[Closed] Handwriting - Illegible

My normal handwriting is awful. It hasn't deteriorated, it's always been that way. If I take my time, it's just about legible, if I write quickly even I can barely read it! I dont recall much time at school (in the 60s and 70s) "practising" handwriting. Once we'd got the basics, that was it.

I did take up calligraphy for a while though and got quite good at it. Much to my surprise and annoyance however, there was no crossover from the very deliberate methodical process used and my handwriting which remained consistently shit 😥

Mine goes up and down, dependent upon what I use to write with. Sometimes I shake my head at my own writing.
Strangely other people seem to think it's stylish... This may have had something to do with having spent about 20 years writing notes on architectural drawings using Staedtler drawing pens.

This is why god created keyboards.

My handwriting is atrocious, always has been but it's got a lot worse presumably due to a lack of use as suggested and having less steady hands as I've got older. Being left-handed doesn't help, I toyed with learning mirror-writing at one point.

I started a degree 2 years ago at the ripe old age of 43, my handwriting had became a god awful scrawl, however even after a full semester, it's not long in getting back to it's worst. I take from this that you need to keep doing it, or at least I do.

Honestly, I can write a shopping list one day, then not have a clue what some of the items on there are the very next day. 🙂

I suppose it depends how much you write.

My handwriting is tragically immaculate. As a designer who's obsessed with typography, I find this subconsciously extends to my handwriting, so it has to be far more Helvetica than Comic sans. Leading and kerning must be perfect.

My dad was a draughtsman all his life and his handwriting is beautiful.

My mum was a nurse and in line with everybody else in the medical profession, her handwriting is absolutely impossible to decipher. It's almost like it's in an unintelligible language designed by aliens

It depends what pens you use too. Biro's are the work of satan. Hateful things. I only ever write with a 0.3mm Rotring drawing pen. I pretty much always have one on me. #pickybastard

Mine is terrible, truly awful, and the less I write, the worse it gets.
Tried to wrote some notes for a meeting yesterday and had to do them twice so I would actually read them. Horrible.

A little story demonstrates the state of my handwriting. Once, on my sister's birthday, whilst they were getting ready to go out, her friend was looking through the birthday cards that my sister had put up on her mantlepiece.

"Who's this one from?", said the friend

"My little brother", said my sister

"Aw, how old is he", cooed the friend

"24", said my sister.

That was twenty years ago, and it's probably got worse since then.

was actually embarrassed when I wrote my Dads Fathers Day card.

Hahah, same!!!

I use an app for handwriting

Mine goes up and down...

Chinese ?

This is the main reason I decided to go into IT. But yes my handwriting has deteriorated significantly since I finished school. I still remember having to hand write my answers on several multi hour tests when doing my IT degree Had awful cramp after that.

For work now I use Evernote to record all my notes in meetings and then drop actions onto a Trello board. Only time I write is when facilitating meetings and writing on flip charts etc. But then I just use capitals.

Only time I write is when facilitating meetings and writing on flip charts etc. But then I just use capitals.

I started doing that.

Now my printing has become almost as bad as my cursive.

I once got the school report that my handwriting was sufficiently bad that they'd considered giving me a GCSE in hieroglyphics...

I have awful handwriting. Imagine being left handed but, because you were taking your time discovering this, your parents decided you should be right handed, so that’s what school forced you to do...

My handwriting is even worse in my left hand now.

Mine has become increasingly illegible over the years. I can't write "joined up" anymore, it's like my hand just can't go fast enough to keep up with my brain.

Moved onto block capitals for most things years ago, that's become worse and barely legible now as well.

My handwriting has always been pretty bad but i place the blame on breaking both my wrists in a moto-x accident when i was 9, whether or not that actually made a difference is a moot point but it seems convenient to assign blame on something else rather than my lackadaisical attitude to school

It's to do with the muscles of the hand. I so seldom hand-write nowadays that my writing has gone really wobbly as I can't form nice shapes any more.

The busted collar bone and frozen shoulder didn't help as I almost lost the use of my right arm.

Mostly my handwriting is pretty poor but I compensate by making sure I dot the i’s with love hearts 💕

Wait hold up.

I love my dad very much but he's still only getting a typed text message.

The Oatmeal sums up mine better than I can

https://theoatmeal.com/blog/handwriting

I once got the school report that my handwriting was sufficiently bad that they’d considered giving me a GCSE in hieroglyphics…

😂 there was a time when school reports were often amusing, I cannot see many teachers writing that nowadays.

Mine has to be decent as I would get a lot of rejected documents at work.
Plus it looks bad if I am picking other people up for illegiblity.

was actually embarrassed when I wrote my Dads Fathers Day card.

there’s merit in buying more than one card for occasions and allowing yourself a few practice runs 🙂

one of my strategies of my rubbish handwriting is I now use pencil for everything - some writing implements are worse than others and it’s find a lot of pens amplify my crap writing but fine propelling pencils (with a handy eraser attached) are a bit better.

cant really use them on greetings cards, envelopes or cheques though- I waste quite a lot of all of those in the attempt to create something passable.

Mine's a disaster. I tend to blame the fact that I broke my writing hand a few years back and it healed a bit squinty, but tbh that's rubbish, it was just as bad before.

So at work, if I need anyone else to read my writing, I print everything, often in sharpie. This is hilarious, apparently, so I keep doing it to cheer people up

After I left school my handwriting was crap. In junior school I was taught a sort of copperplate cursive, which is fine, except when you need to write quickly, at which point your job options are generally to train as a doctor...*
My second job was as a graphic designer/paste-up and finished artist, and one of my work colleagues had beautiful hand writing, so I forced myself to write neatly and legibly, at least in caps, so developed a sort of caps/lower-case handwriting, not joined up.
‘Cos I was in that line of work for nearly forty years, my writing has stayed reasonable, and now I’ve got one of those neat little fountain pens, I can almost manage a sort of cursive style, which is readable.
I have seen some beautiful handwriting that was so stylised it was almost illegible!
* Not quite as bad as this, though...

😂 there was a time when school reports were often amusing, I cannot see many teachers writing that nowadays.

One of my English teachers once wrote that my handwriting "looks like a spider crawled through an inkwell, had an epileptic fit and then died." Different times.

Mine varies between looking terrible, and illegible, to looking neat and tidy, but still illegible. When I take time, and remember that I'm filling in a log book at work, that might end up in court, it comes out looking both neat and understandable.

Mine is awful when writing with pen on paper but gets a lot better when using a marker pen and a flipboard. Guess I just need to write on very large sheets of paper with 30mm high letters.