If you have a serious problem with your handwriting, or are just serious about improving your handwriting, try Teach Yourself Better Handwriting by Rosemary Sassoon. She is both a historian of handwriting and a physical therapist (for handwriting). Instead of presenting a model alphabet to copy, she has you analyze your natural writing style and figure out how to improve it. Her focus is to both improve the look of your writing and help you become more comfortable/fast.
Thanks for this reference. I write a lot of notes (and then struggle to transcribe them). I am considering getting that book and practicing on an iPad (which has a different experience than pen on paper) and perhaps teach myself something reliable that can replace manual transcription.
Back in the Palm days my Graffiti handwriting was (perforce!) pretty clear, but it wasn't that great to use.
This anecdote from one of Dijkstra's students made the article for me:
> The final was an oral final and after going through a few questions to his satisfaction he said “You seem competent, but your handwriting is horrible…” The remaining 30 mins of my final exam by Dijkstra was me writing phrases repeatedly on a pad of paper while he said, ‘no, you need to round the o’s a bit more, the A is misformed, etc…’.
I spent my childhood upsetting people who think there is some moral significance to handwriting.
After a chance meeting with a physiotherapist, I finally got diagnosed with dyspraxia ("clumsy child syndrome" for us old people) at the age of 16, and managed to get a few grudging apologies from the sarcastic teachers who made my life miserable for so long.
I admire Dijkstra's work, but I do think he'd probably hate me. I spent every morning break for years at primary school doing handwriting exercises like in the article, while the other kids played outside. I never got any better.
Funnily enough since leaving school it hasn't mattered one bit.
Over here kids got 'benefits'(extra time for tests etc) for having such disabilities - over-diagnosing was very common.
It was a nightmare for people, like me, who genuinely had this syndrome. Every teacher was sure that everyone was faking it and that they were lazy.
I would seriously trade all that extra time for at least readable handwriting. I, like you, spent plenty of my time practicing - in my case by transcribing books.
Heck, i had once to retake an exam at university - it consisted of me basically slowly taking my original one and writing it cleanly.
I left school in '93. Throughout my school career I was the only person I knew who was diagnosed with anything like that. I only got diagnosed after talking to a physio who was treating my brother. Once that happened I started being treated a lot differently, and got to use a nifty little Amstrad[1] laptop to work on. Pity it happened so late, I might have enjoyed school more.
I tend to think that handwriting tells a lot about one's upbringing and educational backgrounds. I was born left-handed but my parents forced me to use the right hand to write letters (a common practice in Japan at the time). I always make an excuse for me being a terrible handwriter because of that. But hey, I can now write while eating! (I still use chopsticks with my left hand.) Anyway, there's a lot of characters (not pun intended) that one can learn from one's kanji writing, because its blocky shape tends to reveal how rigid you follow the right stroke order, etc.
And then I found that the handwriting by Chinese people is awesome. They're very stylish and it appears that they still treat kanji writing much like calligraphy in China, while in Japan we mostly treat them as blocks. I wonder what secret they teach to kids in their schools.
> I was born left-handed but my parents forced me to use the right hand to write letters (a common practice in Japan at the time).
One hassle that Western left-handed writers have to deal with is avoiding smudging their just-written characters as their hands advance to the right. As traditional Japanese is written top-down and right-left, I would have thought lefties were at an advantage in that regard.
The individual characters are designed to be written left to right. It's much easier for a right-handed person to write them correctly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke_order
i managed to smudge the ink of the previous line regardless. the weight needs to be center so half the hand needs to balance half above the line you are writing. or you turn the paper. or ... there are so many different handstyles.
I'm also left-handed and have ugly handwriting. So does my left-handed sister. But my older right-handed brother has the most beautiful handwriting I've ever seen.
So I figured it was being left-handed that's the problem. Now my 10 year old, right-handed son's handwriting seems stuck at an even uglier stage than where my sister's or my own handwriting is.
ouf, me too. i changed my handwriting back to left handed on my first day at work. on my first holiday i wrote postcards for my mother and she wrote me back, how i could fix my handwriting. now i believe i am ambidextrous because both hands cause not much of an issue for me. only the left hand write somehow more intelligible. for me it looks all the same.
