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Comment by vogt | Hacker News Reader

I'd be curious if anyone had good advice on how to improve your handwriting ability well into adulthood (I'm 35). My penmanship was so bad in grade school that I attended special education classes to improve it, but it still was and remains horrible. This is a source of insecurity for me and since I've always been glued to a keyboard it has been easy to handwave away as "screw this, the world is all typing-based anyhow".

But I have seen evidence before that handwriting notes leads to improved retention, and seeing it here now, I'm wondering if there's a framework or resource that can help me feel a little bit more confident in my ability to, you know...write words with pen and paper. It's embarrassing even talking about it, honestly.

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A helpful search keyword would be handwriting repair.

There are a lot of videos and pdfs on the subject.

That said, I find all of them wanting and have thought of making my own course/book someday. Bottom line is learn a good alphabet, then practice it whenever you can until it becomes automatic like playing with a fidget spinner.

Self plug: I hit Reddit’s front page with some of my work practice alphabets. https://old.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/969vta/i_practice_alp...

I've returned to writing by hand increasingly over the last couple of years, after a couple of decades of rarely holding a pen. To start with, my handwriting was barely legible, and my hand painful after a couple of sentences. Now I write comfortably and legibly. My advice would be:

- as several others have written, slow down. This is by far the most important to start with. If you really needed to record something quickly, you wouldn't be handwriting. So accept it's going to be slow.

- consciously relax your writing hand and arm, where by consciously I mean quite literally reminding yourself, and tensing/relaxing the hand and arm to cement the physical sense of what the relaxed limb feels like. This helps with the cramping/pain

- if legibility matters for your purposes, find the letter forms you write most poorly. Read some of your handwriting, find the words you stumble over, and identify the letters causing this. Show someone your writing and ask them if you're not sure (for me it was 'o' and 'e' - in both cases I wasn't keeping the loop open). Now find a new more legible form for these letters, and use the new form as often as you can remember. In my case I reversed the loop direction I had learned for the 'o' (the physical difference concentrated my mind on keeping it open).

Have you tried the D'Nealian Pencil Grasp? It might not improve your handwriting but it’s way more comfortable because you apply virtually no tension on your fingers: https://www.ot-mom-learning-activities.com/pencil-held-betwe...

Can confirm this improved my handwriting. It also made it not degrade over time as my hand got more tired and lazy from using the pen.

That said pen width is important. My hand writing tends to be more legible with ultrafine tips

What I did - and I'm handwriting the manuscript/first rough draft of a non-technical book - is the slow down to whatever speed allowed me to form letters consistently and neatly.

I found this to be massively effective, and I recovered my cursive script that I hadn't really used since I was 12, and am now up to "full speed" again. Like anything really, slow deliberate practice is pretty much the only, best tool you've got.

"good" handwriting ranges from readable on one end to "is this printed?" on the other.

To me handwriting that looks good has the strokes parallel, spaced equally and almost all circles and curves identical.

Start slow on day 1. Repeat the same stuff on day 2 and 3. Try speeding up a bit on day 4. Then slow down again on day 5. Take a day's break and try again on day 6.

Any human skill I have acquired in my 30s has this pattern. Repeat the same thing, slow at first, speed up till you are barely comfortable without compromising on errors.

Once you hit a plateau, only then introduce more samples and more complexity. The simple stuff the brain encodes has non-linear effects on learning.

In this case, you'd have nothing incredible in week 1. The effects show in week 3-4 onwards.

Same applies here.

I don't have a resource but I'd recommend slowing down your writing speed, doing some practice, and possibly experimenting with other writing styles. Writing is like other physical skills, you need to get your practice and reps in to build your muscle memory.

My writing is pretty illegible when I write quickly, but when I slow down and use capital style block letters my notes are a lot easier to read back later.

As a side note, sometimes it doesn't matter if the notes are illegible later. Just the very act of trying to write it helps with the later retention as you are more deeply engaging with your brain and muscle combination. In school I often took written notes that never got looked at again, but just having taken the notes helped a lot.

I used to have pretty poor handwriting as well. It didn't help growing up in school when learning to write they would just have me trace letters, and never taught what actually makes handwriting legible. A few years back I started practicing calligraphy for fun and it helped out quite a bit. The basics that translate to everyday handwriting are:

1.Use your big muscles to write.(Move your shoulder/elbow, while keeping your wrist and fingers relatively stable.)

