I'm a right-hander and realize the dynamics of writing from left to right for left-handers must be a torment! For a right-hander to replicate the problem, we would have to write the letter forms backward and then write them from right to left with our right hands. Southpaws, I feel your pain!

But for a left-hander to experience the amazing gracefulness with which we right-handers skate over our sheets of Clairefontaine, you have only to write backward from right to left. Mirror writing!

Thinking of this made me remember something. A few years ago I was invited to recite the alphabet backward by a friendly law enforcement officer who thought I was driving erratically. This proved rather difficult (reciting, not driving erratically), but I did memorize the sequence later in the event that an encore was ever requested.

This makes me wonder if any right-handers have learned to write backward with their left hands. This would exactly mirror the neuro-muscular patterns we use with our right hands. It would be a bit hard to read, but I don't think it would be that difficult to learn. I believe that Greek at one time was written with characters going one way, then the other in alternating rows. "Boustrophedon" I think it was called, meaning "as the ox plows." This seems eminently logical to me!

I just tried writing the alphabet backward with my left hand and the trick is to simultaneously write the same letters the "correct" way with your right hand. The motion of the muscles then becomes exactly symmetrical.

Adoption of learning to read and write backward and forward would allow left-handers to write with the same pleasure as we right-handers, and would allow both right and left-handers to write more easily with our "other" hands.

Has anyone learned "mirror" writing?

Doug

P.S. I'm here on FPN, so I may just be crazy. Just a warning.

mirror writing? Sure. And i'm right handed.

I naturally mirror-write with my left hand. When I was a kid, I was left-handed; but those were the dark days when left-handedness was abhorred, and my teacher was asked to rap my left hand with a ruler whenever I wrote with it.

Anyway, one day when I was in third grade, I realized I could still write with my left hand, but backwards. I tried writing with both hands at the same time and that was quite easy, too. It helped a lot in school, switching hands so I wouldn't get tired taking down notes!



It's not a crazy thought at all.

Wow, Leigh

No, but I think backwards

Only kidding,

Daniel

Yeah, wow! Just for the record, all lefties cannot do this.

One of my best friends was allowed to stay a lefty, and she has been eyeing my fountain pens with envy, because she writes with her wrist hooked and cannot get the hang of them. She really wants a stub or italic, too. I've been wondering what kind of nib to recommend to her. Would you have any idea? Lefties must have italics too!

(Being ambidextrous is fun, but I save the writing-with-both-hands bit for extremely BORING meetings. )

But you should try it, really!
I convinced someone at the office to try "reversing" her writing and she was able to do it for a couple of sentences before realizing what she was doing and then she lost it. LOL.

Mirror writing is not that difficult for us lefties; our brains are put in back to front in the first place

I remember a challenge at a fete; a prize for anyone who could write the alphabet backwards. So far, no one had succeeded. So I walked up to the board, started at the right hand side and wrote ABC etc in reverse as quickly as it takes to write letters quickly. Easy peasy.

People backed away... slowly...


Chris

Hi,

I can make a nib. Which direction does she hold the pen in relation to the paper?

Anyway, writing with the left hand is not that hard. I can write with whichever hand I wish to use. My left hand is stronger though, but the muscles are not as trained since I learned to write with my right hand.

Dillon

I am so strongly right-handed that my left hand is essentially useless. I should really swap it out for something practical like a hook, or a feather duster, or *something*. I can barely hold a glass with it, never mind writing anything.

Hi Dillo!
I'll pm you next week. I need her to take a picture of her hand while she's writing, and she might be on her way to Bangkok by now. Thank you!

I'd like to swap out my Peli medium for a flexible EF one day, but I'm not sure about hands and other body parts...

Have you also tried to write upside down as well? I use to do this alot in chem lab situations where someone across the table was taking notes and I would jot something down.


I have also done this in meetings lately and you do get some interesting looks.