I have found two quirks related to international writing styles. The first, as you found, is that people from China tend to have very neat handwriting. The second, (which I don’t know is generalizable) is that my Eastern European coworkers invariably wrote in cursive script.
Although Comenia Script was very hyped, it hasn't become very widespread. Last data I'm aware of gave percentage of schools using it at only 4 percents.
Yes, I figured as much! The interesting thing culturally is that in the US everyone is (was?) taught cursive script and is told it is very important to know, but somewhere around the age of 11-12 it is entirely dropped out of the curriculum and never mentioned again.
Interestingly, while learning Arabic (right to left language), a lot of us could then read/write English right to left without ever practicing it. One day a student started writing something in English on the board from right to left (by accident) and was several words in before anyone noticed.
yes, i started to make notes in german in hebrew script (with yiddish transliteration rules), because it is much easier as a left-handed person. in university i was doing some mirror writing, until a professor teased me.
Speaking of handwriting ... I recently took up Copperplate (also called "English Roundhand") calligraphy. It is one of the oldest European scripts, originated in 17th century England.
Here are a couple of samples from my practice (of 3 weeks) :-)
What inspired me was this book called Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts[1], which has samples of great calligraphy from centuries old manuscripts, among many other interesting things. (Previously mentioned it on HN here[2].)
And I am learning Copperplate script itself from a wonderful book, Mastering Copperplate Calligraphy, by Eleanor Winters.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the entire process. Including the experience of using a proper nib, calligraphic ink and the oblique nib holder. The oblique pen holder (can be seen in the first image linked above) is really helpful, as Copperplate script requires letters be at a 55 degree angle; also lets you avoid having your wrist twisted in an awkward way.
May I ask where you come from? Back the days this is what I was learning as a kid in school and - from my subjective and biased perspective - I always considered this basic handwriting and not "calligraphy". (You know what I mean ...) Thanks for sharing!
I originally come from India; now live in Western Europe. I used the term "calligraphy" (although, my scribbling doesn't deserve that term) because that's what the book I'm learning from (mentioned earlier) calls it.
In school did you learn writing with pressure-and-release strokes? I'm referring to how hard you press on the nib to control the ink flow, using a dip pen. If so, more power to you :-) (The other day, a colleague from the UK also mentioned that they learnt "calligraphy" in school, not sure what kind it was, though.)
On this being a "basic handwriting", while I'm still a novice in Copperplate, if you squint hard in my example, all the upstrokes are (supposed to be) thin, and the down strokes, thick—they are not uniform, and most calligraphic scripts involve these pressure-and-release strokes. As you would know, it requires a precise control. I'm far from it; it takes a months of dedicated practice to get that smooth flow of ink.
Also, note that with Copperplate, it looks like you wrote a word, or even a letter, in one go, but it's not the case—almost all letters require you to lift your pen several times over the course of a word, let alone a sentence. (E.g. writing the Copperplate lowercase 'k' requires you to lift your pen three times.)
> In school did you learn writing with pressure-and-release strokes? I'm referring to how hard you press on the nib to control the ink flow, using a dip pen.
Yes. That was actually the part on which you got your grades for. Tough days.
> E.g. writing the Copperplate lowercase 'k' requires you to lift your pen three times.
Some letters have variants. There are variants of 'k' I know of with only two or one lifts and at least one that doesn't need a lift at all, albeit not looking as good but still considered Copperplate.
I was given almost the opposite advice by a math teacher. Considering that speed was very important during exams, he urged us to spend no time with pretty calligraphy or presentation when turning in papers. Basically anything that could be read was good, but we needed to be fast. For example, if I'd turned in a paper with underlined text where the line is interrupted to avoid crossing the descenders of p's and g's, I'd probably have been told that it would be a good idea to let the flourishes go and be faster, since there were no points awarded for presentation. To date, I still use this advice when taking notes for myself.
There are many things wrong with that. Speed is not the most important thing during exams. If it does, it means one of two wrong things (sometimes both):
- Poorly designed exam: Too many questions and not enough time to complete it for the average student,
- Poor student skills: the student takes too much time on each question. Solving speed is part of the skills, but one should not "cheat" by sacrificing calligraphy or presentation.
Being able to write something that is readable for others (do whatever you want when writing for yourself) is part of basic skills just like being able to read a text in a reasonable amount of time.
