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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Yeaaaah, his handwriting is actual certified art compared to mine . I can't get anything to recognize my handwriting reliably, including the text recognition built into iOS with Pencil - it's just useless.

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To second what the other commenter said to you: I have seen someone with terrible handwriting fix it. He decided he cared, found pens and notebooks he really liked, and started using them attentively. People treat pens like they're all the same, but the drying time, line thickness, weight, drag across the paper, etc. all vary enormously, and if you care, you can probably find the right tool and get your handwriting to a point where you're happy with it.

I disagree on the suggested method, but I agree that handwriting can be improved. Someone who writes in prescription cursive isn't going to get better with a new pen and different paper. It takes deliberate practice and attention to detail.

This is why "a poor craftsman blames his tools" is an adage.

I have terrible handwriting and have had the idea in the past to try and relearn with a new style. Like maybe the way they teach French children in school! But when I looked online for a book on how to learn handwriting as an adult they were all for veterans who had lost their dominant hand and that was incredibly depressing. Anyone have a good resource?

Just copy writing you think is good, and keep a daily journal where you write exclusively in that style. It'll be slow going at first, but it works. Takes about a year before it's totally natural.

My handwriting is much cleaner with a fountain pen than a ballpoint pen. Tools matter. It doesn't have to be an expensive fountain pen or paper, a cheap Faber Castell on printer paper works fine.

Of course your voice is going to sound much better on a condenser mic than on a $1 mic from RadioShack, but that doesn’t mean your voice changed. We’re talking about improving handwriting, if you write someone a note illegibly your excuse should not be that you forgot your good pen at home.

I decided I hated having chicken-scratch handwriting around the end of high school / beginning of college. I literally did writing worksheets (tracing over letters) like I was in kindergarten. And if I wrote a messy word / letter on my homework I'd cross the word out and do it again. It made a huge difference, and I started getting compliments all the time on my writing. It's slipped back into average territory since, but it definitely works!

I can't even recognize my handwriting reliably.

Same - I find I typically use writing as a tool for thought moreso than a record that I will come back to, though I occasionally take a pass through old notes to see if I had any forgotten gems.

You can change that.

After I started using a Palm Pilot, my handwriting improved significantly and the changes seem to have been permanent. I get basically 100% accuracy with the Apple Pencil in iOS.

There is a delicious irony in the fact that you are training yourself using a reinforcement learning approach to meet the needs of an imperfect machine learning application.

An inexpensive bit of consumer tech. was able to accomplish something that years of human teachers could not.

The insta-feedback. I learned to spell because a little red squiggly line told me to try again. I avoided the right-click to autocorrect. Now everything just autocorrects and I assume people are more and more reliant on it.

I don’t see an issue in that, we can meet machines part way to make it easier for both of us

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