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Comment by elros | Hacker News Reader

PSA for people with "bad cursive handwriting" but who would like to improve it: Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

Different writing systems evolved alongside different utensils. Cursive evolved to be written with a quill or a fountain pen. Ballpoint pens are an amazing invention and they have their place, but they optimize for price and practicality, not necessarily for an æsthetically pleasing legible outcome. People say they have "bad handwriting" but their setup is a Bic pen on a thin sheet of paper on top of a hard surface: well, everyone's handwriting is bad in this setup.

In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

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As a left handed person, fountain pens are basically a no-go. What actually helped improve my handwriting was not doing cursive, but writing each letter individually, which forces me to pause between each letter. Still using the lower case forms (though I did try all caps for a while), but just forcing myself to slow down. Still have problems with 9 vs 4 though

I’m left handed, with the right ink and paper this isn’t a huge problem. I picked up fountain pens a year ago and I will never go back to regular pens for my own writing.

Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.

If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

I've never been able to work out how to write in the alternative positions without it hurting a lot

> Left-to-right writing as a left-handed person involves a lot of pen(cil) pushing, which is a big no-go for fountain pens.

> If it works for you, I'm willing to bet you're twisting your hand in a D position (going over and around the cursor), which I sometimes see left-handed people do. I have cramps just watching that.

I see comments like this occasionally and find it mildly amusing as a lefty who has been writing with a fountain pen for over a decade and doesn't have noticeably different hand position (either compared to righties or compared to my use of a pencil or ballpoint pen). Yes, some lefties do have hand positions that look incredibly uncomfortable and some lefties have trouble with fountain pens, but that doesn't mean it's a general/total non-starter for lefties to successfully/comfortably use a fountain pen.

Pen pushing is a problem if a writer used to a ballpoint pen or a hard pencil and needing to apply pressure to get ink to flow and applies that much pressure to a fountain pen. But once one makes the adjustment to a fountain pen's (low) pressure style, pushing is only a minor annoyance for fountain pen writing until the nib is broken in (at least that was my experience).

As others have said, it's also important to pick the right ink/pen/paper combination so that you're not laying down too much ink and so that it dries reasonably quickly.

Thanks for the thoughtful comment.

It perhaps is a combo of cheap pens and learned pressure from pencils/ballpoints (and let's not forget smudging from hand sliding on paper if the ink takes too long to dry - I will emphatically not levitate my hand).

How do right-handed Arabs and Israeli Jews write right-to-left?

Judging by the google image results for "arabic handwriting", they hold the pen above their hand instead of to the left

I have not seen the word "cursor" used that way. From context it sounds like it means "the point where the pen meets the page", which does fit in with the etymology of cursor ("a thing which runs").

But I couldn't find a dictionary which supported that definition. Is that your own coinage, or is it a jargon that I didn't know?

Please share what the right fountain pen, ink and paper would be for a left-handed person to avoid smearing everything to kingdom come! (Asking with honest curiosity as a fellow leftie who would love to be able to use a fountain pen).

I swear by uniball jet stream pens, they feel much nicer than a ball point and dry fast enough for me to use them but would love a true fountain pen setup instead!

I have 2 Sailor Pro Gear Slims 14K and one Sailor Pro Gear 21K. The later is the best writing experience. I'm not an ink maniac but I tried a few and I found that Sailor inks tend to dry reasonably quickly while still having a good flow. Midori paper and Tomoe River both perform very well. If I'm going to do a whole page of writing smearing from hand moisture can be a problem, especially w/ non-Sailor inks so in that case I use the "today" cards you can get for the Hobonichi.

Ouch, the 21k is 420 bucks. I want. Thanks for the info, I truly appreciate it.

A big advantage of fountain pens is that when the ink is not dry yet you can easily erase the color chemically with another type of pen.

Look into Noodler’s Bernake Black ink, it dries very very quickly and I’ve used it as a lefty for years with no problems.

I'm also left handed and the closest thing I've found to fountain pens are rollerball pens, it's very smooth and easy to write with them, they are sharp and dry instantly.

I'm confused. The only thing both have in common is that they are pens. For the rest they are on opposite ends of the pen spectrum. Unless a pencil or a felt tip are called pens as well?

Lamy has left-handed nibs for their pens. So there are options.

> In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.

In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.

I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.

The trick is to realize that you never even needed to write it at all

Writing while thinking is more productive than prompting a Markov chain. Also it's free and benefits your brain.