Your teacher was terribly wrong, they should have awarded points for presentation, spelling and grammar (assuming they can evaluate that too; in my country the culture of "good science people can have terrible spelling" is a scourge).
You make it sound like he told us it was ok to be unreadable and make spelling mistakes... No, we needed to be readable, always. And attentive to presentation, on occasion, but only when it mattered.
I'm very grateful now for the ability to take notes quickly in meetings where things go really fast and I don't have a chance to ask people to repeat what they said. But of course if I'm sending those notes out later, I'll take the time to format them properly.
I thing the exams GP are talking about are more like competitions, absolute grade doesn't matter, rank does. Common in France and probably many other countries if you want to enter a prestigious school.
During these exams, candidates typically won't be given enough time. This is by design, and candidates will be ranked by how far they got in addition to correctness.
Also, in order to promote fairness, grading is standardized. And teachers will tell you the corners you can cut and the ones you can't.
I teach my children that a lot of times their work will be evaluated more from the form than from the substance. It is bad news. It is unfair. But that's how the world works.
Form begets function, so this is a given. Some may be hypocritical, overly critical, etc., but still, if anything, good form exposds flaws in the content, while bad form not just obscures but potentially destroys the content.
Well, you are talking about judging a book by its cover? That's what you have done right there!
One thing I did that helped me improve a lot was to start using a pen with a smaller point. This required greater precision to connect stroke. I had to improve the whole stroke and not just fudge it at the finish with a thicker line.
I highly recommend a smaller point if you're doing math with exponents on exponents.
Interesting. I found the opposite! With a thick point you have no choice but to shape things well and keep loops open, or the lines overlap and you end up with a messy blob.
I do most of my writing giving maths lectures and preparing for them, and I do all my writing digitally (mostly on a Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, under a document camera in lectures), so I have a record of the improvement in my writing (e.g. the same lecture examples 6-7 times, spaced a few months apart each). I use the two previous semesters/years' versions in preparation, and the improvement is clear and steady. I started with fairly thin lines, comparable to a thick ballpoint, and have ended up settling on fairly thick felt-tipped pen width, like a Sharpie.
When I'm writing for myself I tend to use a thinner pen (and write smaller and more compressed together).
Having few reasons to use a pencil or pen since leaving high school, a decade and change later I still have a callus on my right middle finger, but using a writing implement is uncomfortable.
With computer keyboards and touchscreen smartphones used for the majority of written communication, I wonder if penmanship is worse now than at any time in human history. If cursive is still taught, it's probably not for much longer.
During the SATs, we had to write in cursive some statement that we did not receive outside help. Everyone joked afterwards about how tedious it was and how we overflowed the space in which to write because we weren't practiced at making tight loops.
> I wonder if penmanship is worse now than at any time in human history
As another datapoint, I write a few times per year.
I'm not sure if my handwriting got worse (it has always been on the lower end of legible), but I do forget how to write letters. I have to consciously think how an M or a K goes, or how a U fits onto a W. It has also always been slow, nearly slow enough to cause real trouble in exams. On the other hand (pun not intended), typing is something I do faster than anyone else I know in real life, so it's not that me or my hands are slow in general.
If he has to write in a hurry, I wonder how much his font reverts to the old habit. This strikes me as something built in quite deep in muscle/nervous system. Unlikely to trivially change it.
My experience is that a lot of these new habits do stick; I’ve put effort into changing my handwriting, including completely changing a few letters, and when I write quickly they do look sloppier but they’re nicer than when I was a kid who could barely hold a pencil.
Do it enough and you reprogram the nervous system.
You're absolutely correct. I had the opposite problem to the article author: in high school, my handwriting was neater than it needed to be, but too slow. So I made a conscious effort to mimic one of my teachers, whose handwriting had a good balance of legibility and quickness. I noticed that she ligatured a lot -- changing the form of one letter so it would flow smoothly into the next -- and so I tried to do the same. It worked: I was soon able to write quite a lot faster; and it stuck: years later, I still write mostly the same way.
