I’ve sometimes pondered why my signature looks an awful lot my dad’s, and generally conclude that it’s probably because i watched him write it a million times, and was very familiar with his handwriting, and he probably (partly) taught me to write anyway.

But yesterday MrsDoris discovered that her signature is almost exactly like her grandfather’s. Who she never met. And her father never met him either (died before the birth). And her father’s brother never really met him (WWII). And her father’s mother couldn’t really write at all. But it’s almost exactly the same!

Is there something innate about handwriting?

My handwriting is nothing like my Dad’s… but in my 30s I saw my granddad’s signature in his WW2 logbook. Almost identical to mine and he died 12 years before I was born.

My mum wrote my signature out when I was about 5 and I used the same style ever since.

I inherited mine from a dyslexic drunken spider.

It is an interesting question…

I recently made a wee storage unit for one of the classrooms from an old piece of laminated board that, going by the band names on it, was from the mid/late eighties. The pupil’s handwriting was very neat, as were the sketches and graffiti.

I suspect we’re all of an age here where we were initially taught to write by our parents, who themselves were taught be theirs, etc. Sadly, and certainly at the school at which I teach, that is predominantly not the case; when I started teaching some 15yrs ago the state of kids handwriting was a huge shock. They certainly don’t seem to focus on it at primary schools, in my experience… and anecdotally I would suggest pupils with better parenting do have better, neater handwriting.

Human physiology is evolving; where we once used hand tools and the pen and pencil we became more adept at typing, and then using a mouse, and now swiping and tapping. The Royal Society of Surgeons has notes a change in dexterity in its students:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-46019429

35 years ago I worked as a designer and illustrator, doing stuff in pencil, ink and pens. I tried to sketch recently, it was just awful and I’ve inherited my grandfather’s shakey hands. These days I do stuff on an iPad with pencil and grateful for the undo 999 times function.

I inherited mine from a dyslexic drunken spider.

My high school English teacher once said of my handwriting, “it looks like a spider crawled through an inkwell, had an epileptic fit and then died.”

Different times.

I used to have quite a pretty signature, but a previous job involved signing off dispatch and delivery notes constantly, so it kinda devolved into an abstract squiggle, lol.

My collegues intitials were both ‘M’, so his signature was litterally just a horizontal zigzag, hahah!

My high school English teacher once said of my handwriting, “it looks like a spider crawled through an inkwell, had an epileptic fit and then died.

I was told to improve or move to the remedial class.
Different times indeed.

My high school English teacher once said of my handwriting, “it looks like a spider crawled through an inkwell, had an epileptic fit and then died.”

Different times.

Yep, the “epileptic fit” part of it would get your teaching license revoked these days.

Not quite the same, but my mother and fathers handwriting and signature were almost identical.
Edit: thinking about it,they were both Welsh, hope they werent related.

Madame has done junior’s admin and forged his signature for so long that she’s better at it than him.

I don’t think banks etc. pay a lot off attention. We recently changed the people who have the right to sign our MTB club cheques. It turned out that the guy who has written/signed many of the cheques in recent years wasn’t on the bank’s records.

My surname’s too long with too many uppy-downy bits to the letters, so I only ever sign the first 4 letters, do a squiggle and dot the imaginary i.

My handwriting on the other hand I’ve recently noticed if I’m trying to be neat so other people can read it is almost exactly like my mums. When I’m in a hurry though it’s an illegible scrawl.

I was taught to write at school using a sort of copperplate style, which did not lend itself to writing quickly or, indeed, neatly! It was only when I started a job as a finished artist, designer and book-designer, that I had to re-think my writing. One of my work colleagues, who was in charge of typesetting, had a really lovely italic style, which I tried to copy. I never managed to write quite as neatly, but my handwriting did improve dramatically, and starting to use a fountain pen helped a lot as well.

My signature changed a lot over the last few years, having to sign on handheld devices and I don’t think I inherited anything in my writing from anyone in my family at all.

“Edit: thinking about it,they were both Welsh, hope they werent related.”
Que? Do you mean that it was more likely because they were Welsh?
In that case, perhaps they were, which would explain their having a son who could make a comment like that…

Im Welsh too you beaut, its a joke.

I don’t think banks etc. pay a lot off attention.

It does feel a bit archaic these days, especially with impossible-to-sign mobile devices as CZ mentions. Half the time the driver forges a signature and makes a run for it anyway.

When I moved house I had constant battles around my solicitor’s obsession with bits of paper. It’s a legal document so I’ve to print out the non-interactive electronic form (assuming you’ve managed not to stuff it in an envelope for once), sign my name on the bottom which bears little resemblance to any other signature you might have on record because I pick up a pen so rarely these days, then scan the entire thing back in? And this is considered more secure than an encrypted electronic signature?

A while back I had a fuel card through work. Processing a payment, they’d ask me to sign the bit of paper spewed out… but the card didn’t have a space for a signature, so there was nothing they could check against. I started signing “D. Duck” or “M. Mouse,” no-one either noticed or cared. In the end I just started writing an “X”. Still no-one cared, they just had to have a signature because that’s what they always did.