"The trick is to realize that you never even needed to think at all"...

> it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever

That's an exam cramming technique regardless of handwriting quality :)

> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).

I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!

Indeed, pencil is one of the best writing implements for archival purposes. As long as one doens't deliberately try to get the graphite off, it'll probably stay on.

> many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof.

I assumed this was for child friendliness - you just know kids are going to get ink on their fingers etc while changing cartridges from time to time.

It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.

I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.

The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.

Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.

> From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain.

Fountain pens or ballpoint pens?

(I do believe it was a fountain of pain either way :)

I agree. The thing with fountain pens that many sibling commenters miss is that they run the ink so much more smoothly, which means you can use much less force when guiding the pen. It's not just pining for the old ways but that the writing feels completely different with a different class of tool.

I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.

With a really good ballpoint there's no difference. Saying this as someone who had to use fountain pens throughout the school. I now been using UB-157 for years and it is entirely effortless.

Depends what you mean by ballpoint. For a liquid ink rollerball, that's true or very close. For a gel ink pen, or an oil-based standard ballpoint, that's very much not true. Conventional ballpoints require much more pressure than a rollerball (like the UB-157) or a fountain pen. Gel pens are in-between.

No, fountain pens have a "cool" factor and can be made for decorative stuff, but that's it.

Sure the super cheap bic pens that come in boxes of 100 aren't great, but that's because they're cheap (besides being inexpensive). Something like those G2 gel pens that are also available everywhere for not very much (fairly inexpensive, but not pejorative-cheap) these days work just fine.

Fountain pens still have small edge over good gel pen, but that's significant only if you write a lot.

Fountains also feel incredibly good to write with once you find the right nib + pen + ink combo you prefer.

Deliberate practice is the #1 way to get better at most skills, and making the activity feel good will encourage that: if it feels good to write, you'll probably be more deliberate when doing it and really think about the strokes you're making.

Then you have a few "oh hey, if I do this with this part of the letter it looks really nice" moments, and people start commenting on the quality of your handwriting

> find the right nib + pen + ink combo

You left out paper. I have fountain pens that I love to use on particular types of paper. However, on the paper I mostly use (cheap paper) fountain pens aren't great...

See, here's what I don't get: Who wants to go through the trouble? Buying tons of nibs, pens, inks, and paper to find one I like, when I go months without even picking up a normal pencil or pen? I'm really curious what people are still writing by hands these days, especially where others would have the ability to comment on it. I don't think I've even used a pen for a signature in god knows, since all the doctor's offices, etc, these days either have touchscreens or email you the forms to fill out online. Are you writing for fun? Doing math? What am I missing here?

At least for me, it was back when I was taking classes in college and writing a lot of notes. Made it easy to try a bunch of pens and inks. That said, just try a few. You don't have to be systematic or spend a bunch. I like fine tips, so any fine tip is fine with me.

That, and I keep a written log of what I do during a day. Helps with annual performance reviews and to answer the question of "wait didn't I do X a week ago?" I guess I could migrate to a text file or something, but that's a lot more restrictive of a format than just writing.

Plus, my notebook isn't going to suddenly run out of battery in the middle of a string of meetings. And if my pen goes dry - just find whatever ballpoint or pencil is around, nbd.

That said, nobody's forcing you to write or whatever. People enjoy different things, and that's okay.

> No, fountain pens have a "cool" factor and can be made for decorative stuff, but that's it.

I would not disagree more. A fountain pen writes with zero pressure. In contrast modern rollerballs and gel pens have a little spring to prevent contact leaking. Uni might have a patent on that. Famously Pilot's Hi-Techpoint pens doesn't have that and it stains the place where it touches.

A fountain pen can outlast any disposable pen, allows you to write 5x longer without any strain, promote better writing quality and writing habits, and lives with you and becomes tuned to your handwriting in a couple of months to a year.

Moreover, hand writing is better for your brain and concentration than typing on a glowing box which strains your eyes, hands and brain with constant distractions.

>becomes tuned to your handwriting

I didn't know that, what's the noticeable difference?

As you know, almost all fountain pen nibs (sans some specialty ones) come with some tipping. This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

Some manufacturers have their own formulations and grinding characteristics, and some manufacturers use "default" versions supplied by the nib vendor.

As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished. This can take from a couple of months (e.g. Lamy) to years (e.g. Pilot, Sailor). Since the user keeps the pen at a certain angle, the same area gets polished a lot.

