Your Handwriting Speed?

[Miles R.]

Excuse me if there is already a thread on this topic; I did a search and didn't find one.

 

I am curious to know how the speed of my handwriting compares with that of other people. To be more exact, I am interested in whether other people whose writing is no worse than mine in elegance and legibility can write more quickly. I ask because I suspect that my writing speed is rather slow in relation to the quality of the result: I suspect that it is possible to write more quickly without any less elegance or legibility, and even with greater elegance or legibility. But I don't know.

 

Below is a sample that I wrote of the pangram "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" at three different rates of speed:

1. Normal: the rate that I customarily use when writing for someone, whether myself or another, to read in the future, as in a journal entry or a letter. This took about 30 seconds.
2. Hurried: a higher rate that I would use if writing with the same expectation of being read but if trying to get as many words down as possible in a limited amount of time. This took about 20 seconds.
3. Fastest: the fastest that I can write without declining into illegibility. This took about 10 seconds. I cannot sustain this speed for long without my writing degenerating into a mere senseless scrawl.

So how does your speed in writing the same sentence compare? I would appreciate it if readers would post samples so that I could also see how the results compare. I know that there are plenty of people on this site who write much more elegantly than I do, but I wonder if they do so at the cost of taking longer, or if some of them also surpass me in speed.

 

Of course, the timings given are not exact, as the results will vary with the choice of pen, paper, ink, and writing space, to say nothing of how my writing hand happens to feel at the moment. But I have found by experiment on several occasions that my timings for writing this sentence tend to fall pretty consistently somewhere from 20 to 30 seconds unless I start sacrificing legibility.

 

A final note: As you will see, I am lift-averse: I write all the letters except small "i" and "j" without a lift of the pen. I suspect that this slows me down somewhat, but I really hate having to go back to cross "t"'s or "x"'s. Also, having taught myself the trick of writing these characters without a lift, I am disinclined to give up the habit!

 

 

Edited December 24, 2014 by Miles R.

[Melissa]

usually I write like in the second sample. I feel like slowing down to 25sec didn't really make a difference, and the 10sec sample was stressful and barely legible. Writing with a soft nib takes longer.

 

If I'm writing something that will be read by someone who is not me, I print like in the last sample because people tell me they can't read my cursive.

[BookCat]

This reply won't be much help: my handwriting is so illegible to everyone but me that I use a keyboard if I need to write at high speed. When at uni, my lecture notes were only read by myself, so this didn't matter.

 

Even at the highest speed, your handwriting is perfectly clear.

[Miles R.]

Thanks, Melissa and Crazy Cat Lady, for your replies. It was looking to me as though this thread would sink without a trace!

 

 

usually I write like in the second sample. I feel like slowing down to 25sec didn't really make a difference, and the 10sec sample was stressful and barely legible. Writing with a soft nib takes longer.

If I'm writing something that will be read by someone who is not me, I print like in the last sample because people tell me they can't read my cursive.

 

Your general point applies to me too: slowing down beyond a certain point effects no improvement to the writing. But you speak of "slowing down to 25 seconds," which implies that your normal timing for that sentence is less than that. For me, it lies in the range of 25 to 30 seconds.

 

I can't imagine why anyone should have any difficulty reading your cursive writing, unless they are people who habitually neither write nor read cursive at all—as, alas, is true of a growing segment of the population. The only possible source of difficulty in reading that I see is that you put the bar of the small "t" above the stem of the letter, which makes it look as though it is supposed to be an "i" with a circumflex accent (î) rather than a "t." But the fact that taking 25 seconds seems too slow to you confirms my suspicion that I am writing in an inefficient way.

Edited January 1, 2015 by Miles R.

[DonLeone]

13-15 seconds for The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

 

It seems I write faster if the font is smaller. I can shave off a solid 2-3 seconds.

 

Typing the line takes me 5-7 seconds or a 50% decrease in time. However, research shows you don't retain as much information compared to writing it with a pen. But I digress. I tend to talk about notetaking a lot.

 

It was 13 seconds with Pilot Falcon, SF, cross blue ink on cheap notebook paper, cursive, better than doctor script.

[Bookman]

Thank you for the opportunity to learn something about my own handwriting that I didn't know. I just tried "The quick brown fox" etc. a few times with a few pens. My best result was with my Waterman Phileas F. At 30 seconds I got a result nearly identical to my writing shown in the photo below, which is from my travel journal, and it shows my normal writing, what I produce when I'm not racing or paying attention to time.

 

 

 

I sped up, got a sloppy result, and looked at the elapsed time: 25 seconds. I sped up to a ridiculous-for-me pace, it looked like a drunk wrote it: 20 seconds. The difference in my penmanship between 20 and 30 seconds for "The quick brown fox" etc. was much greater than I would have anticipated. And what I lost just shaving 5 seconds off that sentence wasn't worth the effort to save time.

 

[Melissa]

Thanks, Melissa and Crazy Cat Lady, for your replies. It was looking to me as though this thread would sink without a trace!

 

 

 

 

Your general point applies to me too: slowing down beyond a certain point effects no improvement to the writing. But you speak of "slowing down to 25 seconds," which implies that your normal timing for that sentence is less than that. For me, it lies in the range of 25 to 30 seconds.

 

I can't imagine why anyone should have any difficulty reading your cursive writing, unless they are people who habitually neither write nor read cursive at all—as, alas, is true of a growing segment of the population. The only possible source of difficulty in reading that I see is that you put the bar of the small "t" above the stem of the letter, which makes it look as though it is supposed to be an "i" with a circumflex accent (î) rather than a "t." But the fact that taking 25 seconds seems too slow to you confirms my suspicion that I am writing in an inefficient way.

I think my normal timing for that sentence would be slightly less than 20s, probably around the 18s or so.

 

I think the issue is mostly that people don't read much cursive these days. Most of my friends who complain about my handwriting haven't written in cursive since primary school. And since tutors are stuck with marking hundreds of reports/exams, I figure it's best to make their life as easy as possible and just print.

 

I thinks another thing that affects speed is the size of the writing, I usually write really small, and I find I write slower when I write larger.