The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
joshldavis.com
joshldavis.com
Back in the Palm days my Graffiti handwriting was (perforce!) pretty clear, but it wasn't that great to use.
> The final was an oral final and after going through a few questions to his satisfaction he said “You seem competent, but your handwriting is horrible…” The remaining 30 mins of my final exam by Dijkstra was me writing phrases repeatedly on a pad of paper while he said, ‘no, you need to round the o’s a bit more, the A is misformed, etc…’.
> It was surreal. I’m sad he died.
After a chance meeting with a physiotherapist, I finally got diagnosed with dyspraxia ("clumsy child syndrome" for us old people) at the age of 16, and managed to get a few grudging apologies from the sarcastic teachers who made my life miserable for so long.
I admire Dijkstra's work, but I do think he'd probably hate me. I spent every morning break for years at primary school doing handwriting exercises like in the article, while the other kids played outside. I never got any better.
Funnily enough since leaving school it hasn't mattered one bit.
It was a nightmare for people, like me, who genuinely had this syndrome. Every teacher was sure that everyone was faking it and that they were lazy.
I would seriously trade all that extra time for at least readable handwriting. I, like you, spent plenty of my time practicing - in my case by transcribing books.
Heck, i had once to retake an exam at university - it consisted of me basically slowly taking my original one and writing it cleanly.
And then I found that the handwriting by Chinese people is awesome. They're very stylish and it appears that they still treat kanji writing much like calligraphy in China, while in Japan we mostly treat them as blocks. I wonder what secret they teach to kids in their schools.
One hassle that Western left-handed writers have to deal with is avoiding smudging their just-written characters as their hands advance to the right. As traditional Japanese is written top-down and right-left, I would have thought lefties were at an advantage in that regard.
So I figured it was being left-handed that's the problem. Now my 10 year old, right-handed son's handwriting seems stuck at an even uglier stage than where my sister's or my own handwriting is.
Here are a couple of samples from my practice (of 3 weeks) :-)
https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/Copperplate_practice_1.jpg
https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/Copperplate_practice_2.jpg
What inspired me was this book called Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts[1], which has samples of great calligraphy from centuries old manuscripts, among many other interesting things. (Previously mentioned it on HN here[2].)
And I am learning Copperplate script itself from a wonderful book, Mastering Copperplate Calligraphy, by Eleanor Winters.
I'm thoroughly enjoying the entire process. Including the experience of using a proper nib, calligraphic ink and the oblique nib holder. The oblique pen holder (can be seen in the first image linked above) is really helpful, as Copperplate script requires letters be at a 55 degree angle; also lets you avoid having your wrist twisted in an awkward way.
[1] https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/213/213069/meetings-with-rem...
In school did you learn writing with pressure-and-release strokes? I'm referring to how hard you press on the nib to control the ink flow, using a dip pen. If so, more power to you :-) (The other day, a colleague from the UK also mentioned that they learnt "calligraphy" in school, not sure what kind it was, though.)
On this being a "basic handwriting", while I'm still a novice in Copperplate, if you squint hard in my example, all the upstrokes are (supposed to be) thin, and the down strokes, thick—they are not uniform, and most calligraphic scripts involve these pressure-and-release strokes. As you would know, it requires a precise control. I'm far from it; it takes a months of dedicated practice to get that smooth flow of ink.
Also, note that with Copperplate, it looks like you wrote a word, or even a letter, in one go, but it's not the case—almost all letters require you to lift your pen several times over the course of a word, let alone a sentence. (E.g. writing the Copperplate lowercase 'k' requires you to lift your pen three times.)
Maybe basic Copperplate practice letter strokes (for lowercase) in the right-most column here gives a better picture of it: https://kashyapc.fedorapeople.org/Copperplate-lowercase-prac...
Yes. That was actually the part on which you got your grades for. Tough days.
> E.g. writing the Copperplate lowercase 'k' requires you to lift your pen three times.
Some letters have variants. There are variants of 'k' I know of with only two or one lifts and at least one that doesn't need a lift at all, albeit not looking as good but still considered Copperplate.
Luca Cardelli (http://lucacardelli.name/indexArtifacts.html).
Being able to write something that is readable for others (do whatever you want when writing for yourself) is part of basic skills just like being able to read a text in a reasonable amount of time.
Your teacher was terribly wrong, they should have awarded points for presentation, spelling and grammar (assuming they can evaluate that too; in my country the culture of "good science people can have terrible spelling" is a scourge).
During these exams, candidates typically won't be given enough time. This is by design, and candidates will be ranked by how far they got in addition to correctness.
