
Why My Handwriting Sucks: A Typographical Analysis - hellomaggiema
https://medium.com/@manibatra23/why-my-handwriting-sucks-a-typographical-analysis-9e0fc4756b71
======
muraiki
I recently started working on fixing my handwriting, which was often so bad
that I couldn't even read my own notes. I found an excellent free resource,
Handwriting Repair: The Italic Approach
[http://briem.net/8/2/205.html](http://briem.net/8/2/205.html) After going
through the beginning worksheets a few times, I've already made a tremendous
improvement.

The overwrite with zigzag and trace zigzag approach actually works quite well,
even though it seems repetitive at first. But you're learning to change the
easy-to-mess-up circular movements that most handwriting uses into oval
movements, which can be executed more quickly despite looking more
consistently nice.

Something else helpful for me was getting an inexpensive Pilot Metropolitan
fountain pen. With this pen I don't need to exert any pressure at all; the use
of pressure is something that messes up your handwriting, and of course also
leads to hand cramps.

When you first begin to correct your handwriting, you will need to write more
slowly. But as your proficiency increases, so will your speed.

~~~
soared
Instead of imrpoving my existing (sloppy but fast) handwriting I learned a
secondary way to write that is much slower but very clear and easy to read. It
was fun and I'm glad I did it. I only did about 20 minutes of practice
everyday for a week or so.

I chose architect style handwriting and it looks really cool. I only use it
for filling out forms or other similar things where other people really need
to see every letter.

[https://www.quora.com/Why-do-architects-tend-to-write-in-
sim...](https://www.quora.com/Why-do-architects-tend-to-write-in-similar-
lettering-handwriting-Is-it-a-stylistic-thing-or-is-there-a-practical-reason)

~~~
jlg23
At least in Western Europe architects have to follow an industry standard that
governs fonts and stroke width (afaik 2 different widths, depending on
context). 40 years ago, learning to write in this style was even part of the
curriculum in the GDR.

~~~
rbonvall
Note that handwriting styles are not called _fonts_ , but _hands_. A font is
basically a set of prefabricated letters.

------
beeftime
Weird, random bolding and italicizing? Spaces on both side of every
parenthesis? A space before punctuation... sometimes?

This guy's typing sucks too.

~~~
galacticpony
I was about to write the same comment. Since you beat me to it, I'll just
point out that this guy really should put on a proper shirt.

------
vanderZwan
> _I am sure the last time I wrote I did it as a novelty. I did it because I
> was penning down something that held a certain value to me or maybe I just
> thought that actually writing it down will make me feel more connected to
> it. Even as I type down the word “writing” the first thought that comes to
> my mind is actually typing on a keyboard. Whenever I have to write something
> down I use a KEYBOARD._

This honestly sounds like a humblebrag to me.

Typing on a keyboard is not a drop-in replacement for the act of writing by
hand. It has very different effects on the brain and how it engages with what
is being written.

If I'm working out difficult problems, in the early stages I much prefer a
combination of doodling and handwriting over typing stuff on the computer. It
actively engages the mind in a way the keyboard does not. Typing really only
works best when the problem solution is already present semi-finished thoughts
in my head and just needs to be fixated in external symbols, with a little bit
of restructuring along the way.

Basically: I prefer handwriting for thinking, and typing for transcription.

~~~
SamBam
I'm not sure why it sounds like a humblebrag to you. I believe _many_ people,
especially those of us on our computers all day, go days at a time without
writing with a pen once, except maybe to scrawl their names on receipts.

I used to keep a pad next to my desk to work out difficult programming
concepts. I probably used it once a month at most.

I write more now because I try to keep handwritten notes of to-dos, but even
then I had to force myself to use a pen, and not one of the million digital
note-taking apps.

It's not a question of whether one is better than the other, it's just that
keyboards and phones are under the fingers of a large segment of the
population for the majority of the day, so people don't even think to use
pens.

~~~
taeric
Agreed that it isn't a humblebrag. The humblebrag, to me, was that the
person's handwriting wasn't that bad. :)

~~~
manibatra
Haha you are kind. I assure it looks much more prettier enlarged on a screen.

------
jawbone3
My god, programmer typography! It's like the author only just discovered font
weigths. The only possible defence for using bold allcaps five times in a
paragraph is if it is a name that is being typeset that way. here there is no
such defence and the author deploys a further five instances of bold italics
in the very first paragraph, the one small mercy being not deploying any bold
all caps underline or making itrain typefaces.

I honesty felttired just looking at that text.

~~~
kelnos
I know this is meta, and generally frowned upon, but can we please discuss
content rather than presentation? Ranting about presentation does not change
anything or meaningfully add to the discussion.

