f13.net

My handwriting SUCKS.  Worse than a doctors could ever be.  And strangely, it didn't always be that way.  In the last couple of years, my handwriting has gone from pretty good to flat out awful.  Maybe a side effect of typing EVERYTHING?

Anyone else's handwriting completely piss poor?
Any sort of exercises or such to improve it?

Who writes by hand anymore?  :-P


Also, my handwriting has also been shit since...forever. And I don't really care.

My handwriting has always been nearly illegible, and I don't think an undeveloped skill can atrophy.

The only way to improve it will be a conscious effort to make it look nicer and continual use to keep in the habit of writing that way.

Someday you'll get older and have this thing called a "job" where you go to "meetings" and have to take notes.  Unless your company is very special or in the tech sector you'll have to do this on paper, because plebians don't get laptops.

Hell, Corporate Managers don't get laptops sometimes.

That said, no my handwriting is just fine.  My cursive has always sucked-ass, so I print; which dovetailed nicely with having to do so when Hand-drawing was still a reality in my little sector of the professional sphere.

 One of the things I still do when I get bored is an old drafting exercise.  I learned it from classmates who worked for a company that was still drafting in the early 90s and it was the first thing you did every day - to loosen the hand muscles.  You take a piece of paper and fill it across on each line "A" through "0".  Keeps my penmanship fairly nice.

I've TRIED to write better, I really have.  It continually looks like ASS.

I guess I just don't write enough, outside of signing my name.

I write like a doctor.

What's your point? I've taken notes before. Seeing as I'm usually the only person reading my own notes, I don't see a problem.

If I am in a hurry my writing is very sloppy, like when taking notes.  Otherwise I grew up in the same time frame as Merusk and started drafting plans by hand, which required good penmanship or a Leroy template to trace.  :P

Read again.  Your statement wasn't that your handwriting isn't of a concern to anyone else, but that nobody writes by hand.   :roll: :-P :-D

I used to get Ds in handwriting when they still actually gave grades for it. My 9 year old nephew's handwriting looks better than mine.

I wonder if Nebu writes like a doctor.

My handwriting is quite good.  If it's not legible, there's no point in writing anything.  My signature... that's a totally different issue.

Mine looks like a 3rd grader's.

I print.

Me too.


Pfft, what did you think I stuck the smiley in for?  :-P

For reference, I was never one of the Kool Kids who brought a laptop to class for notes; I used my chicken scratch all through college. Lucky for me, my professors didn't seem to have too much trouble deciphering it when we had to write essays for in-class exams. Or they just gave me good grades based on length, without being able to read what I wrote.

I've done nothing but print for at least the last 15 years. I don't think I could hand-write if I tried.

Let's be honest, cursive is for signing your name, wankers, and southern etiquette "instructors."

I have lovely handwriting due to my many, many years of copying out of books during detention.  While attending university I learned the awesome talent of being able to fall asleep anywhere.  My years in the workforce taught me how to look as if I were busy while getting absolutely nothing accomplished at all.  Wherever I go, whatever I do, I learn.

I can't decipher my own handwriting if I lose the context (finding the piece of paper again after a few months).

Hell, if I wasn't in the IT business I would be in trouble by now. I take notes with my company Palm.

I found a way to improve my writing. I learned how to type 80 words per minute. Kinda funny I have gone to a number of handwriting classes in a vain attempt to improve my poor handwriting and after every one my handwriting gets harder and harder to read so I just said fuckit and I type just about everything now.

Other than signing checks and what not I really have no call to hand write anything anymore anyway.


kaid

I print as well. Poorly. Very poorly.

I can read my own scrawl, fortunately, but it looks like moon runes to most anyone else.

I could not write in cursive if you head a gun to my head.  I just tried.  I was one weird looking illegible line. 

My signature is now just a bunch of squiggles after having to sign my name over 500 times in the same day.

My handwriting can be generously described as MONKEY SCRAWL. If it was done in feces, it'd be chimp perfect. It always has been that way, cursive worse than normal writing, but it has grown steadily worse with disuse.

My cursive is too slow to even bother with. I never liked cursive anyway.

I take back my comments on using print.

My handwriting is very much the bastard child of poorly taught print and cursive. I run some letters together. I mix some really fucked up cursive letters in there. Like F's and J's. ESPECIALLY the upper case varieties. But for the life of me, I can't even remember how to make a cursive Q. Honestly, some would call handwriting a lost art. I call it a blight on man. Fuck pencils and fuck paper.

I've been using cursive since the start of highschool when a teacher told me I *must* or I'd never get anything written down in time. So I learned to write fast and wait for all the slow people to finish and got into trouble for talking in class due to boredom. Also really small, which makes it harder to read for people not used to it than the quality of the writing normally would. :P I still do a lot of cursive because anything I spec out I have to do on paper because then I can circle things, draw arrows, underline, and whatever else I want nice and easily. And mentally I can be sitting at a computer not knowing wtf to do and then it all just flows out when I grab the pad. Sometimes when doing that and I know I wont keep it the words lose all meaning because I'm writing faster than my pen can actually go up and down to make silly things like letters that are smaller than "t", but usually it's good.

