Because, while I taught myself to read at age four because I really wanted to know how to, I saw no reason for learning how to write. A few days beore my eighth birthday, I saw a word I didn’t know on a book in a store window. “What’s a diary?” I asked my brother? “A book where people write down what they did that day.”
BINGO! I never thought about recording my day. I taught myself cursive, and started keeping a diary on my eighth birthday (yes, I still write every night). But I taught myself very poorly, and didn’t learn how to print for several years after that.
It’s since been recognized that I have very minimal eye-hand coordination.
I just plain stopped using handwriting. I’ve been “real time chat typing” since I was about 14 (17 years ago) so I naturally got good at it. Computers started to be the norm in school around then, too. I took notes in college with very poor handwriting (or not at all) and since then, I haven’t really done any significant writing. It’s been 10 years since college now.
I write out about 40 Christmas cards each year and it’s like murder on my hands. I have to be very careful and write with block print to make sure they get delivered.
I was writing to my grandparents every month for a while, and I started of hand-writing a letter then threw it away. I told them I was sorry for being impersonal but there’s no way I was going to make two 80-year-olds try to decipher my handwriting.
I have no idea. I’m so old we actually got graded on penmanship when I was in school. It was the only lousy grade I received and it pissed me off a lot.
I used to practice for hours and my handwriting never improved.
That’s why I type.
My handwriting is so terrible, I even get teased about my block writing being illegible. How the hell can block writing be illegible?
Holding a pencil/pen for an extended period makes my hand ache. I’m sure plenty of experts will say I’m holding them wrong, but what I do seems to be a lot like what the diagrams show, so I’m not getting it. Maybe I’m just holding the things too tightly.
I was “skipped” a grade, from 1[sup]st[/sup] semester of kindergarten to 2[sup]nd[/sup] semester of first grade. As such, I missed the fundamentals of printing, and improvised my own style to catch up. My printing has always looked kind of sloppy and childlike, but I find it faster and more natural than handwriting. When I do write in cursive, its slow and neat-looking.
Cursive actively pissed me off when I was in grade school. Why oh why did we have to learn all these new letters when we had perfectly good letters memorized already? “It’ll be efficient”, they said. Pah! I wrote fast enough then and I do now as well with plain printing, when I’m not typing of course. As a result, I rebelled anytime anyone brought up penmanship, as I assumed they were trying to teach the Devil’s Handwriting. And I got sloppy. It’s still legible, mind, but not pretty.
At school they used to make us write lines as punishment. Naturally we scrawled them down as quickly as possible to get it over with. So we were effectively trained to write badly.
My handwriting sucks because I don’t care. If I need to read it, its legible enough for me, sometimes. Leaving notes for somebody, I put in some effort and it can actually be pretty nice.
I never ever liked cursive and after 3rd and 4th grade where they taught it, and the one teacher I had in 8th grade that required it, I can’t write it. I went through college not being able to write well in cursive. It took me far longer to write in the “faster” cursive than in ‘print’.
The attempted transition from ‘print’ to cursive is what destroyed it. I finally get it, then you throw a different bunch of BS at me when I’m 8. Pick one and stick with it. Chinese is chinese, I’ve never seen “cursive” chinese.
My signature is beyond horrible also, same 8th grade teacher that required cursive, quizzes and papers and BS all the time, my signature became unreadable, I just got sick or writing my name, in cursive, so it became really fast.
The funny thing is my business partner, who’s name is nothing like mine, my last name is 6 letters, his is like 87. First names have one letter in common. Our signatures are identical. Loopy doo, squiggly. And he’s left handed.
Hail to the typewriter(computer) and chicken scratch.
I’m old enough that I was graded on my penmanship, and typing (NOT keyboarding) class was an elective. I’m also old enough that our typing classes had both manual and electric typewriters, and we had to learn to type on both, because we didn’t know which kind our future employers might have.