This makes the pen write smoother when held "correctly" (i.e. the way the user holds), reduces contact pressure (pen starts writing almost before touching the paper) and makes the pen a little wetter in some cases, making it more reliable and enjoyable to use.

After some point you can write without ever thinking about the pen, because it never skips (even like gels, rollerballs and ballpoints), and becomes an extension of you. It's hard to precisely and accurately describe though.

For example, I have an old Lamy Safari which writes slightly broader than its Medium designation because of this. I can understand whether my Pilot Metropolitan is happy with the ink or not from how it feels on paper. I have another Pilot which feels like glass on paper due to the same effect (it was already a smooth grind but it got even smoother over time).

Another advantage of fountain pens is the writing characteristics is a constant. Since you don't change the nib with every refill, you don't get the frustration of a bad writing pen when you replace your disposable pen or refill. You only refill the ink.

Except that the pen keeps failing a lot faster as the ink is depleted and the pen writes different whether it runs nearly dry, has to get the ink fully flowing again, or when there's plenty of ink and it flows smoothly.

Uh, no?

The feed buffers enough ink allowing you to change the cartridge or refill the pen before it runs completely dry though.

Also, I tend to use a small cartridge between three weeks and a month depending on the nib size. Considering I fill my notepad in six months, this is plenty of ink. When I write with a gel pen, the ink level is visibly different when I finish the day, so there's that.

If you use a Lamy or use long international cartridges, these durations are at least doubled (6-8 weeks of writing per cartridge).

If you fancy to see the ink level, some pens have windows, and demonstrators are clear all over already. :)

As a fellow fountain-pen enthusiast, I highly doubt this idea that the pen (and especially the nib) becomes "tuned" to your writing. I think it's either [a] placebo effect or [b] the other way around---the hand becomes "tuned" to the pen---or [c] it's more about the other parts of the pen (e.g., body, feed), and rarely, if ever at all, the nib.

> This is a very hard alloy engineered to resist wear and tear.

> As the user writes, this tipping material starts to get polished.

"Polish" is making a surface more even than before either by [a] filling it in with substance so that the depressions in the surface becomes level with the peaks or [b] filing away (i.e., introducing wear) at the surface so that the peaks become level with the depressions.

Either way, I don't see how it can be achieved with writing. Paper and ink doesn't have anything that can achieve [a] nor is it enough to achieve [b]---even over time---otherwise the nib isn't made of alloy that can resist wear and tear.

I'm prepared to wager that a well-used but well-cared for nib isn't gonna exhibit a more polished angle. It could tarnish. It could build-up a patina. Maybe it could have some chemical residues from previous inks. But to have a significant and highly-localized deviation from when it was brand-new, I highly doubt it.

Another part of my hypothesis is that you don't actually keep the pen at the same angle everytime you write. You still produce the same(ish) handwriting but writing angle is easily affected by external factors. In other words, the writer compensates for these external factors subconsciously in order to produce the same handwriting. E.g., I write differently on my journal vs. if I'm filling out a form. I write differently when I'm jotting down notes in a meeting vs. something more deliberate. I might adjust angles if the paper has a different texture, or if the ink isn't drying as quickly. I would write differently on my desk at home vs. a hotel room desk. Heck, I write differently at the start, middle, and end of a journal.

I'm just saying this because I think people could stress over fountain pens over what is basically superstition and there's already plenty to think of when using fountain pens. It won't change your pen's "attunement" if you lend it for friends to try occasionally. Conversely, don't be afraid to give second-hand pens a try just because the previous owner's writing style might be too different from yours.

Hey! Welcome. Let me respectfully disagree with you with my stained fingers.

I'm using fountain pens as my primary writing instrument for more than 15 years now. My familiarity with these marvelous things go back even longer than that. So, I believe I know a couple of things, probably not much as you, about them.

First let me start with the polishing issue. Not all paper is same, and even smooth paper is very abrasive in its nature. You can actually slowly polish a fountain pen nib with a coarse brown bag. If you want to do it faster, you can use a micromesh (which I'm too coward to use). If you search Fountain Pen Network, there are tons of resources how to work with both.

If I understood it correctly, you said that the nib is not made of an alloy that can resist wear and tear. Yes, that's true. Today's nibs are mostly steel or gold alloys. However tips of said nibs are different. If you want to watch how Lamy's nibs are made in house, you can watch [0]. The link I shared starts right at the nib production and finishing process.

