My normal grip:


My tripod grip:


After looking through so many pictures of how the good people of FPN grip their pens, I've started to look at how I myself do it... and realized that no one else seem to grip their pens the same way! I have a very weird grip where it's as if I'm making a loose fist, with my middle finger tucked in. Before my fountain pen days, I used to grip my pens/pencils with such force that there was actually an indented callus on my index finger (right where the red ink stain is in the tripod grip picture). I tried changing my grip to the standard "Tripod Grip," and it appears that I can write somewhat legibly with this grip if I slow things down quite a bit. I can hold the pen comfortably in this manner, with either my thumb and index finger touching, or spread apart a little. With a little practice, I'm sure I can write as fast and legibly as I do currently.

Then the non-conformist in me woke up, grabbed me by the collar, shook me violently for a few minutes, and asked me what the hell I was doing. Is there anything wrong with my normal grip and is the tripod grip superior in any way?

I see no problem with your normal grip — many of my best students use this grip-variation, or similar.

Dear Helius,
I've actually found myself collecting pictures of grips on the net - I think my grip is ok, but my writing movement is not - I have been thaught to write with my fingers only, and lift the hand for every third letter or so, and have done so for about 43 years. Due to writers cramp I'm currently training for armwriting and for that reason I needed another way to hold the pen, as my fingerwriting grip made movement impossible. I don't know if this helps, but I found these grips on the net (Briem's homepage) - and as I see it, your grip is almost there.
kind regards
Henrik

obviously I'm no good at posting multiple pictures <_< , I try too use this grip:
Henrik

You know, this board has gotten me all nosey about others' choice of writing instruments and their writing styles. I just hope people don't think I'm weird when I'm caught staring at their hands.

Thanks for your note, Kate. As someone who's never had formal hand-writing classes I got a little paranoid my grip after seeing the "standard" stuff that most pictures here showed.

Henrik, I just tried your grip (the first one, where the pen rests between the index and middle fingers), and I can actually write pretty well with that! I'll definitely be trying that grip when I start practicing to be an arm-writer.

Re: "your grip" —

Call that grip one of Mr. Briem's grips, not mine.

;-)

Of course. That's what I meant. I should've been clearer.

Hopefully learning to write with it will serve as a distraction from what seems to be a very bad case of active fountain pen collection.

The image from this post appears similar -- although with the hand a bit more on its side -- to the alternative grip presented on page 43 in Sassoon and Briem's Teach Yourself Better Handwriting.

Does anyone here use this pen hold or a near variant? The one from the book seems to me, in practice, to "hide' the pen nib or point from the writer with the hand so flat (almost in the manner of Copperplate); while the picture in Henrik's post seems to me to risk being unusable with anything but nibbed pens?

(See also the holds on the right side of figure 2 on page 6, and picture (i) of figure 5 -- the "lateral tripod grip" -- on page 14 of the paper at https://oa.doria.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/....pdf?sequence=1 -- both of these seem (to me) to provide ease and stability in controlling the writing instrument.)

Wayne