I’m going to university this September. Nearly everybody says “In university they don’t try to understand what you’ve written it is unintelligible.” My handwriting is incredibly ugly. I want to improve it by the time I go to uni.
In elementary school they only taught me cursive handwriting. And I never bothered to learn print handwriting. I can write like that but I’m really slow at it.
How can I improve my handwriting? Which exercises I should do?
Thanks in advance!
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I used to have really bad chicken-scratch printing and I wanted to improve.
The exercise that really stuck out for me was to find a font I liked in a book on calligraphy and started practicing the alphabet.
Before I started practicing, I didn’t pay much attention to how I was forming a letter, I’d just draw it - and it would look messy. Once you start looking at each letter as a discrete number of strokes you start paying attention to the small parts and the whole looks much better.
If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a guide with arrows showing which way to draw each stroke. Super helpful. Note that this font uses a fountain pen, so it’ll look different with a standard ballpoint:
Calligraphy may be too fancy for day to day use. OP may want to look into how architects and drafters would write text. There are tons of guides online for it and that text is meant to be legible.
Yep. I write like a junior draftsman because anything else I do is pretty terrible.
font I liked in a book on calligraphy
They’re called hands, because you do them with your hand. A font is a given instance of a typeface, which is a design of a script. Now you can be pedantic too!
lost me at 2 strokes for a c just to have a little thin spot on top
My handwriting isn’t very good, and I recently finished university. I avoided handwriting any time I could by typing things out and printing them off as needed, pretty much the only time I had to submit handwritten work was on exams, and for those I mostly just wrote a little slower than I usually would to make it a little neater (enough to be legible by others if they make some effort).
I never experienced exams I did at the university I went to (in the US) being marked off because they couldn’t read it, and I think the TAs that did most of the grading (students from higher years or graduate students) probably aren’t mean enough to take off points from a fellow student just for “bad handwriting.” Whoever was grading my exams was probably annoyed at having to read my writing, but I didn’t really encounter any big problems.
Practice.
Taking notes during lecture helped. Not only does it help cement the information in your mind, it is practice writing legibly enough it can be studied later. You could practice this now, before school starts, by watching something like Khan Academy.
If your major sends you to the whiteboard often, that will help a lot, too. You will naturally improve as you do it out of necessity. Practice on the board until you can write a straight line of consistent text that doesn’t droop or curve down as it goes along.
I second the suggestion for calligraphy in a script you like.
Perhaps practice by trying to quickly write down song lyrics as you listen? I think that’s when I first started to improve.
Pay attention to your classmates who can take good notes quickly. I made a friend who found my writing to be glacially slow, so I watched how they wrote to learn some tricks.
Sorry if some of these won’t help until you’re in, but don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure your handwriting will be markedly improved by the end of even the first year.
p.s.
Write letters or postcards to friends.
Try to fit your favorite quotes on a notecard.Depending on where you’re going, you may not need to worry about it much. When I was in postsecondary education, there wasn’t much handwriting required. And I graduated 13 years ago; certainly things have gone more online since then. You might want to check with a current student in your field of study at your university and see what the handwriting requirements are. Make sure to ask whether cursive is a dealbreaker.
If it is something you’re going to need to work on, there’s really no getting around it: you’re going to need to practice. Cursive or print, you’re going to need to practice it. Get a big notebook, and something to write (hopefully something you’re actually interested in), and just start writing. Transcribe a TV show as you’re watching it. Copy a book line-for-line. You get good at the things you do a lot, and so you’re going to have to write a lot.
Also, I would recommend slowing down. My handwriting is great when I’m writing slowly but can be terrible when I speed up if I don’t pay attention. Slow down to start; if it’s still not legible, slow down even more. Make sure you aren’t practicing your existing bad habits. Then, as you practice, be deliberate: focus on each individual letterform, and as you become more comfortable writing legible letters, try to pick up the pace.
There are other things that you might find help you out: try practicing on wide-ruled paper, rather than college-ruled, for instance. Try a pencil or pen which moves more roughly across the page, for more tactile response. Make sure your pen or pencil is making strong, clear marks so that it’s obvious what legibility issues are your hand (and not just a bad implement).
You can change your writing style; I have, on a couple of occasions. It just takes practice.
I was thinking about going to local universitys’ introduction days I’ll make sure to ask handwriting.
If I go with copying a book do you reckon I should do a book I read before? Would it make it more efficient maybe?
The mechanical action, not the content, is what’s important. So you want something you’ll be able to stay focused on (and not be bored by), but other than that it’s not a huge deal.
Actually this could be a good opportunity. If there’s something you want to learn really well—potentially even memorize parts of—writing it over and over is a good chance to do so.
In my opinion, choosing the right kind of pen is very important. I use ballpoint pens mostly and prefer some pens much more because of their tip, weight , thickness and shape.
