How to Improve Your Handwriting

Bad handwriting has easily cost at least 10-20% of my marks in academic life. Not to mention, complaints from my colleagues in the office when I write notes to explain stuff. I always wanted to improve my handwriting but never put required hours in deliberate practice. For the last 2-3 months, I have consciously put effort to improve my handwriting, and proud of myself to say that, it has immensely improved.

It involved not only good old practice but also few specific pointers which I followed. I am sharing those here which may be helpful for my blog readers.

Trick # 1: Have a proper grip: For this, I used a Lamy Safari fountain pen which was very useful. One, it is a fountain pen that slightly slows down your speed of writing which helps during practice, and second, it has a triangle-shaped grip section which helps you to learn proper pen grip. The grip where the thumb and index finger comes in inverted V shape and the pen rest flat on the middle finger. Believe me, once you use a fountain pen, you will think twice before going back to a ballpoint pen. The feeling of writing with a fountain pen is pleasantly different from a ballpoint pen and you get more options with nib sizes, ink colors, cool filling systems, etc. The line variations and ink shading you get cannot be found with a ballpoint pen. By the way, if you tend to write characters very small, use extra-fine or fine nib size so that writing does not get mangled.

Trick # 2: Learn cursive letters: Take a print out of lower case cursive letters practice sheets from online and practice each characters multiple times, a,a,a,a,a, b,b,b,b,b, and so on. I am stressing on lower case letters because of the fact that you only use the initial character in the sentence as upper case and you do not have to join in with the rest of the characters.

Trick # 3: Practice cursive patterns: Cursive handwriting requires the joining of each character (except for this rule is explained in the next trick). So practice writing inininininininini(forgot about the dot in I as of now) pattern at forty-five degree. Keep the pattern going making sure it is always joined, there is an equal length between each character, all are of the same height, width touching baseline and it is legible. Then practice 3 character words, then few 4 character words, etc.

Trick # 4: Know the few basic rules of cursive handwriting:

a) Only the initial letter in the sentence is uppercase and it does not have to join with the rest of the characters in the first word of the sentence.

b) Do not join consecutive m's, n's, mn's, uv's, For example, words like running, cunning, etc

c) Do not lift your pen to put a dot to i's and dash to t's. you can do it after completing the word. it distributes the flow.

Trick # 5: Forty-five-degree angle: I could have mentioned this as part of trick # 3 or # 4. But it needs a special mention because of its importance. The forty-five-degree angle makes it so easier to write cursive handwriting and when you turn the face of the nib slightly towards you, the pen flows very smoothly. One technique is to practice using a fountain pen with a 1.1 stub or italic nib along with a normally rounded nib.

Please leave comments and let me know, the techniques that worked for you.