(assuming it does)
When I was a wee lad, I came up with a foolproof plan to avoid looking up words in the dictionary. If I had to write a word like ‘friend’, but didn’t know if it was ‘friend’ or ‘freind’, I would make two blobby loops for the ‘i’ and the ‘e’, and throw the dot somewhere in the middle. Not sure if a word ended in -el or -le? No problem, I’d just make a couple squishy, vaguely ovular shapes of indeterminate height and hope for the best. To compensate for what I thought was the occasional trick, I made sure that my handwriting style lent itself to a chaotic flair.
The underlying assumption to all this was that teachers, who generally recognized me as a bright child/smartypants would either give me the benefit of the doubt and assume I spelled the word correctly, or wouldn’t be able to read the word well enough to tell if I spelled it wrongly. That there was a chance I’d actually spell a word right never factored into it. That I could simply do my spelling homework and master the task seemed like such a boorish chore, especially since I had this great system in place—my grades could take the hit in spelling, but all those other essays, fill-in-the-blanks, sentences, and other assignments where “spelling counted” would skate along.
Boy, did I have them fooled!
…or so I thought.
Turns out I wasn’t enough of a smartypants to see the gaping holes in my plan. Nope. No benefit of the doubt. No assumptions. No credit for words they couldn’t read—not just for spelling but for the overall assignment to boot. Not once in the twelve or so years of elementary through high school did I ever doubt my system or catch on to it’s flaws.
The end results:
I have atrociously poor handwriting and absurdly poor spelling skills.
Epilogue
I did get the last laugh of sorts. I now write and edit for a living—all thanks to wonderful, wonderful word processors!
So that’s my story. Anyone else with a complete absence of handwriting skills know how they ended up that way?
I just have poor motor control where it comes to writing. I’m not consistent - no two letters are ever the same, even in the same 2 minute period.
When I was about 18 I ended up getting embarrassed by it as it made me look like a retard, so I bought a book about cursive italic handwriting, and practised over and over and over. Now I have shit handwriting that has excessive loops in it as well.
Well, you know how when you look at a little kid’s writing, how it’s immediately identifiable as “little kid font”? That’s the font that they teach kids to write in. Most people’s handgrading “degrades” as they try to write faster and so become less fussy about perfectly emulation the “proper” print letter font. Also, most people pick up some letters from cursive. I was too stubborn and too precise to allow my handwriting to degrade, so even though it was very slow and actually almost somewhat painful (if you write a lot) to form the print letters perfectly, that’s how I continued to write.
It’s fully legible, on the plus side, but having handwriting like an 8 year old isn’t exactly the sort of impression you want to give over to employers or whoever.
I’m more of the “close enough” type person… I pick things up really fast, but I have no patience for perfecting them once I feel I’m performing acceptably. What I produce might not be pretty, but it works. Couldn’t do golf for that very reason; whacking a ball around… sure, it’s sort of fun… repeating the same motion thousands of times just to perfect every last detail of it is just boring.
Besides, I could never write neatly while at the same time keeping up with my thinking; it’d be like writing a poem one word an hour, you’d lose the flow.
My hands shake constantly and have since I was a child. It’s not really noticable unless I’m trying to hold something still, like a fork full of rice or holding a pen to paper. If I really concentrate and take a lot of time my handwriting is legible, but I can type much faster and can read my own scrawl when necessary so I don’t take the time.
On the plus side I’m never chosen to take notes on the whiteboard. Well at least not more than once per person.
I have huge blocky hands that can’t do anything that requires small motor skills. I can print if I go slow but there is no hope for my handwriting. Way back in 1966 I was told to start using a typewriter for all my HS papers, even though normally I would not be able to take typing for another 2 years the school made an exception. I bought a portable used typwriter and used it through HS and 2 years of college.
By blocky hands I mean I cannot touch my thumb to my little finger, and I cannot cross any of my fingers over any other.
Apparently it has something to do with the fact that I am a cross-lateral (right handed, but left eye dominant) hook writer. (I have been told that this combination of symptoms means that my brain is connected up backwards, or something.) Hook writing is when you hold the writing hand to the side of, and even somewhat above the pen, rather than below, as most people do. It is relatively common amongst left-handers, I believe, but I am right handed. They tried hard to train me out of it at primary school, but to no avail.
(I tried googling “hook writing” but I just got a lot of pages about how people compose the catchy bits in songs :(.)
My wretched handwriting is the result of a number of additive factors, any one of which could have caused ugly writing, but together make my handwriting something my doctoral supervisor called “the worst handwriting in history, including 500-year-old scrawls by a blind old scribe writing on sheepskin with a sharpened duck feather”.
