Your handwriting

[Stoneage Dinosaurs]

Had to note something down sans laptop at work today. Fuck me, absolute state the result. Not a single letter that even vaguely resembles what it's supposed to. For some reason I write everything in all caps because my brain tells me it's easier but still join up the letters. Remember being taught how to hold a pen correctly in primary school, don't think I've ever done it that way for longer than a second since then. My teachers used to have a proper go at me for not being able to write legibly, if they could see me now they'd shoot me between the eyes like a fallen horse, and I'd thank them for it.

I suppose the flipside of this is that I'm far from the only one like this given how computers and screens have taken over every facet of life. So is this simply a skill that, regardless of what my generation were taught, is destined for the scrapheap? Even when the inevitable catastrophic collapse of society and technology comes, I'd imagine we're just going to go back to cave paintings and smoke signals, and I won't have to worry about not being able to do the number 9 the right way round for a couple of hundred years. Or maybe you're all a bunch of caligraphic gods and goddesses, and I'm the weird pen-abusing fuckhead. I don't know. POST

[Sebastian Cobb]

Put it this way, I fold my shopping lists in half when I'm not reading them.

[Butchers Blind]

Got handwriting that would make a GP laugh.

[dontpaintyourteeth]

Got a load of shit for my handwriting in my school days. Left-handed, though they tried to convince me I wasn't for a while.

[Endicott]

My handwriting was shit before computers, and it's still shit now. I know for sure because I still write notes every day that I can barely read back after.

[bgmnts]

Relatively shit but got better as I journalled more.

Definitely depends on the type of pen I'm using. A shitty biro would make the most delicate calligrapher look like a seven year old.

Regardless of technology, I enjoy the act of handwriting and it has something typing doesn't.

[shiftwork2]

It's now illegible.  But it no longer matters.

I won't miss pens.  You either need one and you can't find one or you have one just sitting around on the dining table and you're not sure where to put it so it just sits there for months.  Then there's the affected use of fountain pens and the gibbons who try to impress us with that arseholery (my former boss).

All serious writing has been done using a keyboard since the typewriter was invented.  Fuck handwriting.

[Shaxberd]

My primary school went to great lengths to teach everyone proper joined up handwriting. You had to prove a certain level of skill to get your "fountain pen license" in year 3 and move on from pencil. There were weekly dictation lessons where we would practice writing down a passage the teacher read out to us.

Absolute bloody waste of time as my secondary school didn't care and by my mid-teens my handwriting had become an illegible chicken-scratch (mostly due to frustration that I can't write as fast as I can type).

I taught myself how to touch type just through constant exposure, and that's been vastly more useful. I could probably do a reasonably good job of typing while blindfolded, I can't draw you an accurate keyboard layout but my muscle memory knows exactly where everything is.

[canadagoose]

My handwriting went from "quite neat" aged 11, to "a bit of a mess" aged 13, and then to "quite neat" again aged 15 (after a lot of effort)... and it's just devolved into an utter mess from there. It doesn't help that it hurts to write now. I like writing postcards but I'm not convinced anyone can read what I write on them. They seem to get to where I send them to, mind.

[seepage]

I really like my handwriting but looking at it dispassionately now the lower case 'r' is starting to look like a 'v' so need to pull my socks up. I can't get out of the habit of making hand written notes in a jotter instead of using Notepad. Luckily there's a Factory Shop nearby that sells jotters for about 10p a pop. 

[seepage]

There were two extreme cases at uni: a person who could that writing that looks the same upside down and in a mirror, and someone who wrote lecture notes in perfect Times New Roman

[Sebastian Cobb]

When I write notes I end up only writing odd phrases and have arrows between key points, circling important words etc. It ends up looking like the stuff John Nash sees when he's going mad.

But the fact it's pretty much impossible to do all that on a computer without losing your train of thought is precisely why I hate them for note taking and knocking up quick flow-charts or diagrams. Much better to make a mess that makes sense on paper then put it in the machine. You can even use markdown now and let the computer arrange it all for you.

As a side note something I hate about my current job is everyone's seemingly settled on these horrid horizontal uml sequence diagrams rather than simple state machines to explain flow between components. One of several things that makes me think people are more interested in cargo culting the enterprise than doing things that are simple and efficient.

[Norton Canes]

Never got the hang of joined-up writing at school so my handwriting evolved some weird characters in an attempt to compensate - b's with a backless bulge and d's that look like a 6 flipped horizontally. Then there was a phase of trying to emulate the Dalek's typeface - E's like lightning bolts and A's like pentagrams with a line missing. Then I read Watchmen, and started writing everything like Rorschach, in upper case with lower case vowels.

Total fuck-up, basically. Desperate attention seeking in lieu of actual skill, sums me up really. 

[touchingcloth]

Mine was shit, then computers made it worse, then MS made it even worse. I feel sorry for those of you who don't have a medical excuse.

