This entry comes courtesy of asciident, though most of it has nothing to do with.. her?

[conuly]

Way over on linguaphiles, they're discussing handwriting. And asciident said that she thinks most people who complain about their handwriting are modest, something else, or unwilling to put in the effort to change their handwriting.

I'll be the first one to say that I could change my handwriting if I really tried. Instead, I latched onto typing big time when I realized that I never had to write anything ever again if I didn't want to. In those rare cases where it looks like I do, I can usually get the other person to write down their email or phone number instead. And then promise to email them so they have mine. No muss, no fuss, no ink on my hand.

The amount of effort required to make my handwriting legible? Well, it's slow, and a bit painful for my poor hand, but it's definitely do-able. The amount of effort required to give me an adult handwriting? Oy vey.

Twelve+ years in the public school system gave me handwriting that's somewhat legible, if I remember to make it so. Part of the blame for this has to go towards the teachers, whose attempts at teaching me how to write involved: passing me books and telling me to "do some exercises in your spare time", showing me what the finished product looked like, but not the way it was written, trying to forbid print in the classroom (brilliant maneuver, considering that my cursive is even slower, more painful, and less legible than my print, and that at the time I couldn't even print with any reliability), and at times openly mocking my handwriting (a move which should go down in the annals of pedagogy as a really bad idea). So, basically I had to, like, teach myself.

This usually isn't a problem. I mean, the other kids suffering through this misguided attempt at education came out fine, so why didn't I?

Maybe it's because I'm a lefty. Everybody knows lefties have bad handwriting, right? In my 8th grade English class, the three kids with the worst handwriting were lefties. That's 75% of the lefty population! (The fourth, Andrew Conrad, had the neatest handwriting of anybody I've ever met, excluding possibly his father, the doctor.)

But other lefties still have age-appropriate handwriting. Mine looks like a child's, no joke. (This is why I hate it. Anybody can have messy handwriting, but at least people don't think that it's forged by an erudite kid.)

Well, in the end, it doesn't matter why my handwriting is screwed up, it just is. And I've got my choices. I can live with embarrassing handwriting (um, no thanks), I can work around it (yay), or I can work to improve it.

Based on my attempts to stop spilling food, to cut foods neatly, and to draw, I'd say that the amount of effort required for this would just about equal the amount of effort required to move a smallish-sized mountain. And that's effort every time I write. It wouldn't decrease just because I could do it neatly, I'd have to expend the same amount of effort each and every time I put a pen in my hand.

So. If I stopped thinking about what I was writing, put all my energy into forming letters, and was willing to sacrifice most of my life to practice, I could have nice, adult handwriting.

Or I could just type.

Weirdly, I type a good 90+wpm, with no real mistakes, despite the fact that I have admittedly poor fine motor skills in general. And typing is easy.

So, no, I'm not willing to take the effort to improve my handwriting. It's just not worth it. And that's okay.

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

I too latched onto typing big time. My brother was diagnosed with dysgraphia, but they never tested me, because my parents were like that. So, I suspect I have it too. My handwriting is nearly identical to his. I started typing in first grade, because we had to repeat the assignment if it wasn't legible, and my teacher said printing out homework was fine if I chose to.

My handwriting isn't that horrible, and I studied calligraphy so I could learn how to write legibly. But there's no way to avoid the issue that every so often, my hand will jerk beyond my control. And every so often when I tell it to go down, it goes up, or vice versa. So I have problems with letters like p,b,d,q.

I also think I was supposed to be a lefty, but I'm a fair bit ambidextrous. When I was young, I asked a teacher, "Which hand am I supposed to write with?" and she (much to my annoyance for the rest of my life) said, "the right". Gee thanks. So, instead of developing whichever one was better at it, I wrote only with my right hand for years. My writing with my left hand is roughly as good, but much, much slower. Probably because I haven't spent years practicing it. But I think I may have had better long-term results if I'd been working with my left hand. Hard to say though.

Most teachers nowadays, I hear, are trained to say something like, "Try both and see which feels more comfortable." But I just got a flat-out, "the right". And I was a good kid, so that was that, and I never asked again.