My parents were both left-handed and write in classic “hook” style. I’m right-handed, and somehow I picked up their style. Result: even with a fast-drying ballpoint pen, my hand immediately smears what I just wrote. Also, I am essentially writing everything upside down.
I have a habit of not stopping to concentrate while I’m writing, with the result that I sometimes start thinking of something else mid-word. Result: I write the wrong word and have to cross it out. Or I have an instant portmanteau when the Big Idea struck.
Something is a little funny with my fine motor skills. I’ve noticed this in other avenues too. In golf we’d call it the yips. Result: my letters are oddly-shaped, and rarely the same size twice.
I don’t look at my writing when I’m doing it (mainly because I’m embarrassed to look). Result: words go all over the page and the lines don’t go straight.
Frankly, I’m through giving a damn about it. I can type fast, and I and others can obviously read what I’ve just typed. Result: I ain’t getting any better any time soon.
I write quickly. I switched from cursive to printing about 30 years ago, but it’s still not all the readable. Writing just takes too long, which is why I touch type everything I can.
I just don’t care. In grade school I got straight As in everything and Ds in handwriting. I still don’t care. I can make it legible if need be, and for everything else, there’s computers. In this one way I am totally “into” the modern way of doing things; why write when you can type?
The OP pretty much describes my journey to poor penmanship and spelling. It wasn’t so much of a plan as it was just muddling through the whole writing/spelling task with very little assistance from teachers or parents, other than yelling and sad head shakes. The fact that I clutch a pencil in my whole hand like I’m going to stab the paper doesn’t help either. Once I found typing I never bothered to write again other than block printing.
Mine’s crappy because I write really big and because I take a lot of notes. I developed my own shorthand (“wh” and “th” for any words beginning with those letters, for example), and a lot of on-the-fly abbreviations I remember short-term.
Consequently my handwriting is an illegible mess that only I can read. I used to work with two women with gorgeous handwriting. We put notes on large sheets of paper during meetins, and when they took their turns writing up there it was a sight to behold. When I wrote the notes they only vaguely resembled actual words.
Mine is crappy because I never ever write anymore. I look at my handwriting from back when I was in college and took a lot of notes and did a lot of longhand writing, and it’s not too bad.
Nowadays, 20 years later, I type. I type really, really fast. Other than grocery lists (that my husband says are totally illegible) I really don’t ever write anything.
Never knew that; I learned in the army I was cross-dominant, left eye/right hand. My shooting improved by switching long arms to the left shoulder. Now that I think of it I guess I do the [hook thing](http://www.nibs.com/www/WEBSITE PICS/Left_hand_writers_images/wRick Propas left hand writing.JPG)… like, the top of the pen is pointed away from my body, and I can see all my fingernails under the pen… and I tilt the paper pretty strongly… though in reverse as I am right-handed.
I’m SO blaming my handwriting on that from now on. Woohoo, free pass on bad penmanship
My handwriting does suck; you need experience with it like you would a foreign language or you just can’t read it. Mine comes from racing motorcycles when I was younger and shooting a lot of high caliber handguns. My hands have both been busted up and abused to much that even holding a pen is tough sometimes let alone moving it in a manner that produces an attractive result. I’m trying to get better though - relearning control by using dip and fountain pens and writing slower. But will I live long enough to get it back to clear? Hard to say.
I’m lefthanded, so my cursive handwriting always sucked, being designed for righthanded people and all. But other than to sign my name, I haven’t used cursive in decades.
My printing-style handwriting wasn’t too bad until about 15 years ago. Once I started typing pretty much everything on computers, my handwriting went south in a hurry. But for the same reason, the quality of my handwriting isn’t at all important anymore.
Do they still teach cursive handwriting in the schools anymore? And if so, why?
Me too. My handwriting is actually pretty legible but it looks sloppy and like a child wrote it. I would say it’s at least as legible as a lot of people with very consistent neat writing who are never the less too stylized and hard to read. It really exudes the lack of caring though. In addition to being sloppy, letters are rarely if ever on the line, preferring instead to float comfortable above it, unimpeded by its overly restrictive horizontalness.
My parents believed that being left-handed was a masculine trait, and so insisted that their daughter be right handed. Add to that a complete inability to keep up with the speed of my thinking. If I’m writing slowly and carefully, I’ll write beautifully, but my mind then wanders and I end up inserting something that’s not supposed to be there. . .
Ditto. However, I write quite a lot with pen or pencil nonetheless. If it’s something I need, I type it when I get home; weeks or even days later I often can’t read it myself otherwise. If it’s a note to someone else, I use “caps” only.
It troubles me a bit, I wished my handwriting was clear and perhaps even a bit beautiful.
