Why My Handwriting Sucks: A Typographical Analysis(medium.com)
medium.com
Why My Handwriting Sucks: A Typographical Analysis
https://medium.com/@manibatra23/why-my-handwriting-sucks-a-typographical-analysis-9e0fc4756b71
10 comments
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...
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...
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.
Note that handwriting styles are not called fonts, but hands. A font is basically a set of prefabricated letters.
I did something similar but thanks to my coworker. I was writing 'normal' like what you learn in germany in school and was unable to read it after i wrote it.
I talked about it with my coworker and he told me he changed his style (to something very similar to what you linked to).
Now i write that way and it is much better.
I talked about it with my coworker and he told me he changed his style (to something very similar to what you linked to).
Now i write that way and it is much better.
I learned to write by copying the font from my mother's high school typewriter, built in the 1920's it was older than she was.
There was no numeral 1, it was unnecessary since people just used the lower case L.
My first variable.
But my font was way out of date even for that distant decade. Looked older than newsprint of the time.
Anyway, when I got to school it was easy to learn printing the blackboard way, and some of us then did cursive writing and were promoted to third grade at the end of the year.
So for the good part of a year I did cursive but before the next September they closed that school.
It was like getting a promotion but the employer still closes beyond your control before you can even get into duty.
Well instead I had to go to a place where they would only put me in second grade since they didn't want me to be so much younger than the other kids. They did not do any writing their first year and were just going to start printing with the big pencils. There would be no cursive allowed until third grade so I went back to a year of printing instead of handwriting. It was easy to see that conformity took precedence over advancement in such an institutional environment. By the time I got to third grade I could already print faster than many adults could do longhand, I was not going back to my slow cursive, and I made it perfectly clear that I was already more advanced when I got there a year earlier. Not an encouraging academic experience, but seemingly common.
It evolved into a form of fast printing eventually toward what looked like shorthand with hieroglyphics, not readable by others at all. I still change fonts all the time.
There are no remaing samples of my actual handwriting.
So that's why my handwriting sucks. It doesn't even exist any more.
However numbers need to be so unmistakeably readable when a lot is at stake, letters too but I start with numbers.
Naturally I used the same character (a straight line) for 1 and lower case L for the longest time, even though I had started with serifs on upper case i and thoroughly dotting my lower case i's to avoid confusion. Eventually all lower case L needs a little tail. Turns out to be the lower case L is the one I could actually do without. Gotta have numbers.
Basically, I encourage conscious calligraphy or "lettering" (drafting room or comic book style) in notebooks and documents. In an international laboratory you really don't want a trailing numeral 9 being confused for a lower case G meaning grams. With cultures that cross their 7, consistency is important since often there is also an upstroke on the 1 which can throw those off who are unfamiliar. Shortening the upstroke can be a good move but you want data recording to come naturally and not require conformity for its own sake. I use an uncrossed 7 with a bold serif but not wild enough to ever be confused with a 9 myself. 4 must never be confused with A or 9, nor 8 with B, or 5 with S. Zeros are good crossed when it might be helpful. Stuff like that. It must make sense.
I never want to make people feel like bureaucracy is more important than the characters they are working with. Not a good feeling at all.
If your handwriting sucks because it's difficult for others to read or decipher, then in that case consider it a special occasion and use calligraphy.
There was no numeral 1, it was unnecessary since people just used the lower case L.
My first variable.
But my font was way out of date even for that distant decade. Looked older than newsprint of the time.
Anyway, when I got to school it was easy to learn printing the blackboard way, and some of us then did cursive writing and were promoted to third grade at the end of the year.
So for the good part of a year I did cursive but before the next September they closed that school.
It was like getting a promotion but the employer still closes beyond your control before you can even get into duty.
Well instead I had to go to a place where they would only put me in second grade since they didn't want me to be so much younger than the other kids. They did not do any writing their first year and were just going to start printing with the big pencils. There would be no cursive allowed until third grade so I went back to a year of printing instead of handwriting. It was easy to see that conformity took precedence over advancement in such an institutional environment. By the time I got to third grade I could already print faster than many adults could do longhand, I was not going back to my slow cursive, and I made it perfectly clear that I was already more advanced when I got there a year earlier. Not an encouraging academic experience, but seemingly common.
It evolved into a form of fast printing eventually toward what looked like shorthand with hieroglyphics, not readable by others at all. I still change fonts all the time.