2.Make sure vertical lines are all on the same angle. Vertical parts of "l's","h's","T's" etc...

3.The round parts of letters are the same shape (For example the rounded parts of "o's","e's", and "c's" are all the same)

I'd suggest basically just starting again.

I learned some alternate alphabets (non-Latin) and I used to just pin up a reference behind my desk.

I then went back and did the same for cursive English. I still have to look at it every now and then, but I don't see that as being an issue.

As otheres have said - just sit down and write. But sometimes if you do not feel like writing - try to do at least some light drawing exercises (like drawing small straight line thousend times over, or small circles or other geometrical shapes). I used to do this because I wanted to draw better but in the meantime my handwriting got legible by accident.

It appears that in reality writing is nothing more than drawing and same rules apply. The secret is hand-eye coordination (hence simple shapes), consistency (hence thousend times over and then thousend more) and the ability to observe subject (this is not so important at first with writing, but if you want to have really nice style, it can be useful).

I struggled with this as well in school. In elementary we were taught cursive, then in middle school switched curriculum to print, so I ended up with a weird messy print/cursive hybrid.

I can thankfully write cursive, for my own notes, but it can be hard to read back for others.

I had to make a conscious effort to write my print neatly, only tips I can give is having good reason to write, and using that to take your time and write slowly. Most of my sloppiness in writing came from being too quick and not caring enough. I take weekly classes for a second language, and use my homework as opportunities to write slowly and legibly. Best of luck!

Check out this concept called "Bullet Journaling" (lots of YouTube videos on it). That, with a dot grid notebook, could do wonders for keeping your notes organized.

But for the writing itself, look into "calligraphy basics" - doesn't mean you have to write every letter in a fancy way, but the mere exercise of practicing it will at least build better habits for letter height (which makes everything more legible).

Lastly, I recommend switching to a fountain pen (yes). I don't know what it is - but I just care a bit more when writing with one. There are cheap ones (Pilot Kakuno Fine), no need to get fancy.

Unconventional: switch hands for a bit. Most people can write legibly with their non-dominant hand with a bit of practice. After a few days of tears of frustration doing this, take what you've learned about how the pen flows over the page and apply it to your dominant hand. Everything about how a letter is formed is excruciatingly obvious when you are fighting your hand to move in the way you want it, rather than automatically as has been ingrained in your dominant hand.

There are plenty of resources on Youtube on how to better your Handwriting: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=handwriting+adu...

But i would say don't worry about it as long as you can read what you have written down. Notes are for personal use only. For example, my handwriting is atrocious and most other people can't read it but that is fine by me.

Honestly, handwriting is mostly just practice, kind of like art. The exceptions are generally medical sorts of things (including stuff like dyslexia).

In that vein: Have you tried learning calligraphy? If you use the more traditional nib shapes (even if using a fountain pen), you'll likely form letters in a different manner than with a ball point pen. You can move from more traditional stuff to things that look like print or cursive that you like. And then it is just practice.

I guess that depends on what your goal with hand writing is. My handwriting is horrible too (no idea if to your degree), it's basically my personal cipher by now. My wife can read it, sometimes. But that's basically it. And my attitude is "so what, I write those notes for myself and I can read them just fine". No idea if this helps.

Improve is vague. You probably want to change the style, so that it's more readable. For that you need to find a style you like(reddit's probably full of good ones). And practice copying it. Slow and careful at first. This is how I changed mine in school, when I decided certain letters should look differently.

Just buy some handwriting workbooks and complete them. And then keep practicing, a lot. It might be slow going for a bit, you're trying to change something you've been doing for over 20 years now the same way, it'll take time.

Is your spelling also bad? Do you have trouble reading even short strings of digits like 2223232? Do you have trouble reading?

You may have some (mild) form of dyslexia. You triggered me with your remedial classes to improve it, but no improvement.

I can relate - I struggle spelling words on paper, but not on the keyboard! So I rarely write handwriten notes to avoid looking stupid!

Just write. No one is going to judge you for your notes. After a lot of pages you get better. Also reading helps

Use a fine tip pin (no bigger than 0.38mm), and write slower

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