A similar change happened in college and graduate school: my science education (see username) required distinguishing a lot of characters most people don't need to distinguish often, like 'ω' and 'w' and 'v', or 'x' and 'X' and 'χ', and between '2' and five different forms of 'z'/'Z' (that one happened during statistical mechanics class...). With just a little bit of conscious effort, I could permanently change how I wrote letters. I didn't even need to explicitly practice: the natural use during note-taking and homework assignments form was plenty sufficient, at least for me.
Your nervous system really can reprogram itself!
A couple semi-related tips for anyone who wants better handwriting:
1. Just go slower. Your handwriting is probably perfectly legible to others if you allow yourself the time to do so.
2. Realize when it does and doesn't matter. A doctor writing a critical prescription by hand (not that they do that these days) is very different from scribbling on a sheet of scratch paper that you'll throw out as soon as you've figured out what you're doing.
3. Try a fountain pen or felt-tip marker. These require zero pressure to write, just contact. That makes things take a lot less effort, so your muscles can work on shaping the letters instead of pushing a pen. Rollerball pens aren't half bad, but fountain pens are still the gold standard for a reason.
I will just note that fountain pens tend to require thinking about your stroke direction a bit more than other pens; it’s pretty easy to dig into the paper when going upwards. There can also be issues with getting the flow going; most cursive scripts date from a time when fountain pens were pretty much the only option, and are designed around these issues.
If you don’t want a cursive script then you could also look into the faces found in old Speedball lettering manuals.
Flow issues sound like a problem with the pen, and there shouldn't be enough pressure on the nib for it to dig in like that.
/r/fountainpens is a really nice community with lots of guides to troubleshooting pens, as well as recommendations for beginners. If anyone's curious reading this, the Platinum Preppy is a very good, very inexpensive fountain pen that gets recommended a lot.
On 3, writing digitally is another way to get zero pressure (can depend on the pen and settings). In my experience, ease of use and control go (best) Wacom tablets > Galaxy Note (also Wacom, better on tablets than phones) > Surface (N-Trig, Surface Pro 3-6, Book) > Apple Pencil (worst).
I have changed my handwriting away from cursive during my mid-teens and I was surprised how easy it actually was. I literally just printed out a bunch of pages from [1], practiced for a few days and it was done.
Now I can't really write cursive even if I want to. My signature, which is in cursive, has morphed to an unintelligible mess over time.
That is my concern too. My maths script is very good—I put considerable effort into the equations I write and as such the numbers, lines, and symbols turn out very good. On the other hand, no matter how much I studied lettering (regular and cursive), I don't really recognise any difference beyond what came of the added patience of my age. My letters are the same, they are only tidier. It was truly terrifying (sorry, my twenty-some teachers...) and only got better because I slowed down.
Having changed my handwriting style a year ago: when the new habit is really set, writing in a hurry doesn't reveal the old one. I actually can't write how I used to, my brain changed its wiring (and did not just acquire new "cables".)
The first few weeks were horrible though: new style not yet ingrained in the brain, old style already being forgotten.
We should find people that can write the fastest in a very legible way, without being full-on cursive. And then extract their writing style out as a font and copy that style.
From the pictures in the article his handwriting seems to have an uncanny valley effect to them where the letters are extremely uniform but still clearly handwritten. It kinda produces the same response as seeing Comic Sans if I'm completely honest.
When I was in the seventh grade, a curmudgeonly teacher insisted all his students learn copperplate.
That made my handwriting worse - to the point that a couple of years later, at the same school, other teachers complained and I was sent to a remedial teacher to undo the damage inflicted by the earlier teacher who had wanted 'stylish'.
Girls definitely have better handwriting IME, and men and women differ stylistically too. When marking exams I can almost always correctly identify students as being male or female (or having learned to write in Chinese or Arabic, which each leave distinctive characteristics) before I see the name on the cover when I'm done.
Chinese has particular stroke orders that often carry over into English (e.g. cross the t before drawing the vertical) which leads to all kinds of differences when writing quickly, as the lines from the pen not leaving the paper are in different places. There are often also quite distinctive curving diagonal lines.
Arabic, being written right to left, requires quite a different hand position, which leads to very vertical strokes (not slanted to the right).
Some other distinctive features I've noticed are that beautiful cursive is likely to be someone Indian, and very small, fine, and vertical, likely Indonesian. I'm sure handwriting experts can tell a lot more than me.