I'll politely counter your wager about nib polishing with another anecdote. My father gave all his fountain pens to me since he's not using them anymore. One of them is used everyday for years, and he uses his pens at a slight angle. The well used pen writes scratchy when I hold it like my other pens, but writes buttery smooth when I hold like him. Another pen also exhibits this but to a lesser degree. Interestingly, when my father tries my pens, they write a bit scratchy because of his holding angle. The seldom used pens write smooth regardless of the holding angle (they are essentially new old stock).

Another interesting anecdote is between me and another pen enthusiast. I have a particular Lamy Safari which I use every day. Also, Lamy's tipping material is a bit softer than other manufacturers, so they polish faster. We tried a couple dozen pens that day. He took that Safari, wrote with it and said "this is a well tamed nib. did you polish it?". He didn't know that it was my EDC pen.

You said that your pen holding angle changes depending on what you write. Mine don't. I keep my pens at a very particular angle independent of what/how I write. So much that, my Metropolitan writes a little scratchy if I hold it too close to the nib, near the front end of the finger rest, and I don't even use pressure. But that pen is with me every day for more than six years (or more? IDK).

Another thing about nibs is flex (not like a flex nib, much more subtle) or breaking in, which is very apparent in Kaweco pens. That little, stubby bastards' nibs always start a little dry. After a couple pen flushes and with some writing, they start to break in. They start to write the way it should after a couple of weeks generally. When they find their tune, they write pretty dependable though. Lastly, Montblanc says their nibs need a couple of weeks before reaching their true performance. I want to experience this some time in the future, but I can't today.

A well-used nib doesn't exhibit a Lamy 2000 like "narrow sweet spot", the angle doesn't get narrower, but that sweet spot develops a sweeter spot if you write at the same angle after some point, depending on the tipping material and geometry.

I mean, I have a lot of pens, and I can distinguish between an unused nib and a well used one on the same body and same ink just from the feel for it.

I'd love to continue this friendly discussion. Heck if I had a macro lens, I'd happily share close up photos of the said nibs, so we can learn together, but alas.

I'm not afraid of fountain pens, or second hand pens in general. I got myself a nice Pilot Elite from a pen show this year. I need to fix its nib (it's a bit loose), but it's a well used buddy with a buttery smooth gold nib.

[0]: https://youtu.be/2jf3lbhQR6I?t=98

I agree with you - the low/no pressure that a fountain pen writes with is important. However, I will say that decent rollerballs (eg UniBall Vision) require only the weight of the pen itself, which means there is very little difference from fountain pens (but not none).

Recently I restarted using my Vision Elite rollerball and Signo gel pen, because the last notebook's paper didn't play well with my fountain pens.

While I love these pens as well, they require a little bit more pressure than a fountain pen, and their difference becomes very apparent in long writing sessions.

Being said that, they're probably the best rollerballs and gel pens you can use, because of their pigmented inks and archival qualities. Plus their blue black is a nice color, and Vision Elite can actually shade while writing.

Also, a fountain pen can be held at a smaller angle to the paper. Unlike the other kinds of pens, it even tends to write better that way. I find the smaller angle more comfortable to hold.

that may be the case for your particular writing style, but it is not universal.

i have a mild orthopaedic problem, and i found, in my twenties after years of struggling with disposable pens, that a fountain pen allowed me to write more lightly and fluidly on the page with the result that my words per minute more than doubled. my writing is still ugly, but it is vastly faster and a bit more legible.

fountain pens are not only for "decorative stuff" but have actual functional advantages due to their mechanical dynamics

I envision electrically charged ink, and opposing paper, so one only need approach the page with implement, and the ink flies upon it.

Just need a clothing iron as a fuser and you’ve got yourself an artisanal copy machine.

I tried fountain pens for a bit back in grad school, but they honestly weren't great. They were imprecise, blobby, scritchy on the paper. Subscripts and superscripts would smear out. The best experience, IMHO, was a 0.5 mm mechanical pencil, but those smeared, so I eventually switched to pilot v5 or muji pens.

But that sounds like math, not cursive, you say? Well, yes, but there are paragraphs of thinking and doodling and argument in there with the math. My point is that fountain pens seem optimized for some kinds of writing, but certainly don't have a monopoly on all sorts of putting pen on paper.

