
Ask HN: How do I improve my handwriting? - uptownfunk
Has anyone successfully hacked handwriting improvement? I write left-handed and my left hand hooks so that it&#x27;s above the line when I write.
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Jugurtha
When I was a child, I had to do what we called at home "les pages d'écriture"
("the writing pages"). Before I was "allowed" to go out and play (a figure of
speech, I had every liberty to roam anywhere), I had to write the alphabet on
ten pages, following a canonic form. All had to look good, no cheating or I
had to write two good pages for one bad page.

This is the "process" my siblings enforced with me, as our parents enforced
with them before I was born.

I had new teachers in primary school accuse me of not being the one who did my
homework because it was an adult's handwriting. I had to write in front of
them to disculpate myself. My handwriting now is not fabulous, but it's
legible.

My point is that you can find a canonic form and go at it as you would
everything. Systematic improvement, tight feedback loop, continuous
corrections.

PS: The "process" was adapted and writing was just a part of it: I had to read
texts from books and magazines, look up words I didn't understand in a
dictionary (Larousse 89), write them down and learn them, then write a summary
of the text, and present it in front of one of my siblings, my sisters (oral
summary) and they would test my understanding (the articles were from Science
& Vie and dealt with science and engineering, the books were classics in
French, and I would try to the best of my ability to summarize and reason by
analogy and share my mental model).

This started before going through K-12 and was in addition to homework.

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Jtsummers
I won't say I hacked it, but I did improve my handwriting. It took deliberate
practice over a period of months.

I'm right-handed, though, and so for English and other left-to-right languages
my experience is different than yours will be. I have noticed that my boss
(left-handed) writes top-to-bottom which may be a useful trick for you. She
has the top of the page turned to her right and essentially writes the
characters "sideways" as she goes down the line. This may help with the way
you hook your hand (you wouldn't have to focus on changing your hand position,
just the direction of movement as you write and how you draw the characters).

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mtmail
There's a subreddit where users give feedback.

"Is your handwriting terrible? Tired of being embarrassed by your penmanship?
Come here and trade tips on ways you can improve your handwriting, talk about
italics vs cursive, or share your progress pics."

[https://www.reddit.com/r/penmanship/](https://www.reddit.com/r/penmanship/)

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AnimalMuppet
I found it helped me to slow down a bit, and to think about (focus on) the
movement of the head of the pen/pencil.

If you're left-handed, you might try a left-handed pen. (No, really. There are
such things. They are geometrically identical to normal pens, but they contain
faster-drying ink.)

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deauth
try train via look at the fonts at fonts.google.com :)

