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Comment by mywacaday | Hacker News Reader

While I love writing and trying different pens the quality of my handwriting has degraded as I get older and is occasionally illegible. Has anyone found a good method for improving their handwriting?

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As everyone said, it's not a degradation of the handwriting but, degradation of attention to writing.

Taking the time, slowing down and being aware of writing immediately resets my handwriting.

Also, the smoothness of the pens affect your handwriting legibility. A fast pen like a Uni Jetstream makes my writing worse. OTOH, a slightly resistant roller, a gel pen or ideally a fountain pen brings out the best in my handwriting.

In my case, I've also just forgotten a lot of my script as I've switched from writing for others to read to my own notes. I never had good handwriting--as I recall it was consistently my worst grade in elementary school but I did know how to make the Palmer script letterforms even if I didn't execute them elegantly. Today I don't really even know them except vaguely.

I switched from doodling to alphabet practice in meetings a few years back. It resulted in a marked improvement of my handwriting, which had declined primarily do to disuse (no significant long form handwritten stuffs since college, really).

I practiced print and cursive letters, then my more eligible letter pairings and words in a more deliberate fashion.

A nice tip, thanks. It boggles my mind, though, how often meetings are a waste of time (whenever N goes over three, perhaps).

Well, I doodle even in useful meetings. I get fidgety and need something to do with my hands. Doodling was one option, handwriting practice becomes a similarly unthinking activity with enough time, not something I consciously paid attention to.

I was in exactly this situation and I actually bought a handwriting book and "re-learned" how to do it by working through the book and focusing on writing with my shoulder instead of my wrist. I saw immense improvement in three weeks or so, and doing handwriting practice was also extremely satisfying and a good mental break after a day of coding.

I used this book, no affiliation other than I liked it: https://handwritingsuccess.com/write-now/

Inspired by this Slate article: https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/09/why-your-kids-have-...

For me, Uni-ball Vision Micro (not the Elite in this article) helped kinda surprisingly - they scratch a bit like pencil, which gives me a lot more control and ended up improving my handwriting compared to a smooth-rolling pens.

I found this to learn basic italic handwriting. Once you get that down, you can branch out in other directions. But things like consistent slant and spacing, which is what this teaches you, are the foundation on which everything else will build.

https://sites.google.com/view/briem/free-books/handwriting-r...

I found that it mostly just takes slowing down and writing more patiently. And I discovered this while seeing my son learn penmanship, where he was required to take his time to learn something new. I started to look at my own writing and found it not very nice. Simply taking more time to write what I wanted made it a lot nicer.

I write cursive, and I felt the same way. I had to slow down and force myself to write the way I was taught in school. You don't need to caricature the characters (charicature?!) but get back to very plain, school-style letters for a few weeks, and it seems to have reset my handwriting.

I definitely agree with this. I've noticed that the more time I spend away from handwriting the worse my handwriting gets. The only way to improve is to write more. As a developer, this is sadly not something I get much opportunity to do throughout the day.

Learn calligraphy! There are many videos and tutorials to follow along with and I have found after not much time at all the careful practice carries over to my normal writing.

I think the secret key is rhythm.

I get frustrated how long it takes to get my ideas onto paper, so I write really-really fast, mostly giving up quality for speed.

I find if I conscientiously try and write slower, it markedly improves.

Get a good fountain pen and high quality paper. This is a) fun and b) forces you to write properly.

This is probably the wrong place to say this, but ... use a fountain pen.

Not bad advice at all; while anecdotal, I learned to write properly using a fountain pen - my grandfather handed me one as I started primary school, claiming that this would learn me how to write properly, doubly so as I am a leftie.

It took a while, but I believe he was right - as the fountain pen forced me to write slower and more deliberately, it did improve my handwriting.

(I still (35 years later) mostly write with a fountain pen, always carrying my grandfather's Souverän 400 in my shirt pocket - it was gifted to me once I had learned to write properly.)

Do algebra.

A math-heavy job did wonders for my handwriting.

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