Learning to Write

Since I’m hoping to make a habit of uploading my handwriting to the internet I figured I should try to learn how to write a bit more nicely. Also that first essay killed my hand so getting it to flow more would help ease the pain for future writing. However this was not as easy as I thought. Whilst I did mainly handwrite at school, I’ll be the first to admit it was ugly. So I went down the rabbit-hole [sic] of trying to find a handwriting style that worked for me and looked good.

Unsurprisingly there are many “methods” out there: Spencerian, Champion, Palmer, Bailey, the list goes on. I realised though that learning these would not help me have nicer handwriting. I’m sure Mr Palmer’s method was great back in it’s [sic] hey-day but I found it too [sic] be basically illegible because I’ve never really seen it before. Instead I just picked out some stuff from various places to incorporate. Here are the rough principles I devised to help me choose what to include

1. A letter should be one stroke;
2. A letter should be legible;
3. A letter shoud [sic] be fast to write;
4. A letter should look nice.

So what changes did I make ? Well, for lowercase letters not many. Here’s what’s different now:

f $\rightarrow$ f	q $\rightarrow$ q	r $\rightarrow$ r	s $\rightarrow$ s	t $\rightarrow$ t
v $\rightarrow$ v	x $\rightarrow$ x	z $\rightarrow$ z

I said it wasn’t many. To be honest I’m not totally convinced by them all, especially ‘r’. It’s grown on me though, and looks normal in most words although I feel it looks pretty bad in words like “write” ironically enough. “z” instead of “z” was wild at first to me but it is much faster and again looks better as part of a word, like “crazy”.

So what about capitals? Well here they almost all changed (no doubt you’ve already admired my “A”). This was necessitated by the fact that I didn’t used [sic] to join capitals with words but for the sake of fluidity I plan to start (and have done so in this writing). Here is a full list of my new capitals.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I wouldn’t say I’m totally happy with this iteration. You may have noticed “I” has changed already, and I don’t like how “J” descends below the horizontal (maybe I’ll make this new “I” my “J” actually looking at it now). Also “T” looks similar to “I” (whatever that letter ends up being).

Has making these changes actually solved my original problems? Well, my hand still hurts so I’ll have to let you decide if this looks any better or not.

On retrospect this was probably quite a dry read, especially the typed version. The UK just had (another) P.M. resign which rather dominated my mind but (for now) I’m determined not to write about politics – I want to focus on the more fun things that are going on in my life.

Addendum: “I” is now “I” and “J” is “J” – for the time being anyway!