Technical pens (staedtler) are great for math writing and quite precise (I studied engineering and used these a lot for notes with lots of formulas, diagrams, math notation etc), but the ink does take a bit to dry so it can be smeary particularly for left-handed use. They’re also a bit unforgiving with writing angles (likely not optimized for writing, for sure but they do work)

I we had the same here in the Netherlands. Never helped me one bit. I even had to go to after-school handwriting coaching. My handwriting is still horrible.

I think my main problem is that handwriting is so slow. I get impatient and rush it turning it into a mess. Reading it is also slow, even when written by someone with good handwriting it's a PITA to read cursive. I hope it dies out sooner rather than later.

I think the slowness is the point. I write in a journal as a way to collect my thought, get new ideas, focus my thinking. I’m always telling myself to slow down, because legibility and intelligence seem to both increase when I do so

I write almost exclusively with fountain pens, and it hasn't helped my handwriting at all. Not sure why you think it would help.

it seems there are two kinds of people

Well it's not magic, you still need to learn the skill of how to use the pen properly to write cursive.

My argument is simply that it's significantly easier to learn to have good handwriting with the right tool than with the wrong tool.

Surely there are also people with excellent handwriting even writing with sub-optimal tooling.

That's probably because YOU use a cheap fountain pen. ;)

I use a cheap (£20) fountain pen it doesn't affect how good my writing is. That's practice not tools :)

You sound like one of the never tired shills of the Peasant's Handwriting Tools Club. Your terrible lot really knows no shame. :(

I don't know what that is and googling gets me nothing. I'm also unclear how saying "you don't need a £200 fountain pen to write well" offended you. Have a great day anyway.

It does not really help my handwriting, but writing with a fountain pen is much more pleasant. I also like the objects, the ink bottles and the small refilling ritual every now and then. But yeah, my writing is still terrible.

As I am mainly left-handed, I learned to like writing with a nice wooden pencil, like Faber-Castell, and a sharpener. Then, if it is something serious and if it is possible to use a felt pen, I use Staedtler or Faber-Castell felt pens in different sizes. I hate ballpoint pens.

Have you tried a good fountain pen? A good nib makes all the difference.

The thing about being left handed is your hand will naturally drag across the fresh ink of a fountain pen.

Fountain pen + left handed + left-to-right language is sadly a no go

I'd like if you address the main point of his post: being left-handed.

I've never liked fountain pens because most languages are written left-to-right, which means you will get smudged much more easily than if you were right-handed.

The seemingly best advice I've seen is to learn how to be an "underwriter", aka position your hand north to where you're writing, instead of sideways. I say seemingly because I'm not willing to spend that amount in effort when I can write fine with pens.

The issue with being left handed, when writing a language that is written left-to-right, is the hand gets dragged over freshly written ink. A fountain pen has liquid ink that takes longer to dry than a ballpoint pen, it would make things significantly worse.

> Write with FOUNTAIN PENS. Ideally on thicker paper, with something soft below (like more paper for example).

I love fountain pens. Well-made ones are elegant and feel good to write with. I love the look and feel of certain kinds of permanent black and blue-black ink that you can’t find for ballpoint.

They were extremely useful in dealing with hand cramps at a time I was doing a lot of mathy stuff for work (tens of pages of derivation a day for a while). They retrained my hand to not push on the page so hard and not grip the pen so hard. That eliminated most of the problem.

That said, they have had no effect on my handwriting. Which was bad-to-mediocre before and remains bad-to-mediocre now.

As an alternative, for people who dislike fountain pens -or stained hands-, I'd suggest a Tombow Fudenosuke marker pen. There're two variants, with a softer or harder tip, and there's a pack with both so it's easy to try both. The softer one produces a heavier result.

There are other brands, of course; Pentel has a similar marker and some other smaller brands too. I just think the Tombow is very nice and easy enough to find.

These pens are sort of the modern version of the Japanese calligraphy brush, so they're nice for writing but much more practical.

Any tips for lefties? I find in very difficult to avoid complete smudgification of everything I write with a fountain pen, since it takes so much longer for the ink to dry.

Try writing right to left!

This is the kind of solution I'm looking for!

Should I:

- Write in mirror image form?

- Learn to predict my line length so I can write right to left, but have the text read left to right?

- Learn arabic or herbrew?

I'm leaning towards all three personally.

You're being facetious, but Da Vinci famously wrote mirrored script. If it's just for your personal notes and such, I feel this is actually the obvious smart solution, seeing as the flow of the writing will be aligned with the direction you're coming from.