As long as you don't mix case when writing, you are not as bad as my dad.  I write everything in uppercase and type everything in lowercase, unless I am writing something that I will later type, in which case I write in lowercase.  It's like having 52 letters instead of 26.

I mix case, but not really. Some letters, I simply don't use the lowercase version of. A, E, I, Q, and G come to mind.

I used to have great penmanship, but I don't really bother much these days. I'm pretty legible if someone else needs to read it, or if it's stuff for work. For notes and personal writing, I have a pretty wild lazy style loosely based on some occult writer I tried to emulate as an angsty teen. I almost exclusively print. I used to draw comics when I was younger (an art major), so my printing got really good during that period.

edit: Lesser Key of Solomon

I print faster than I write (we call it writing up here, none o' that "cursive" crap). I still actually print fairly fast and neatly. Lots of note scribbling while taking calls at work, combined with a couple years of drafting (pre CAD) in highschool.

How can you identify people who took drafting? We print our eights like snowmen, not figure eights. Never figure eights!

Ah yes, that explains why my wife's eights are disembodied.

I don't understand how some people can have perfect handwriting all the time. Mine fluctuates, sometimes even between sentences. Amazing, bad, good, okay, bad, and so forth on the same paragraph. heh.

I've developed the opinion that perfect handwriting all the time comes form a severe case of anal retention.  Nothing I've seen has countered this opinion yet.


I had a similar problem, until I said, "Fuck it.  It's print, it's legible and it doesn't need to look like fucking san-serif Times."  My writing is decidedly stylistic, but it's still print.. just takes a while to disconnect that "it must look exactly like THIS" part of the brain.


Damit Schild.. I just tried writing a cursive "Q."  I can't remember how the fuck you do it either, or a "G" for that matter.

I stopped writing in print about age 9 or so, I got that same "you'll never be able to write fast enough otherwise". Plus it's apparently how grown ups write! My writing is... legibile. Not sure how else to describe it, it's not neat and it's not got any nice stylistic qualities but I can write fairly quickly and people other than me can read it. As for cases, I capitalise properly. Call it anal but I have to write properly and use correct grammar, with the result that some of my lecture notes have crossing outs and scribble where I've mispely something or used incorrect punctuation/grammar.

Thinking through that last bit again made me a bit sad. I think it's a bit too anal  :cry:

I can still write in cursive,  though I print  mostly.  My hand writing is atrocious.

I'm a righty,  but I grip the pencil like I'm a lefty.  Which means my right hand curls all the way around it and I look like I'm writing backwards.  Not too mention this drags my hand through the lines I wrote a couple lines above,  leading to nice ink or pencil dust staining.

For years in elementary school they kept putting those triangular block things on my pencils to get me to use a proper grip.  Screw that.

At the office,  all the old folks use dictaphone machines and get the secretaries to type up their letters.  Most of the young folks find it quicker just to sit down and type it up,  then let the secretaries know where the file is stored to take care of formatting.

Don't feel bad, I do that too. I just know that if I go back and read it the mistake will jar in my mind so might as well fix it now so it all flows later.

Whenever I end up handwriting something, I'm always amazed when I make a perfect 'f' or 'o' or something. At one point in my life, my signature looked like a rabbit. It was uncanny.

My handwriting's awesome :-D but I print rather than use cursive. I perfected my cursive in 6th grade but it was very stylized (nice and spiky, sort of like my hair) so it was tough for my teacher to read (or more so than your standard "rounded" cursive). So I switched over to printing in Jr. High and kept practicing and evolving it through college. Like some of the other people here I've lost most of my cursive writing abilities since I never use it except for my signature and I never write that the same way twice and I'm constantly leaving out letters and stuff. At the rate it's degrading in another decade or so it's going to look something like this:

|____| |___

Of course back in my youth, we actually did lots of handwriting since computer printers were not ubiquitous like they are for kids today. I remember when my best friend's mom got one of the first HP laser printers when we were in High School -- it was like "oooh, aaahhh" compared to the dot matrix (or FSM-forbid thermal) printers we were used to (and those of us who even had access to some sort of computer printer were the exception), though of course it could only print in Courier (extra fonts required expensive font cartridges) and the quality wasn't as good as an IBM Selectric.

It helped a lot that there were a group of us in elementary school that used to "compete" to see who had the best handwriting though we didn't have formal grades or anything like that. In Jr. High a friend and I used to compete to see who could legibly print the most number of lines in between the lines of college ruled paper. We even had 0.3mm mechanical pencils just for that task (I used 0.5mm normally). Yes we were that nerdy even back then.

As Lantyssa said if you want it to look better you have to practice at it. It's like the exercises you may have done in early elementary school where they made you trace letters over and over to learn how to write. One thing you can try is to learn some simple italic calligraphy. It won't necessarily directly make your handwriting better since many of the strokes are different but it will force you to think about the mechanics of drawing letters in a way that's not as boring as printing letters over and over again.

