallel to and above the lines thereby missing the most recently written letters. This makes for a hook shaped lefty hand and wrist.
<feeling very dense>
I’m going to have to find pictures…
Hold your pen in your left hand in a writing position. Now, still holding the pen, bend your wrist down as far as it will go. Write. It looks like an upside down hook.
Here is an image that will give you an idea of the “hook,” although it is not very pronounced in this example.
The reason some left-handed people do this (IMO) is that they were not taught to orient the paper at the proper angle. This is something I learned from an attentive teacher in the third grade. Apparenly, not all left-handers learned this lesson early enough.
If a left-handed person does not change the angle of the paper so that the top angles up to the right, he or she is forced to bend the wrist in order to write.
I hope this makes sense…
Oh, and BTW, IIRC, Cecil “hooks.”
I don’t believe all those explanations about why most left-handers hook their hands above. I think there is something about left-handers’ brain organization that is different. FWIW, my daughter is right-handed, has never shown the slightest tendency to left-handedness or even ambidextrousness, but writes in the “hook” fashion. She never learned to do so by seeing anyone else in her family and I can only suppose that there is something in her brain organization. My son is also right-handed, but has always felt more comfortable batting left-handed.
Well, did you teach your daughter to write, or did she learn it in school? If it’s the latter, maybe she picked it up from somebody there.
Yes, but only when the rent is due. Cecil Admas on In a right-handed world, why is a man’s billfold pocket on the left side? [and hooking lefties]
Well, I dont think its somethin different in the brain, because im left handed, and instead of hookin my hand i turn the paper 45 degrees so its sideways and i am writing towards me:( this has its problems though because now i can’t write the right way up…
but hey, the writin doesnt get smudged
Do left-handers hook in countries where the script runs right to left?
Yes! Thanks. Ok, so I don’t hook my hand when I write, probably because I do angle my paper more or less correctly. 
I (left handed) hook all the time, and it’s getting worse. Was never taught to do anything different in school, even as the teachers complained endlessly about my terrible handwriting (which is pretty good, now).
Never heard that bit about angling the paper - as far as I can tell, keeping the paper parallel to your body when writing is the write (hehe) way to do it. The reason for this is that the eyes are also following the words one is writing on the page; if the page is angled, then your eyes aren’t focusing on the words directly (head-on). And if you wind up looking at the words at an angle, your whole posture could be screwed up badly (also, at an early age you could become cross eyed, or perhaps misinterpret the letters). So it’s best to keep the page head on. So your handwriting’s a little illegible - so what? Work at it, and it’ll get better.
I may hook a lot now (right on top of the words!), but my handwriting’s fine. So there.
This is more or less an accurate assesment of the situation. As a tiny lefty back in grade school I remember distinctly when the teacher told us all to tilt our papers to the right. Being an ornery child I figured that was ok for the righties but I was unique and deliberately tilted my paper to the left.
I do not and never have ‘hooked’ when I write and cannot understand why more teachers of writing don’t take the time (about 20 seconds) to tell other tiny lefties it’s ok to orient the paper for their ease and comfort.
I’m a leftie and I do hooked writing. I just took a digital pic and posted it here.
Isn’t technology wonderful?
Some people say hooked lefties have some aspects of their motor functions arranged differently within the brain than other lefties. I’ve never seen any strong evidence in support.
I write like this because when I was young, learning to write in school, I copied the angle of the pencil of the kid sitting opposite and facing me, who was a natural right-hander. No-one corrected me. I suspect I’m probably actually a natural right-hander myself - apart from hooked writing, there is nothing ‘leftie’ about me at all.
I’m a lefty, and I don’t hook. However, I have an identical right-handed brother who DOES hook… It’s pretty goofy looking.
Hooking lefty here. IIRC (and I have no cite for this), left-handed people who do not hook are “true” or “absolute” lefties, while hookers are lefties who are attempting to write with their left hand in the way they perceive right-handers to do. In other words, a true lefty can smoothly translate the information he receives while learning from watching a right-handed person write and simply do the same thing with his/her left hand. A less-strongly-oriented lefty learning to write will try to place his/her hand in the identical position on the page that he/she sees the teacher’s hand to be in, and that will cause the hook.
And it is not IMO merely a matter of the angle of the paper but rather of differently processing what you are taught. Non-hookers write from a position “under” or adjacent to the line of the letters, just as right-handers do, whiile hookers write from above the line. Much of the smudging lefties deal with is not just from dragging your hand over the words you’ve just written to your left, but from dragging your hand over the whole block of text you’ve written above whatever the line you’re on. This is supported, I think, by the pictures here. While the author of the linked site says it’s all a matter of paper angle, in fact if you look at the pictures, you can see that the “hooked” position involves holding the pen in an entirely different way and writing from above, while the non-hooked position shows the pen held totally differently and ready to write from below.
I think hookers who angle the paper to reduce the hook do so not because they were taught to (in most cases), but because they figured out for themselves that doing so reduces the degree you have to cramp your hand in order to write. I have such a pronounced hook that I figured out early that only angling the paper a lot would allow me to uncurl my hand. I now write with the paper almost horizontal, paralleling the edge of the desk, so I can write from bottom to top, following a line “up” the page.
And I hate clipboards because I can’t sign my name or write on them because of the big flipping clip in the way. The first thing I do when I’m handed a clipboard of documents is take the documents out and put them back upside down, so the clip is on the bottom of the board. When I was in school and using spiral notebooks, I flipped the notebooks over so that the spiral was on the right, and filled the notebook from front to back, using only the back of of each page, in order to avoid the spiral. I think left-handed people, especially those that write a lot, make a lot of minor accommodations to make writing easier. We’re just used to it.
Maybe I’m an ignorant righty, but I’ve always thought that was the sole reason. By hooking, lefties avoid dragging their hands through fresh ink, or what have you.
Is it really supposed to be more complicated??