I have really bad handwriting. All my teachers used to complain about it back in school. I did improve it slightly over the years with practice. But nowadays I type on touchscreen or keyboards 95% of the time and in the rare occasions I use a pen I have starting trouble and my handwriting gets really really bad. Hell I can’t even write stuff on a straight line. Writing may become less frequent in the future in most jobs I guess.
But that being said, if you wanna improve it keep practicing, hold the pen properly and choose a pen with the type of tip that works best for you. You can even practice on those handwriting books.
- handwriting is pretty much pure muscle memory – regardless of which direction you head, it’s going to require practice to learn a new style and practice to break old habits
- cursive was based off of drawings (copperplate etchings), not writing, which is why it comes across as hard to read and feels artificial
- italic is an older style out of the Renaissance that has the advantages of being based off of writing, is far more legible, looks just as elegant, and (with practice) can be faster than both print and cursive
- Rosemary Sassoon and G SE Briem, Teach Yourself Better Handwriting
- Gunnlaugur SE Briem Handwriting
those books look great thanks!
Buy a fountain pen. They require you to write shower and be more careful.
Second, why write in print when you already write cursive??? It’s much more practical. Just try to focus on writing clear readable cursive instead.
I also switched from cursive to print for legibility.
I always found cursive terrible to read. Letters are more likely to look the same and it’s harder to tell where one letter stops and the next starts. I also read print all day, so I’m just more used to reading it.
I suffered from the same thing. nobody could read my writing because of the reasons you stated
I think one of the reasons my handwriting is bad, is that letters are bunching up because they are connected in cursive.
Honestly, slow down the writing and just keep practicing.
I doubt you need that. What matters is that you can understand your own writing. Most other things you need to submit will require typing, not handwriting.
But if you want to improve your handwriting, more power to you! Just practice a little every day. Be slow and deliberate with your strokes. See if you can find old calligraphy workbook templates for technical drafting online. Do half an hour of practice a day, practice letters individually, then practice writing stuff. Once you feel more confident try to speed up and see how fast can you writa the same paragraph. Put some 30 hours of practice total and you’ll be good to go I believe
Practice writing slowly and with good form. Write regularly, give yourself practice pieces. At uni you will be writing FAST, so it’ll get worse if you don’t keep disciplined.
Alternatively, learn to touch type, and type any work you need to hand in. - if your handwriting is so bad, you may want to make your notes legible to yourself for revision.
I’m more worried about exams and what not. I don’t think typing with a keyboard could solve that.
It’s like everything, practice slowly, get good form wired in, then when you write fast for exams your writing will be worse than normal, but still legible.
In my personal experience the most of the time I’ve hand written stuff that needs to be graded are mid term and final exams. 90% of the time are digitally typed essays and research papers. I’ve only written in cursive but my profs are mostly older and I’ve never got any complaints about it. Also most profs out there are trying to give you as much help as possible. They’re not out there to try and fail you. Most of them anyway lol.
I’ve also never used laptops in class and have only taken notes by hand. Maybe practice like that would help?
I’ve heard in my country profs can be just plain jerk. They can chose to not pass you just because you critiqued them. I’ve heard plenty of stories like this.
What worked for me is learning some better letterforms from some free images from the Write Now book (by Getty-Dubay) on italic cursive. It’s a different kind of cursive from the awkward one I was taught in school, and it’s a lot easier to write and read.
I think the biggest improvement in my handwriting was just finding letterforms in that book that are both easy to write but that are also more clearly distinguishable when you write quickly. For example, just putting a little curl at the bottom of my lowercase T’s, I’s, and L’s made them a lot more aesthetically pleasing but also more clearly distinct from other letters.
Once you find some letterforms like that, it just takes a little practice to rewrite your muscle memory.
First, start big. Get the basic shapes right with large lettering. Ideally you would have something you are comparing to like a stencil or grey printout so you can see the difference between your writing and the target.
After you have the shape fairly good large you can shrink it down. You can take your time getting to that and just make a little progress at a time.
If you find it impossible to shed your current handwriting consider using grid paper to force spacing and maybe try your non-dominant hand.
Have you considered a career in medicine? (/s)
I work in IT so YMMV; Functionally, outside of k-12 education I have not really needed handwriting skills. If I don’t have a working keyboard available, something has gone very wrong
As long as you can read it, speed would probably be the priority over legibility.
I’ve heard even in IT exams are still in pen and paper where I’m from.
that was my reaction too lol I think it is for preventing cheating
id suggest finding a style you like online, print off a few pages of text thats fairly large. then trace the original to train your hand where and how to move. then practice without tracing.
No clue if it would actually work, but thats what i did when i got into calligraphy
I could trace in the beginning thanks!
When I was a kid, my parents made me do hand writing exercises. I had to fill entire sheets of paper with slashes and slinky loops.