As an aside: I love how you're criticizing, but in your post made (at least)
one spelling error ("weigths"), missed a space between two words
("felttired"), missed capitalizing the first word of a sentence ("here"), and
spelled/spaced two words differently ("allcaps" and "all caps"). (Also I'm not
sure if "itrain" is a word; Google didn't help in deciphering that one.)
Pot/kettle/black.

~~~
setr
tbf the topic is "Typographical Analysis"

If the author displays a weakness in a Typographical practice/understanding,
it's difficult to continue believing his "analysis" has real value; it would
obviously be limited to at the very least those shown weaknesses, as well as
the set of weaknesses we haven't yet seen.

And when the shown fault is at the basics of typographical best practice, then
it is likely not worth reading any of the analysis; any statement used is
likely a misunderstanding of the real properties of it. And given that this is
targeted at people _not_ well-versed in typography, then it is probably a case
of a novice teaching a novice, and thus any presented understanding is likely,
at best, a poor understanding of the subject, and at worst, incorrect.

When discussing typography, I think its pretty fair to judge the presentation
as well as the content, since its a metric of their authority on the subject
matter.

Not fair, however, is that the grandparent's subject is typography, and afaik,
your criticism is not related to typography. Particularly in that in the
article is very distinctly _edited_ to use typographical "features", and fails
to use them well (imo), a result of misunderstanding the properties of the
features; whereas the grandparent is very distinctly _not edited_ , and
clearly a result of typing too fast. The grandparent is _not_ thinking about
typography in his presentation; The article is. So the article can be judged
(it tried and failed), whereas the grandparent can really only be criticized
for a lack of caring in the first place.

~~~
kelnos
The author isn't really discussing typography as the main focus, though. He is
talking about handwriting, and how it could possibly _relate_ to typography.
I'm not trying to be picky or pedantic here; I think the distinction is
actually important. He need not be an expert in typography (or even display
good sense in presentation around typographic elements) to take a look at his
handwriting and find inconsistencies between it and some common metrics used
in typography.

One need not even agree with his conclusion/belief that you can make your
handwriting better by post-processing it to make it have consistent letter
spacing, line heights, etc. I think just the idea of doing those comparisons
is interesting, and one is free to draw their own conclusions. Just the idea
of making those comparisons made it a worthwhile read to me, because I
wouldn't have thought of it on my own. Sure, you can disagree that it was a
worthwhile read for you, but that doesn't make it somehow ok to trash the
guy's article like the great-grandparent did.

I think what I'm getting at boiled down, is this: be nice. The original author
had an idea about something, looked into it, and wrote up some of his findings
and opinions. You can disagree with those opinions, or even the methodology
around the findings, and it's fine to express that disagreement, but the
great-grandparent did so in a fundamentally rude way, which I think is well
beneath HN's standards for quality, respectful discourse. It amounted to
little more than an ad hominem attack.

------
taeric
I have notepads where I wrote that sentence. I didn't make the mistake of
forgetting that the second animal is a dog. I did forgot to include an "s" in
my sentence, though. Somewhat embarrassing when I realized I was writing a
sentence to include all letters, but didn't include all letters.

I am still a fan of writing. More, drawing some diagrams, which I am terrible
at. It really takes an intuitive sense of understanding space as you are
drawing. All too often, I have drawn the boxes, without the space for names
inside of them. It is frustrating.

~~~
manibatra
I wrote it over two days and didn't notice the missing animal. Color me
embarrassed. Honestly I was not a fan of writing, typing being much faster.
But a chance reading of the book "Thinking with type" and a big discussion
with a friend about how handwriting is unique to a person made think of my
handwriting as a type. Thanks for reading!!

~~~
taeric
As I said, I went quite a few days writing before I realized I had my fox
"jumped" instead of "jumps". It was only one day when it occurred to me I did
not have any practice writing an S that I stopped to think why. :)

And thanks for doing the post. Fun read!

------
AkirIkasu
The irony of this is that the only problem he really fixed was making his
handwriting more regular. While it does help, the real problem is his
malformed glyphs. His lowercase 'q' has such a large tail that it adds an
extra space between the word, and his 'o' is written slightly different every
time he writes it. The base of his problems seems to be that he writes with a
mixture of different scripts, and if he taught himself to write with just one
of them, he would be much better off.

~~~
manibatra
Thanks for the constructive criticism. Coming to think of it I did modify my
writing style completely 7-8 years ago. Went from cursive to not so much. Some
of it clearly lingered. So I will take a note of that. Like an another comment
pointed out learning about glyphs will go a long way and that's next on my to
do list.

------
robinson-wall
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy... fox?

~~~
owlninja
I am ashamed to admit that it took a long time before I learned that sentence
(with dog) is used because it has every letter of the alphabet.

------
libertymcateer
>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy _dog_.

That was bugging the heck out of me.

~~~
manibatra
Author here. And to think of it that I wrote it over two days. Two days. Made
a couple of my friends read it. I am embarrassed and will fix it by tonight.

~~~
libertymcateer
No worries!!

Also, don't let all the very tough feedback on here get you down. Tough crowd
on here!

~~~
manibatra
I will not . I am just truly grateful that some people took the time out to
read something I wrote. Amazing !!

------
pacaro
So leaving aside the fact that tools for converting your handwriting into a
font already exist. The way the Latin alphabet is typeset is really inimical
to this. Arabic is a much better match, because the font shaping engines
understand that letters have different forms in different parts of a word, and
that the strokes need to align. Maybe you could do this with learning pairs
and glyph substitutions, but I doubt many people are going to have the
patience

~~~
manibatra
Author here. I agree the tools do exist. Learning about typography ( the
technical details ) is very much outside of my comfort zone. Plus I am
learning a lot while deploying this as an app. Is there is any book/resource
you could point me towards to further my understand? Thanks.

------
CodeSheikh
CORRECTION: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

