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Comment by benrutter | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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?

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.

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

Try different inks.

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