I have to use a fine nibbed pen because of my smallish handwriting. When I try to deviate from that and use a wet med for instance, I have to write larger so my written line doesn't look like a horizontal smudge of ink. But I can't. When I force myself to change penmanship "fonts" (for lack of a better word), I revert to my old style of small handwritting without thinking about it. It reminds me of my driving experiences in the UK, I found myself drifting back to "my" side of the road even though I was sitting on the opposite side.

Is this a normal problem for people. I've been writing the way I do for a lot of years and I'm having a devil of a time to change when I have to.

Handwriting is muscle memory, yes, but you can definitely retrain yourself. Think about the fact that when you write on a blackboard or a whiteboard, your "font" is essentially the same as it is when you're writing under a microscope. The difference is that under the microscope you're probably using finger motion, which is a bad idea in the first place, while on the board you're using arm motion. Concentrate on training yourself to use arm motion with your pen on the paper: imagine that your forearm, wrist, hand, fingers, and pen are a (very light) piece of cast iron that cannot and should not flex at all. It's a big paradigm shift, but once you've accomplished it you're on your way to forgetting what writer's cramp used to feel like -- and your "font" will very likely become freer and more fluid.

I do believe that it would be possible to change the size of your normal handwriting - but it would take a long time and a great deal of practice to 're-educate' your mind - and I'm not sure that the end result would be a good thing anyway. It sounds to me as though you are a 'natural' with regards to small handwriting, and there's nothing wrong with that. Just take a look at Phthalo's marvellous writing - and it doesn't get much smaller than that!

caliken

What's interesting is that I seem to have the opposite problem: the wider the line, the larger I tend to write. This can be just as annoying for different reasons, as I'm sure you can imagine. It's as though instead of having a natural preference for a certain size of writing, as you do, I have a natural preference for the ratio between line width and character size.



Well, that's probably more out of habit than anything else, unless you happen to naturally walk to the right of things (hard to determine).



We're all different, and what you describe is perfectly normal for you. I'm sure that other people have the same issues, though, as handwriting is generally pretty consistent in most respects.



Coincidentally, I was just talking about this in another thread. I'm still surprised at how well this "muscle memory" is translated between such different physical systems. Then again, after all these years of moving about, I suppose that the brain ought to know how the body responds by now.

Iridium, I tend to agree with what your saying. I work hard on this but I want to write without thinking about my writing style. It's fustrating to no end, I pick up a pen that's know to write a wet medium, consiously try to write a little larger but soon revert to the small style and now I have an inteligable mess. Maybe I'm vain but I like my looped letters to be open, I've read here that some people mentioned they didn't care about that detail. I do. I've sold some nice pens because they wouldn't match my writing style. I'm working on it.

greencobra,

If you can write a complete line at your preferred larger size before you revert to small lettering, you are perfectly capable of retraining yourself so that you write this way all the time.

The answer, I'm afraid, is the same as you've probably heard a thousand times - practice slowly and often, until it becomes second nature - sorry, there's no short cut!

I'm afraid your right.