Dear FPN members and experts,
I a HS student w/ a dilemma. I have always had decent handwriting when I write....slowly. Unfortunately, class does not allow such slowness. With onslaughts of notes, timed writes, in-class essays, I have found it impossible to retain neat handwriting. (My first few sentences are acceptable...then it dilutes into a jumble of rushed lettering!)

I am trying to improve the my handwriting, in "prettiness", neatness/uniformity and speed.

Please help!

Hi Lingyuki:

Here are my thoughts...

As long as you're willing to practise, you can do this. Try picking up Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay's Write Now. They have a nice system for improving handwriting and some speed drills which may help you. Even if you only practise the drills and retain your own writing style it should help. But, like most things, it will take work....trust me, I suffer the same affliction as you!

Cheers,

t.

As a right-handed person who is having to learn to write with my left hand, I have your same problem - my writing looks pretty good when I'm writing slow, but gets messy-looking if I speed up. If I'm having to take notes quickly, I've decided to be satisfied for the time being if my notes are just readable - especially if I'm the only one who will be reading the notes.

I agree with tdiddy that practice drills help speed up the improvement process. Most evenings I spend about an hour practicing my handwriting while I watch TV or listen to music. I've been doing this since May and I can produce decent-looking writing at a faster speed than I could when I started. Since you're a student, you may not have an hour a day to practice and that's OK. I think you would benefit from 15 or 20 minutes a day. Then too, if you have writing to do where speed is not a factor, take your time and that will count as practice. Just be patient. It doesn't happen overnight, but you'll see improvement over time.

Judybug

I second the recommendation for "Write Now"....although after I learned the lower-case alphabet I haven't spent much time with the book. I will eventually finish it though. I improved my handwriting quite a bit with it. My fast writing isn't great or pretty but I can now read it days after I write. I still want to improve speed and legibility.

You might want to practice on graph paper to train your hand/mind for the proper lettering....then speed it up with drills. The proper nib with for your letters/style is important too. I can write small with a thicker line slowly but when I write fast it blurs together. You might want to examine how you take notes too....

I'm taking a college psychology class now and it's a lecture class in a auditorium...lots of notes without a desk or anything other than a notebook to write on....I personally want to improve speed/style/legibility and take better notes. I just typed "taking notes" on google....some good stuff came up if you could use help in that area too.

I made a huge improvement with "Write Now". I used to not be able to read my own writing...now it's all legible. The italic handwriting alphabet is great....

matthew

Lingyuki, you have an advantage in that your writing has always been decent when you write slowly. No one's writing looks its best when done in a huge hurry. Everything everyone said above is right on target--best advice that you could hope to get. It all boils down to practice and slowing down when you practice, initially, until your eyes and your arm muscles become "trained," then you'll be able to write faster with better results.

Good luck!
Ann

How quick and how neat?

Perhaps your standards are higher than most might think. For extreme speeds and levels of neatness at the same time, you might want to consider a different approach. Or perhaps shorthand. Most people don't consider the nitty-gritty of handwriting, but if you're going to start pushing for extreme speeds while maintaining legibility, you might have to get into the really ugly details.

Consider this analogy: On a piano, even playing a C-major scale with one hand within 10 seconds while maintaining even tone can be difficult, but a bit of practice and perhaps reading a beginner's piano instruction book can help one do that. However, if one needs to play a C major scale in 1/5 second while maintaining even tone, instruction aimed at a beginner is useless.

Aside: One thing that has really helped me speed up note-taking was making up easier-to-write abbreviations for common elements in English, e.g. "tion," "ss," "ment" "[pluralisation of a noun]," "(of) the," "this," "that," "and," etc.

(Why so many edits? English is difficult.)

Welcome to the world of speedwriting, my friend.

In highschool and university, you will be doing a LOT of it.

My advice is to write larger. It gives more leeway and more flexibility. Trying to keep things small and neat and pretty when you're writing at 100 miles an hour, is NOT possible. It can be, if you practice hard enough, but if you're not into that, then my advice is to make your writing larger. And remember this:

Swirls are easier to create than angles. Instead of stopping, making a perfect right-angle for your L or T or E or whatever, fancy-it-up a bit. Do it all in ONE STROKE with a neat swirl in the middle. That's what I've been doing for the past few years. It's faster and it looks prettier. The decorative swirls will make up for the missing strokes. It saves time and speeds up writing.

Don't worry about the notes you are taking for yourself (unless YOU can't read them either). Get your education, become a billionaire and let someone else take notes for you in the future!

From high school to law school -- even with the onslaught of laptops in classrooms -- I've always preferred to take notes by hand. And yes, I had to write very quickly, but I was not concerned with the neatness of my penmanship. I just had to make sure I could read/understand what I wrote.

After my lectures, I would read over those scribbles and rewrite them again by hand for neatness. After doing so, I would then type them on the computer -- and from there, compose outlines or summaries by hand and then type those outlines/summaries on the computer.

This process might reveal a side of my personality that I don't like to readily admit to (can you say "OCD"?), but the process did have a purpose. It made me very familiar (and very comfortable) with the subject matter. The more I worked with the material, the less I had to memorize anything. Learning to me is not the memorization and recall of facts -- it's about thinking through those facts and being able to apply them. This process built that in for me. I had "massaged" the material enough by hand and on the computer that the concepts were integrated into my thinking. It made a difference during study group discussions and exam time.

I know people who do not need to go through this cumbersome process to learn anything. I've always been in awe of those people -- I am not one of them. And this is what worked for me. I'm a tactile learner -- I need to be able to work with the material in some way to learn it.

I'm in a similar situation as I've gone back to school for a master's degree. Some of the classes I've had to take are at the undergraduate level, and I swear they're moving at a faster pace and are more demanding than the classes I took before, even though it was only nine years ago that I got my bachelors, and I made the first fledgling efforts toward this degree back in 2004.

I've never been too happy with my handwriting. We were taught Zaner-Bloser method in elementary school, and even used the special Z-B pencils. I didn't like it too much then, and never got too good at it. I abandonned it somtime in high school and started printing with decent results, sometimes with a ballpoint, or a fountain pen, or a Flair. It's ok writing, but not great.

Writing in some form of cursive might help with speed and legibility, but I'm not interested in it if it looks awful. I had a classmate ask if she could look at my notes from a previous class as she had been absent. Even with printing and one of my favorite pens, I had to read the notes to her and questioned my own writing a couple of times. That's just not acceptable.

How nice it is to know that I am not the only one with such a system. I'm a student and I use that method. I think it is quite efficient and it does help me. Thanks to that I don't have to learn for my exams, I jus do the review.


Jarek