You know, they say this.  But I've just practiced and practiced and write print quite fast.  I can keep notes up in the meetings I get to sit in all day long.  I personally write like mad because my professors said that was the way it was done in the engineering world as proof that you came up with an intellectually copyrightable idea when you say you did: write it down and date it in your notebook and keep a system.  I go through one notebook every 4-5 months and have a giant stack at work now.  I write down everything.  Mostly because it keeps me from being bored during the slow parts at work, and it's also great to be able to whip out what someone said and call them onto the table for trying to lie about it.  If I write slowly, it's legible (albeit VERY small) and if I hurry it can cause me problems reading.

One key to being able to take notes in print quickly, even if cursive would be quicker, is to Not take notes in complete, proper English. Hell, sometimes I even toss in symbols and arrows and shit to save time.

Oh well, it worked for me.

My cursive, although ironically more legible than most people I know, always got me yelled at in my school years.  I am a lefty and a minority of left-handers write with the pencil roughly 90 degrees, straight up and down- it looks almost like I just make a fist around a pencil.  Of course, third grade teachers who had taught 40 years would have none of that  :cry:

I write only in all-caps blockprint -- generally single-stroke glyphs when possible.  Pretty hard to read, even for me.  Borrows a bit from the old single-stroke graffiti input method from palmos.  It's a distinctive hard-to-read though and almost every whiteboard in the offices of people on my project at work seem to have some bit of Brian-scrawl, usually alongside some kind of boxes-and-sticks datastructure or software component diagram.

I'm about 50/50 on longhand note taking vs laptop notetaking in meetings.  I lean towards laptop for meetings that I'd rather not be in and will be catching up on email or writing some code during and notepad for the more important stuff.  Unless I know I'm going to be taking *lots* of notes, then laptop it is.

Company SOP requires detailed interview feedback after interviews and to make this work for me I take notes longhand (usually scrawling all over the resume of the person I'm talking to).  Using a laptop for note taking in an interview just seems rude to me.  This does necessitate writing my feedback ASAP afterwards, while I can still figure out what the hell my scribblings mean.

- Q

I really, really want to develop this habit.  A coworker of mine is totally anal about writing down *everything* (and as a result of doing this religiously, forever, has pretty insanely tidy handwriting).  I've in the past stopped by and asked him "hey, Dave, why did we do X for Y" and see him find the notebook from when we were working on that issue, flip through it and find his notes on it, and be able to tell me *exactly* why a decision was made. 

It's a remarkably useful habit in general, and yes, invaluable for patentable stuff -- I'm pretty opposed to software patents in general, but the reality of the industry is that you end up having to patent stuff, if only for defensive reasons.

- Q

Signatures are another thing entirely, imo. I have a 'doctor's signature', apparently. I developed it when I was an art major, I stole Jeff Dee's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Dee) 'D' and went with some scrawl from there. It's kinda funny, and very wild. I'm always marking up counters when I sign receipts.

On journaling. I tried it during a creative writing fling. Decided I didn't like having such incriminating stuff around and burned it. I used to live a very odd lifestyle. I'm much more boring now.

A big heaping "Who Cares" from me about handwriting. The only time you ever use it is on applications, to-do lists, and random notes during meetings. Only one of those things has to be understood by other people. Personally I look forward to the day when voice recognition software becomes so mainstream that typing will become a lost art.

Here for everyone that forgot!

(http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/tcguidel.gif)

Hmm... well, I suppose I'll pick wanker as my category for now, but if I move to Austin in the next year or so, I'm switching to etiquette instructor. ;)

Need the caps version too.

Seriously, caps is where it gets all zany.

(http://www.handwritingforkids.com/handwrite/tcguideu.gif)

There ya go.

It's a miracle I ever made it through the 4th grade!

THE GODDAMN 'Q' STILL LOOKS LIKE A MOTHERFUCKING '2.' AND THAT UPPER CASE 'G' IS BULLSHIT. BULL. SHIT.

General Mills disagrees with you.

Q as a letter in and of itself is retarded. Fuck you, Q, you don't need your co-dependent spouse U everywhere you go. Let U have a U's night out or something, you're smothering U.

Nyquil, Nyquil, Nyquil, we love you, you GIANT FUCKING Q.

The label should just say, "Don't make any fucking plans."

"Capital N, little y, big fucking Q!"

Dennis Leary says some funny shit.

"Are you drunk?"

"No, I have a cold."



"I'm high as a kite and my teeth are green, Merry Fucking Christmas!"

I wonder if I'm the only one that printed those out and actually tried tracing them....

I would recommend working on your printing rather than your cursive.

My handwriting used to be abyssmal, but I found that when I switched to printing as my main form of writing it is at least legible.

But that really comes from having to take 3 semesters of drafting classes in college (the old way).

And I guarantee you all, after reading 8000+ responses to 8th grade tests last month, handwriting has gotten no better. Girls still use the big loopy letters with circles or hearts to dot their i's and boys tend to make reading heirglyphics seem like see spot run.

...that tracing guide is horrendous, if everyone writes like that I probably can't differentiate quite a lot of letters.  :-o