Chicken scratch
July 16, 2008 – 6:15 amGreg Marra has been writing letters back and forth to us from California, forcing me to once again use the archaic method of pen and paper for data input. I have been disturbed to see how awful and painful my handwriting is. By painful I mean painful to read, but also painful to write - I’ve turned into a finger-writer with a cramp-inducing scrawl.
Not good.
Therefore, it is practice time. After a 5-minute search sprint, I decided that I probably couldn’t afford a book and should write in the air instead, progressing to printing out free online worksheets for practice once my letters were smaller than a sheet of paper. Oh man, I can work on my climb-and-slide letters! (i, u, w, and t, apparently.)
Then I realized that printing was silly because I have a tablet laptop. Right. So. There are different kinds of handwriting…
Increased legibility was to be had with italic script, but at the cost of being really confused over how to move the pen, and therefore far slower. What if I just changed the muscle groups I was moving?
Legibility not increased at all. Hand still cramps. Arm very confused. I realize I’m going to need to settle on something and then work on the muscle memory so my arm won’t be confused.
Triumph! (Well… improvement.) Now if I had a drafting table available at all times…
Writing in cursive was just a bad idea. The letters join together, but they don’t flow, and some of them just look weird (does anyone understand where the capital cursive letter ‘Q’ comes from? I never got it). What about printing?
Yeah, that didn’t go over so well either. The whole “lift pen after each stroke” deal is woefully inefficient. And my “hybrid” handwriting is just too inconsistent and messy.
Writing more systematically would make things easier. I should come up with a standard Mel-hand.
All right. Now if I practice doing these letters large and with good posture, and the same way each time (note no loop in the “g,” that the “f” is print style instead of cursive, etc.) I can probably get it to be cleaner and clearer (and straighter and more regularly spaced) and write sans cramps. Still slower than I type and slower than I’d like it to be, but legible… not pretty, but legible.
Onwards!
2 Responses to “Chicken scratch”
I miss having a printer all th eitme. I should make a pile of stuff to print at work and take home. I remember when I was little my dad would take home “scrap” paper from work and and I would draw on the back. That’s a total aside.
I hope my response letters are somewhat legible. I think my handwriting is either getting better or worse, depending on if I can keep myself focused enough to print instead of semi-script. They’re about the same speed, but printing requires more thinking.
By Greg Marra on Jul 16, 2008
Your “Standard Mel-Hand” looks pretty good (although I could suggest further improvements/simplifications of shape and joining; feel free to contact me if you’d like to know more).
And, as it happens, your “Standard Mel-Hand” actually comes closer than your first “italic” example to a good modern italic-style handwriting.
I would recommend that you keep and refine your habit of “semi-script” if you mean by this “joining sometimes, rather than all the time.” Research shows that the fastest and clearest handwriters join some, not all, of their letters — making the very easiest joins, and abandoning the rest — in addition to using print-like shapes for letters whose printed and cursive shapes notably “disagree.” Again, if you’d like to know more you can contact me … and/or visit my web-site where (among other resources and matters of interest) you can order “I Hate Cursive” lapel-buttons.
Kate Gladstone –
Founder/CEO, Handwriting That Works at http://www.HandwritingThatWorks.com
Director, the World Handwriting Contest
By Kate Gladstone on Oct 2, 2008