Also, in order to promote fairness, grading is standardized. And teachers will tell you the corners you can cut and the ones you can't.
I'm very grateful now for the ability to take notes quickly in meetings where things go really fast and I don't have a chance to ask people to repeat what they said. But of course if I'm sending those notes out later, I'll take the time to format them properly.
Well, you are talking about judging a book by its cover? That's what you have done right there!
I highly recommend a smaller point if you're doing math with exponents on exponents.
I do most of my writing giving maths lectures and preparing for them, and I do all my writing digitally (mostly on a Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2, under a document camera in lectures), so I have a record of the improvement in my writing (e.g. the same lecture examples 6-7 times, spaced a few months apart each). I use the two previous semesters/years' versions in preparation, and the improvement is clear and steady. I started with fairly thin lines, comparable to a thick ballpoint, and have ended up settling on fairly thick felt-tipped pen width, like a Sharpie.
When I'm writing for myself I tend to use a thinner pen (and write smaller and more compressed together).
With computer keyboards and touchscreen smartphones used for the majority of written communication, I wonder if penmanship is worse now than at any time in human history. If cursive is still taught, it's probably not for much longer.
During the SATs, we had to write in cursive some statement that we did not receive outside help. Everyone joked afterwards about how tedious it was and how we overflowed the space in which to write because we weren't practiced at making tight loops.
As another datapoint, I write a few times per year. I'm not sure if my handwriting got worse (it has always been on the lower end of legible), but I do forget how to write letters. I have to consciously think how an M or a K goes, or how a U fits onto a W. It has also always been slow, nearly slow enough to cause real trouble in exams. On the other hand (pun not intended), typing is something I do faster than anyone else I know in real life, so it's not that me or my hands are slow in general.
Mass literacy is a fairly recent norm, especially outside the West. Only really took off with the norm of mass schooling.
Do it enough and you reprogram the nervous system.
A similar change happened in college and graduate school: my science education (see username) required distinguishing a lot of characters most people don't need to distinguish often, like 'ω' and 'w' and 'v', or 'x' and 'X' and 'χ', and between '2' and five different forms of 'z'/'Z' (that one happened during statistical mechanics class...). With just a little bit of conscious effort, I could permanently change how I wrote letters. I didn't even need to explicitly practice: the natural use during note-taking and homework assignments form was plenty sufficient, at least for me.
Your nervous system really can reprogram itself!
A couple semi-related tips for anyone who wants better handwriting:
1. Just go slower. Your handwriting is probably perfectly legible to others if you allow yourself the time to do so.
2. Realize when it does and doesn't matter. A doctor writing a critical prescription by hand (not that they do that these days) is very different from scribbling on a sheet of scratch paper that you'll throw out as soon as you've figured out what you're doing.
3. Try a fountain pen or felt-tip marker. These require zero pressure to write, just contact. That makes things take a lot less effort, so your muscles can work on shaping the letters instead of pushing a pen. Rollerball pens aren't half bad, but fountain pens are still the gold standard for a reason.
If you don’t want a cursive script then you could also look into the faces found in old Speedball lettering manuals.
/r/fountainpens is a really nice community with lots of guides to troubleshooting pens, as well as recommendations for beginners. If anyone's curious reading this, the Platinum Preppy is a very good, very inexpensive fountain pen that gets recommended a lot.
The first few weeks were horrible though: new style not yet ingrained in the brain, old style already being forgotten.
Now I can't really write cursive even if I want to. My signature, which is in cursive, has morphed to an unintelligible mess over time.
[1] - https://www.nala.ie/sites/default/files/publications/better_...
Teaches you how to print in a simple italic hand, then the same in cursive by connecting the letters you learned when printing.
Avoids curly 2s and Qs, e.g, as unclear.
Interesting bits of writing history.
Entire book written by hand in the subject style.
Surely that should be like most people ?
Certainly varies with people and probably each generation?
wow that's clean AF. Respect
Give me something more stylish, for sure.
That made my handwriting worse - to the point that a couple of years later, at the same school, other teachers complained and I was sent to a remedial teacher to undo the damage inflicted by the earlier teacher who had wanted 'stylish'.
I remember that at my school copies of notes taken by girls were particularly popular for that reason.
For me it seemed so obvious that I never wondered why it is the case. Or if it really is the case for that matter.
Arabic, being written right to left, requires quite a different hand position, which leads to very vertical strokes (not slanted to the right).
Some other distinctive features I've noticed are that beautiful cursive is likely to be someone Indian, and very small, fine, and vertical, likely Indonesian. I'm sure handwriting experts can tell a lot more than me.