When I was at school, we used fountain pens only (Hifra), and spent a great deal of classroom time practising our cursive. Each letter had to be light on the way up, dark on the way down. Being left-handed and smearing ink all over my page and my hand, I was told to use my right hand. My right-handed writing was awful. As soon as I could, I moved back to writing with my left hand and making a point of writing well. I print 99% of the time rather than using cursive. My writing has changed over the years, becoming bigger and rounder.I am not sure what that means, given that graphologists argue that personality can be seen through handwriting. My handwriting also tends to be untidy when I write bookings in my calendar, and very neat when I write notes for my students. I have been told several times that I have ‘teacher’s handwriting’.
Nowadays, people write less often by hand, and find it harder to read older cursive. But me, I love seeing gorgeous handwriting. Not calligraphy, not fancy ‘fonts’, not signwriting – just plain neat handwriting. I found this BoredPanda article with 110 examples. My absolute favourites are these:
As try as hard as I can, my hand writing is never neat. I used to get told off for it at primary school, I was kept in to practice it. It never made any difference.
It wasn’t until a few years ago I realised the reason. Because I don’t see in true 3D (stereoscopic vision) I have problems predicting where the pen will end up when I lift off the paper to move to the next word!
While I was still teaching I dropped off some papers to our new school secretary. One glance at my handwriting and she said “Catholic school, right?, and then she showed me some of her writing and we both had a good laugh. We were of a certain age and remembered how the nuns took nothing but perfection, or else . . .
This was a great piece Janet. If only more wrote like the examples.