Starting in about the fifth or sixth grade, most of the popular girls in school began practicing their cursive writing, complete with circles over the is and js. They compared their handwriting to that of their friends’, and the girl with the prettiest handwriting acted like she’d won some sort of tiara. I wasn’t popular, and was quite a tomboy, and I always figured if I could read my writing, and my teachers could, then I didn’t need to lovingly practice my penmanship. I also figured that my last name was unique enough that I didn’t need to creatively spell my first name. This was when the I started replacing the Y in the final letter of girls’ names, and Y was replacing I in every other position. Cindy became Cyndi, for instance.
At any rate, one of my life plans was to be able to buy my own typewriter and type everything that needed to be written down. I did own a typewriter for a while. However, I’ve found that I STILL need to jot stuff down by hand now and then. But my handwriting still sucks.
Apparently there are several schools of calligraphy. What’s called “English calligraphy” in Spain uses ovals, slopes forward and used to be taught to boys; “French calligraphy” uses perfect circles and vertical lines and used to be taught to girls (including yours truly, although I evidently didn’t learn it well). Since my natural tendency is to use ovals and slope forward, I might have better handwriting if I could bring myself to spend a few hundred hours learning to write “like a boy”. I felt like I’d been robbed at rulerpoint, when I found out about English calligraphy… “if they’d let me write like that, it would have been half as hard!”
I used to write the s the way I was taught and did so for 20 years. Then I had a teacher who wrote it like a printed s. And for some reason, from then on I’ve been mixing both kinds of Ss.
I got away with that excuse until I was in grade 7. The teacher took a “that excuse won’t work with me” approach, and after having been hit enough times by him (this was the '70s) I had beautiful writing. I did so for many years.
Then my career in IT happened. My typing very quickly became way faster than my writing and almost all my communication for ages has been either electronic or printed off my laptop/PC. It must be at least 15 years since I wrote an entire page by hand. Any skill needs to be practised to be maintained, so now my handwriting sucks. I can sometimes force it to be fairly good, but the time and effort isn’t worth it.
Giambattista Bodoni created a FONT, not a handwriting style. So no, I don’t feel like I’m letting the family down when I use mechanical means of wrting stuff down.
I do feel a little guilty every time I choose some other font, though. And I frequently do. Many times, Bodoni font isn’t the most attractive/effective font for my purposes.
I used to have really nice handwriting. All my life I’ve been complimented on it. Three years ago, I got hurt on the job, lost a finger and half my thumb and what’s left on my right hand doesn’t bend (no joints). I can’t hold a pen or grip anything.
So, at the age of 52, I had to learn how to write left handed and it hasn’t been easy. I can print and then sign my name in cursive (like when I write checks) but it’s not pretty and if I have to write more than a few lines (like writing a check), I get really stressed. In fact, my right hand will start moving and will ache when I get really stressed.
When one of my older sons realized just how bad it was, his comment was, “Oh, Mom! You had such nice handwriting!”
I spell great. I write poorly. I print everything; the only thing I do in script any more is sign my name and that looks like a doctor’s scrawl on an Rx pad.
Around middle school, I wanted to change my writing style because it looked like “little kid” font. So I created my own style, both with regular straight up and down letters, and a sloping style that I thought was either cool or horror movie font. I worked very hard at it and it looked great for a while. I used the up and down style for school/work, and the slanty style for personal letters and what not.
A few years ago, I broke my right pinky finger in a bar fight. Now I can’t hold a pen correctly, and my writing sucks again.
If I write with a pen for too long, my fingers start to hurt. So I keep it short and post-it note length.
As for cursive, I can’t do it. It too, looks like a version of “little kid” font.
Nobody needs to be able to identify what I wrote (that’s what typing is for), except for my signature (which is just ‘identify’ not ‘read’), and I can read my handwriting (normally). (When this isn’t true, I write more clearly, but it’s printed, caps and smallcaps, which is the only way I can make my handwriting consistently clear to others.)
And, like Ellen Cherry, I abbreviate on the fly (sometimes to the point that even I can’t figure out what I meant if I leave it too long).
And I jam the writing in wherever I can fit it - I often need to include arrows and ‘walls’ to make it clear where in a particular thought fits in.