K

Another fun game is to write boustrophedon. Have you ever puzzled over: if the greeks got writing from the hebrew, and hebrew writing goes right to left, why did the greeks end up writing left to right?

What came in between was boustrophedon. The direction of the lines alternates down the page. At the end of a line, instead of jumping across the page to find the beginning of the next line, one just starts the next line on the side of the page one ended the previous line on, and proceeds in the opposite direction. Just like plowing a field with an ox! I gather that's what boustrophedon means: ox-plough.

So of course the fun is to switch writing hands every line, too. I don't know if the boustrophedon scribes of old did that or not!

I'd give my right arm to be ampidextrous!

Ron

Mirrored writing? Man, I haven't done that in a loooong time. Back in elementary school, the kids took up mirrored writing for fun, and to make it too much of a hassle for teachers to read our passed notes (well, that was our theory anyway, but whadyawant? we were kids! lol!).

One day, a teacher gave us a homework assignment to write something, anything, didn't matter as long as we put pen to paper.

I wrote my piece mirrored. She was not amused.

We also learned to write upside-down so that we could write notes to the person in the desk in front of us (all they had to do was sit sideways and they'd be able to look over and read it).

Hmmm, never learned to write mirrored upside-down, though.

Also, since our French teacher said we could only speak French in her class, we learned the alphabet in sign language so that we could "pass notes" that way.

Ah, good ol' Catholic school. What a lark.

t!

Edit: Come to think of it, we really were an odd lot in that school. We also played Chinese Jacks and Chinese Hopscotch. I wonder whatever happened to all my jacks...

I'm a great fan of Leonardo da Vinci for years and since he wrote most of his notebooks in mirror writing and is supposed to have been a left hander I guess that he wrote backwards, too. Just for being easier for him. I tried mirror writing as a kid but found it pretty difficult. Having read later about Leonardo I tried that with my left hand and found that it came quite naturally. Funny though - never tried this with a fountain pen... :doh:

Jester

I'd be interested to know if there are any board members who write in Hebrew or Arabic with fountain pens. What techniques (if any) do you use and which pens do you feel excel at writing from right to left?

I can't write upside down, but I can read upside down, at something approaching an average reading speed.

It used to really freak out a former manager of mine who would be frantically making sure there was nothing I shouldn't read on her desk every time I walked into her office. I did point out that I was sufficiently short sighted that I couldn't read it unless I was actually sat at the desk, or wearing my glasses (for distance vision).

It's useful in meetings, job interviews, and restaurants that are running short on menus.

Oops, posted twice and can't figure out how to delete the second one.

I had an instructor at Naval Nuclear Power School who would take a piece of chalk in each hand, stretch his arms out and start writing with both hands until they met in the center, and then he'd move down to the next line and repeat. We were required to transcribe what was on the board verbatim.

It was real tough to keep up when he was showing off like that.

Why is it that some right-handers think that being left-handed is wrong or unnatural? We are not broken. Not something that needs fixed. Only different. Appreciate us for our unique qualities.

I remember my old physics master at school. He would write notes, formulae etc. on a blackboard, in chalk, that we had to copy into our exercise books. Pages and pages of stuff!

The blackboard was a big, wide thing and he would start at the far left hand side with the chalk in his left hand, writing as he dictated. When he got to the middle of the board, the chalk moved to his right hand and he carried on to the far side of the board. Then, back to the left for the next line.

Even though he had his back to us, if he heard the slightest noise that chalk would whizz through the air with deadly accuracy almost before we saw him turn round.

But we did learn physics

Chris

I learned to write reverse with my right hand, from the example of my sister, who wrote both ways left handed. My mirror writing was nowhere near so legible as hers, and I gave it up after a while.

If I recall correctly, Leonardo da Vinci wrote with both hands, backwards with the left. Le Comte de Saint-Germain wrote forwards, simultaneously, with both, and his signature was the same with both hands.

I watched a blind woman read braille in very much the same way. Until I saw it, I had no idea it was possible to do so.