[lauraxsynthesis]

When I started the new school year age 12 at a new school, I noticed that every other girl had this new handwriting that was very round and charming. I couldn't copy it to save my life and to this day I wonder what Children of the Damned stuff I missed out on.

These days I'm jealous that my colleagues can make beautiful Miro boards.

[Buelligan]

My best friend at school was German.  His handwriting style was unmistakeable.  Then I went on a school exchange to Germany and noticed all the kids wrote like my friend.  Now in France, everyone in my village writes like the writing in an old Babar book, it's the same when you go to the market, writing in the style of Babar.  That is my racial theory of handwriting. 

My own handwriting is like a Japanese or maybe Chinese person was forced to abandon kanji and pretend to write western letters.  But I can touch type and fast, QWERTY or AZERTY.

[flotemysost]

Having had to sign a proliferation of leaving/birthday/baby etc. cards at work recently has made me realise how dire my lower-case handwriting is. At school I could never be arsed to learn joined-up writing and tried to cut corners by drawing on the little "tails" afterwards, thought I was so fucking smart, but obviously they saw through my ruse.

I actually quite like my "all caps" handwriting though. At some point I must have adopted some sort of Continental affectation because everything's all rounded, like the "A"s and "E"s don't have any sharp angles and the "Y"s are like little levitating "U"s with a straight-down tail, and the "L"s have a little undulating shimmy in the horizontal line, pretentious prick that I am.

Oh and *obviously* I can fashion one of these like a god damn medieval scribe:

[touchingcloth]

Oh and *obviously* I can fashion one of these like a god damn medieval scribe:

Obviously. That's a Nazi symbol, you know?

[Alberon]

My handwriting was so shit I got special lessons for it in Primary School. They didn't even care about crap like fountain pens they were just trying to get me write slightly better than if someone was having a stroke while in a bus with no suspension going down a steep rocky track.

Had no effect and since then I've had to write in capitals if I want a chance of being able to read it let alone anyone else.

Thank fuck for computers and the keyboard. Christ alone knows what I'd have done if I was born twenty years earlier.

[Vitamin C]

I was thinking the other day that a top business idea would be a dating site, but if you liked someone you could only contact them through handwritten letters. You'd have to put a lot of effort in and it would really sort the wheat from the chaff.

But everyone's demented handwriting would make it difficult, you would have to give your address to a load of strangers, and there would definitely be murders along the way. Might be worth it though?

[Zetetic]

Got called ambisinister when I was 7. Apparently had learnt to copy letter shapes very early and that screwed over my ability (or willingness) to learn actual handwriting.

My zoomer too-online ex's handwriting was terrifyingly similar to mine. Assume he'd always been using computers for almost all of his life, even more than me.

Tried to learn Sutterlin for a bit to see if a new style would help, without much success. I do think my hands, whilst looking pretty stylishly delicate and precise, are actually pretty crap for anything fiddly.

[Zero Gravitas]

My handwriting is remarkably beautiful, palmer style script, wasn't always as nice, took about a month of practice in 2013.

[Captain Z]

It's not bad, distinctly average, but I often miss letters out of words as I'm writing them. Like, I know how the word is spelt, and I realise instantly, but my hand just decides to skip ahead.

[Buelligan]

My handwriting was so shit I got special lessons for it in Primary School.

Yes.  Forgot this, I was taken aside and tested because my writing went
^{tiny.  I wanted to disappear.  That's what that was about.}

[touchingcloth]

Portuguese people have beautiful handwriting. Wonder if it's due to them having no typewriters or computers under Salazar.

[Clatty McCutcheon]

When I started the new school year age 12 at a new school, I noticed that every other girl had this new handwriting that was very round and charming.

Did they put lovehearts for the dots on top of the i's? That's the kind of shit the girls at school absolutely loved doing when I was that age.

Funny this topic should come up as I was thinking about what handwriting says about a person the other day when I got a wedding invite from a friend and realised I'd never seen their handwriting before. The old cliche is that forward-sloping handwriting suggests an optimistic go-getter and backward-sloping letters a more melancholic type, I think.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

handwriting went to shit in university and never really recovered (early 2000s, days before tablets/laptops for note-taking). If I want it to be legible to other people I have to take my time and print.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I do this weird lowercase f when I'm doing joined up writing, only because the teacher in third year at primary school taught us that was the correct way to do it. I wonder if any of my classmates still write it like that. It looks a bit like an S, except the "tail" of the S hangs below the writing line, and there's a line across the centre. Fuck it, have a picture:

[touchingcloth]

Nice swastika.

[Brian Freeze]

This has never been worthy of its own thread but how many pen strokes do you use to write the number five? One? Two? Three?

I'm a twoer and wonder whether it might be unusual or not?

My handwriting is fine, used to like mixtapes to look cool but it's now used for timesheets and shopping lists mainly.