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Comment by audiometry | Hacker News Reader

If he has to write in a hurry, I wonder how much his font reverts to the old habit. This strikes me as something built in quite deep in muscle/nervous system. Unlikely to trivially change it.

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My experience is that a lot of these new habits do stick; I’ve put effort into changing my handwriting, including completely changing a few letters, and when I write quickly they do look sloppier but they’re nicer than when I was a kid who could barely hold a pencil.

Do it enough and you reprogram the nervous system.

You're absolutely correct. I had the opposite problem to the article author: in high school, my handwriting was neater than it needed to be, but too slow. So I made a conscious effort to mimic one of my teachers, whose handwriting had a good balance of legibility and quickness. I noticed that she ligatured a lot -- changing the form of one letter so it would flow smoothly into the next -- and so I tried to do the same. It worked: I was soon able to write quite a lot faster; and it stuck: years later, I still write mostly the same way.

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.

I will just note that fountain pens tend to require thinking about your stroke direction a bit more than other pens; it’s pretty easy to dig into the paper when going upwards. There can also be issues with getting the flow going; most cursive scripts date from a time when fountain pens were pretty much the only option, and are designed around these issues.

If you don’t want a cursive script then you could also look into the faces found in old Speedball lettering manuals.

Flow issues sound like a problem with the pen, and there shouldn't be enough pressure on the nib for it to dig in like that.

/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.

On 3, writing digitally is another way to get zero pressure (can depend on the pen and settings). In my experience, ease of use and control go (best) Wacom tablets > Galaxy Note (also Wacom, better on tablets than phones) > Surface (N-Trig, Surface Pro 3-6, Book) > Apple Pencil (worst).

I have changed my handwriting away from cursive during my mid-teens and I was surprised how easy it actually was. I literally just printed out a bunch of pages from [1], practiced for a few days and it was done.

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_...

That is my concern too. My maths script is very good—I put considerable effort into the equations I write and as such the numbers, lines, and symbols turn out very good. On the other hand, no matter how much I studied lettering (regular and cursive), I don't really recognise any difference beyond what came of the added patience of my age. My letters are the same, they are only tidier. It was truly terrifying (sorry, my twenty-some teachers...) and only got better because I slowed down.

Having changed my handwriting style a year ago: when the new habit is really set, writing in a hurry doesn't reveal the old one. I actually can't write how I used to, my brain changed its wiring (and did not just acquire new "cables".)

The first few weeks were horrible though: new style not yet ingrained in the brain, old style already being forgotten.

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