Writing with mirrored letters would be a awesome party trick.

Counting line length before writing it seems harder to get fluent in than arabic or hebrew scripts...

Why not

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon

I write with my hand below the line to avoid smudging. A consequence of this is my pen meets the page at quite a shallow angle which I find is perfect for fountain pens but scratchy with ball points. These days I do very little hand writing and find my traditional pose (described above) causes hand cramps, but I don't know if that's specific to the odd way I write or if all poses would when so out of practice

Did you learn that handwriting pose already as a child? If not, how hard was it to teach yourself writing that way?

Try different inks.

What I’ve seen being done before, not only by lefties but actually by quite a few people, is to shift your paper 45~90°, so that you’re effectively writing bottom up (right handed) or top to bottom (left handed). It can get a moment to get used to it but it alleviates the smudging significantly.

For what it’s worth, personally, I don’t like it so much, but I know people who swear by it; and had fast, clear, legible notes to back it up.

I recommend using a sheet of tissue, napkin or old school blotting paper under your writing hand.

This advice is not just for lefties. Although I'm right-handed myself, I like to use a tissue paper under my palm when scribing Wedding Cards, to avoid smudges.

I disagree about the thicker paper part. It's the "sizing" of the paper that's important, that's the preparation of the paper that makes it more or less absorbent. Moleskine/Lechturn and similar notebooks have a sizing on the paper that makes it less absorbent and easier for a fountain pen to glide over. Printer paper is way more absorbent and creates more drag causing you to use more effort. Source: I use a cheapish but decent Lamy fountain pen on both kinds of paper, and I write cursive and shorthand for speed, but print for long term legibility.

Went through school in France too, was forced to use a fountain pen too, had my hands soaked in ink at the end of every day too. Except it never went away, and my handwriting is still awful.

Years of every teacher I had writing in red at the top of every test or homework "Applique-toi!", as if this injunction was all that was required for me to finally realize I had been holding the pen wrong for over 15 years. Fuck that, I'm glad it's over.

I will gladly celebrate the death of handwriting when it comes, that we may focus on more important matters and stop judging books by their covers.

I grade my university students' work with Herbin Violette Pensée ink and a Platinum Plaisir fountain pen. The symmetry of using a student's ink to grade students' work tickles me.

For other people who grade big stacks of papers, nota bene: fountain pens with a soft nib are a lifesaver! They require almost no writing pressure, which is so much more comfortable. You also get to use fun ink colors.

I understand liking fountain pens for their "old school steam punk" factor, but I think recommending them to improve your cursive is a little nutty.

I love writing by hand, and for years I was looking for the ideal instrument. Frankly, all the big "pen enthusiast" websites gave awful advice IMO. I essentially wanted something with the tactile feel of a good pencil, but with the permanence of ink. Finally I stumbled across fine line markers at an arts supply store (I like the prismacolor ones but I'm sure there are others). They come in various widths (some as thin as a thin mechanical pencil), and they don't smudge, bleed, or need to be refilled. They have a great tactile feel and an extremely sharp, crisp line. I'll never understand why pen forums never seem to recommend them.

For handwriting in general, I would not recommend a fountain pen. For cursive in particular, though, sure. The soft, pressure-sensitive tip of a fountain pen is the only place where cursive really makes sense to me. With a ballpoint, felt-tip, or pencil, printing feels much more natural.

For what it's worth, I'm not a big proponent of fountain pens or cursive, but I do think they go hand-in-hand.

Tools definitely matter. If fountain pens just aren't practical or not your thing, modern pens like the uni jetstream are excellent as well.

Absolutely. Fountain pens are the way to go - with one I can write beautifully, with a BIC or Biro it’s a spidery mess.

Any suggestions on how to get into fountain pens? I handwrite a lot, but fountain pens have always intimidated me.

Get a pack of Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens. Just write with them, with no pressure. The cheapness and disposability means no reason to be intimidated. Then after you go through one pack of Varsities, buy a Pilot Metropolitan for about $20, and optionally a $10 piston-fill adapter and a bottle of ink. A Metropolitan is one of the cheapest "good enough" fountain pens.

In Poland you started with a pencil, but as you got more proficient you could switch to a fountain pen. I never did.

As a leftie I was forced to do exercised designed for "normal" children, that were just painful. Thinking about using "normal" scissors with my left hand makes me sad and angry almost 40 years later. But I do enjoy a nice fountain pen and a thick paper - it's relaxing.

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