We had the same lowercase “s” fad in my elementary school. We also had the bubble writing fad and the skinny writing fad.
I’d guess that some of it is learned behavior that was re-inforced by peers (and to a certain extent teachers).
She came from the same one I did, although in my case my teachers basically gave up on doing anything to “neaten” my handwriting. They graded me down for “bad presentation” but never explained how to improve it. Of course they couldn’t, as the same presentation would have been perfectly acceptable from a boy.
- Boys learned “tilted” handwriting (which turns out to be what comes naturally to me) but girls were taught to write with vertical lines and round circles, rather than slopes and ovals. Even after the two schools merged¬, being tilted was still one of the things that made my handwriting unacceptable.
- I am a lefty trained as righty. My strongest hand and the one that’s got better coordination is the left, but the one that’s got greater dexterity thanks to the training is the right. This wrecks havok with any skill that required both dexterity and coordination (writing, sewing, most crafts).
- Story told before, my first encounter with sexism as something which applied to me was overhearing a conversation between two teachers: they were going over some students’ written work; he asked why a certain report had been graded lower than others of similar quality; she answered it was because “that handwriting, it’s horrible!” “Horrible? It’s perfectly readable!” “Well, it… it would be all right if it was a boy, I guess, but it’s a girl!”
¬ When I moved to town, the nuns had K-12, with K co-ed and the rest girls only; the Jesuits had 1-12, boys only. When I was in 2nd grade the two schools re-shuffled: nuns K-8 co-ed, Jesuits 9-12 co-ed.
This thread is confusing me. Are people actually suggesting that women have better handwriting?! All their letters are touching! You can’t tell where one letter stops and the next begins!
Those are thighs.
I’m telling you guys, I have a pile of essays in my bag right now that you couldn’t sort into genders to save your life. It’s cultural, and it’s dissolving.
This is an interesting thread. Have there been any studies of the handwriting of gays, lesbians, tomboys, sissies, Bronies, transvestites, transgender people, etc.?
If handwriting is psychological, one might expect to see some gay men who write more like women. If it is mostly due to physical body proportions, not so much.
And Hallellujah praise the Lord, the Lady, the Spaghetti Monster, the Rainbow Fairy and the little men who live in mushrooms! It was a pain in the ass to deal with.
Actually the sex/gender of the writer was never something you could tell from handwriting with any degree of accuracy.
There are quite a few credible published studies indicating that is incorrect. Do you have some basis for this belief other than personal opinion?
So no one is going to bring up graphology? Study of personality based on handwriting? I think much of it is woo, but certainly there is some psychological component to how we choose to construct our letters. My wife’s grandfather was quite into graphology and she would provide samples of her classmates’ writing and he would give some pretty interesting psych profiles – sometimes spookily accurate.
I must have missed the legible handwriting aspect of being female. I struggled with it in grade school where ‘neatness counted’, and couldn’t wait to get to high school where it no longer was part of your mark on an assignment.
As an adult, my handwriting is still so bad that unless I make a special effort or print in all capitals, even I can’t read it sometimes.
My mother, a former teacher, has nice, easy to read handwriting. I seem to have inherited my father’s chicken scratch.
Yes. I took several graphology classes–they were more in the nature of forensic graphology–and this is one of the first things we learned.
There are tendencies, for instance, for women to adhere more strictly to standard penmanship forms, but that doesn’t mean a man won’t or a woman will.
But there is also a tendency (and it’s been too long since I took these classes so no cite) for someone who knows and uses shorthand to also adhere more strictly to standard penmanship forms. More women knew and used shorthand as well.
Oddly enough, it’s easier to tell someone’s age, but that’s more because of different standards of penmanship over the course of decades, except for young people and very old people.
I will say, if someone is dotting their is with little circles, or hearts, or (god forbid) happy faces, that person is probably female. But according to the people teaching the class, hardly anybody does this for very long.
Because girls are made of rainbows, sparkles and cute-bubbles.
Guys are made of things that smell vaguely of meat and hair, along with assorted bits of bleh.
This has profound effects on penmanship.
Most facets of graphology are considered to be pseudoscience and as far as I can tell there has never been proof of any ability to tell almost anything about a person’s personality, state of mind, preferred occupation, etc. based on their handwriting.
Alongside this, scientists have noted that assessing gender based on handwriting can be done reliably at a rate far greater than chance would allow.
Obviously that doesn’t mean 100% of the time. Most of the studies linked in the study I cited previously show success rates from 68% to 80% when people were asked to judge the gender of handwriting. That is a highly significant rate - the odds of it being mere chance that they were more successful than 50/50 are millions to one.
Forensic graphology is a different discipline from woo graphology: forensic graphology IS the scientific part. It’s the one along the lines of “do these two bits of handwriting look like they come from the same person?”, not the one about saying that the writer was bipolar, 6’ tall and overweight.
Note that Hilarity’s post contained the admission that some patterns do have a higher probability of being from a woman’s hand… absent any “telling” signs, is it possible to tell? No, but then, a baby’s sex can’t be told unless you see relevant bits or there’s some sort of cultural signage attached to their clothing. The thread is about the existence of those telling signs.
Agreed, and my point is that those telling signs existed in 70%-80% of handwriting samples across the board, consistently, across dozens of published studies conducted over decades, using thousands of handwriting samples that were evaluated by tens of thousands of eyes and the presence of those telling signs and people’s ability to recognize them wasn’t just a fluke or random chance.
This was in response the statement:
“Actually the sex/gender of the writer was never something you could tell from handwriting with any degree of accuracy”
But it was something we could tell with up to an 80% degree of accuracy, even using samples of handwriting from other languages, cultures and alphabets.
I can be your first data point. I’m a gay man who learned the Palmer Method back in the 50s. Of course over the years it changed, but I don’t think I ever wrote “like a girl.” And by the time I was in college I was printing everything. Today, on the rare occasions when I have to write something in cursive, it looks very “forced.”
But I do have a unique (?) way of holding a pencil (or pen, paint brush, etc.). Rather than just the index finger resting on top, I add the middle finger, which is exerting slightly more pressure than the index finger. If I try to hold it “normally,” I have less control. I don’t remember a time when I held it differently, but I wonder why some teacher didn’t get me to correct this. And I seriously doubt this has anything to do with sexuality.
Maybe a significant proportion of those published studies had little hearts above the “i”'s when submitted for thesis review?
“^^ Hi plz approve my study LOL kthxBYE ^^”
It’s gotta be the Corpus Callasum. Plain and simple.
Are there invariable anatomical differences between male and female hands?