Why My Handwriting Sucks: A Typographical Analysis
medium.com
medium.com
The overwrite with zigzag and trace zigzag approach actually works quite well, even though it seems repetitive at first. But you're learning to change the easy-to-mess-up circular movements that most handwriting uses into oval movements, which can be executed more quickly despite looking more consistently nice.
Something else helpful for me was getting an inexpensive Pilot Metropolitan fountain pen. With this pen I don't need to exert any pressure at all; the use of pressure is something that messes up your handwriting, and of course also leads to hand cramps.
When you first begin to correct your handwriting, you will need to write more slowly. But as your proficiency increases, so will your speed.
I chose architect style handwriting and it looks really cool. I only use it for filling out forms or other similar things where other people really need to see every letter.
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-architects-tend-to-write-in-sim...
I talked about it with my coworker and he told me he changed his style (to something very similar to what you linked to).
Now i write that way and it is much better.
There was no numeral 1, it was unnecessary since people just used the lower case L.
My first variable.
But my font was way out of date even for that distant decade. Looked older than newsprint of the time.
Anyway, when I got to school it was easy to learn printing the blackboard way, and some of us then did cursive writing and were promoted to third grade at the end of the year.
So for the good part of a year I did cursive but before the next September they closed that school.
It was like getting a promotion but the employer still closes beyond your control before you can even get into duty.
Well instead I had to go to a place where they would only put me in second grade since they didn't want me to be so much younger than the other kids. They did not do any writing their first year and were just going to start printing with the big pencils. There would be no cursive allowed until third grade so I went back to a year of printing instead of handwriting. It was easy to see that conformity took precedence over advancement in such an institutional environment. By the time I got to third grade I could already print faster than many adults could do longhand, I was not going back to my slow cursive, and I made it perfectly clear that I was already more advanced when I got there a year earlier. Not an encouraging academic experience, but seemingly common.
It evolved into a form of fast printing eventually toward what looked like shorthand with hieroglyphics, not readable by others at all. I still change fonts all the time.
There are no remaing samples of my actual handwriting.
So that's why my handwriting sucks. It doesn't even exist any more.
However numbers need to be so unmistakeably readable when a lot is at stake, letters too but I start with numbers.
Naturally I used the same character (a straight line) for 1 and lower case L for the longest time, even though I had started with serifs on upper case i and thoroughly dotting my lower case i's to avoid confusion. Eventually all lower case L needs a little tail. Turns out to be the lower case L is the one I could actually do without. Gotta have numbers.
Basically, I encourage conscious calligraphy or "lettering" (drafting room or comic book style) in notebooks and documents. In an international laboratory you really don't want a trailing numeral 9 being confused for a lower case G meaning grams. With cultures that cross their 7, consistency is important since often there is also an upstroke on the 1 which can throw those off who are unfamiliar. Shortening the upstroke can be a good move but you want data recording to come naturally and not require conformity for its own sake. I use an uncrossed 7 with a bold serif but not wild enough to ever be confused with a 9 myself. 4 must never be confused with A or 9, nor 8 with B, or 5 with S. Zeros are good crossed when it might be helpful. Stuff like that. It must make sense.
I never want to make people feel like bureaucracy is more important than the characters they are working with. Not a good feeling at all.
If your handwriting sucks because it's difficult for others to read or decipher, then in that case consider it a special occasion and use calligraphy.
Do you know if that font is anywhere on-line? The author suggests not focusing on the letters at first, so I was thinking: what if we make a scrambled character generator that creates work-sheets with non-words to trace? This might help with the unlearning process.
I totally agree with writing slow. My handwriting is much worse than it shows on the post. I had to write slow to actually make it legible.
This guy's typing sucks too.
This honestly sounds like a humblebrag to me.
Typing on a keyboard is not a drop-in replacement for the act of writing by hand. It has very different effects on the brain and how it engages with what is being written.
If I'm working out difficult problems, in the early stages I much prefer a combination of doodling and handwriting over typing stuff on the computer. It actively engages the mind in a way the keyboard does not. Typing really only works best when the problem solution is already present semi-finished thoughts in my head and just needs to be fixated in external symbols, with a little bit of restructuring along the way.
Basically: I prefer handwriting for thinking, and typing for transcription.
I used to keep a pad next to my desk to work out difficult programming concepts. I probably used it once a month at most.
I write more now because I try to keep handwritten notes of to-dos, but even then I had to force myself to use a pen, and not one of the million digital note-taking apps.
It's not a question of whether one is better than the other, it's just that keyboards and phones are under the fingers of a large segment of the population for the majority of the day, so people don't even think to use pens.
Sure, but would you call that "doing it as a novelty"? (in bolded italicised text no less- I find that kind of writing style horribly annoying too; as if the author trying to "idiot proof" their writing and/or distract you from other, weaker parts of it, by SHOUTING the bits they want you to focus on)
You are one step ahead of me that you are trying to write using a pen.
I honesty felttired just looking at that text.
As an aside: I love how you're criticizing, but in your post made (at least) one spelling error ("weigths"), missed a space between two words ("felttired"), missed capitalizing the first word of a sentence ("here"), and spelled/spaced two words differently ("allcaps" and "all caps"). (Also I'm not sure if "itrain" is a word; Google didn't help in deciphering that one.) Pot/kettle/black.
If the author displays a weakness in a Typographical practice/understanding, it's difficult to continue believing his "analysis" has real value; it would obviously be limited to at the very least those shown weaknesses, as well as the set of weaknesses we haven't yet seen.
And when the shown fault is at the basics of typographical best practice, then it is likely not worth reading any of the analysis; any statement used is likely a misunderstanding of the real properties of it. And given that this is targeted at people not well-versed in typography, then it is probably a case of a novice teaching a novice, and thus any presented understanding is likely, at best, a poor understanding of the subject, and at worst, incorrect.
When discussing typography, I think its pretty fair to judge the presentation as well as the content, since its a metric of their authority on the subject matter.
Not fair, however, is that the grandparent's subject is typography, and afaik, your criticism is not related to typography. Particularly in that in the article is very distinctly edited to use typographical "features", and fails to use them well (imo), a result of misunderstanding the properties of the features; whereas the grandparent is very distinctly not edited, and clearly a result of typing too fast. The grandparent is not thinking about typography in his presentation; The article is. So the article can be judged (it tried and failed), whereas the grandparent can really only be criticized for a lack of caring in the first place.
One need not even agree with his conclusion/belief that you can make your handwriting better by post-processing it to make it have consistent letter spacing, line heights, etc. I think just the idea of doing those comparisons is interesting, and one is free to draw their own conclusions. Just the idea of making those comparisons made it a worthwhile read to me, because I wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Sure, you can disagree that it was a worthwhile read for you, but that doesn't make it somehow ok to trash the guy's article like the great-grandparent did.
I think what I'm getting at boiled down, is this: be nice. The original author had an idea about something, looked into it, and wrote up some of his findings and opinions. You can disagree with those opinions, or even the methodology around the findings, and it's fine to express that disagreement, but the great-grandparent did so in a fundamentally rude way, which I think is well beneath HN's standards for quality, respectful discourse. It amounted to little more than an ad hominem attack.
I am still a fan of writing. More, drawing some diagrams, which I am terrible at. It really takes an intuitive sense of understanding space as you are drawing. All too often, I have drawn the boxes, without the space for names inside of them. It is frustrating.
And thanks for doing the post. Fun read!
Not great.
That was bugging the heck out of me.
Also, don't let all the very tough feedback on here get you down. Tough crowd on here!