There are no remaing samples of my actual handwriting.
So that's why my handwriting sucks. It doesn't even exist any more.
However numbers need to be so unmistakeably readable when a lot is at stake, letters too but I start with numbers.
Naturally I used the same character (a straight line) for 1 and lower case L for the longest time, even though I had started with serifs on upper case i and thoroughly dotting my lower case i's to avoid confusion. Eventually all lower case L needs a little tail. Turns out to be the lower case L is the one I could actually do without. Gotta have numbers.
Basically, I encourage conscious calligraphy or "lettering" (drafting room or comic book style) in notebooks and documents. In an international laboratory you really don't want a trailing numeral 9 being confused for a lower case G meaning grams. With cultures that cross their 7, consistency is important since often there is also an upstroke on the 1 which can throw those off who are unfamiliar. Shortening the upstroke can be a good move but you want data recording to come naturally and not require conformity for its own sake. I use an uncrossed 7 with a bold serif but not wild enough to ever be confused with a 9 myself. 4 must never be confused with A or 9, nor 8 with B, or 5 with S. Zeros are good crossed when it might be helpful. Stuff like that. It must make sense.
I never want to make people feel like bureaucracy is more important than the characters they are working with. Not a good feeling at all.
If your handwriting sucks because it's difficult for others to read or decipher, then in that case consider it a special occasion and use calligraphy.
Thanks, that is a very nice link! I'll give it a try, being a lefty with horrible handwriting.
Do you know if that font is anywhere on-line? The author suggests not focusing on the letters at first, so I was thinking: what if we make a scrambled character generator that creates work-sheets with non-words to trace? This might help with the unlearning process.
Do you know if that font is anywhere on-line? The author suggests not focusing on the letters at first, so I was thinking: what if we make a scrambled character generator that creates work-sheets with non-words to trace? This might help with the unlearning process.
The fonts (Briem Handwriting and Briem Handwriting Italic) are in the .zip package on this page:
http://briem.net/4/4201/4201_4051.html
http://briem.net/4/4201/4201_4051.html
Thanks for the awesome link!
I totally agree with writing slow. My handwriting is much worse than it shows on the post. I had to write slow to actually make it legible.
I totally agree with writing slow. My handwriting is much worse than it shows on the post. I had to write slow to actually make it legible.
Weird, random bolding and italicizing? Spaces on both side of every parenthesis? A space before punctuation... sometimes?
This guy's typing sucks too.
This guy's typing sucks too.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> go days at a time without writing with a pen once, except maybe to scrawl their names on receipts.
Sure, but would you call that "doing it as a novelty"? (in bolded italicised text no less- I find that kind of writing style horribly annoying too; as if the author trying to "idiot proof" their writing and/or distract you from other, weaker parts of it, by SHOUTING the bits they want you to focus on)
Sure, but would you call that "doing it as a novelty"? (in bolded italicised text no less- I find that kind of writing style horribly annoying too; as if the author trying to "idiot proof" their writing and/or distract you from other, weaker parts of it, by SHOUTING the bits they want you to focus on)
Thanks. The author here. It was not intended as a humblebrag like you said. I had just noticed that the only things I ever wrote where things that meant something special or something I really wanted to actuallise.
You are one step ahead of me that you are trying to write using a pen.
You are one step ahead of me that you are trying to write using a pen.
[deleted]
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.
I honesty felttired just looking at that text.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I did just learn about typography. And it was a conscious decision to just go all out and I did debate whether to keep it the way it is as it was looking at times all over the place. I just wanted to try something different. I promise I will learn.
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.
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.
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!!
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!
And thanks for doing the post. Fun read!
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.
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.
That's sorta what I was thinking. My handwriting is terrible. Sure, the irregularity of spacing, height, and width contributes, but the real reason it's hard to read what I write is because the glyphs themselves are sloppy and inconsistent.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy... fox?
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.
Yeah. It is like a spelling error in an essay about spelling.
Not great.
Not great.
>The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
That was bugging the heck out of me.
That was bugging the heck out of me.
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.
No worries!!
Also, don't let all the very tough feedback on here get you down. Tough crowd on here!
Also, don't let all the very tough feedback on here get you down. Tough crowd on here!
I will not . I am just truly grateful that some people took the time out to read something I wrote. Amazing !!
fixed.
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
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.
CORRECTION:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
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.