Helpful Hints for Handwriting

To begin improving your handwriting, remember: Your third-grade teacher was not always right!

Your third-grade teacher — or someone else you trusted — probably told you that you must always use proper cursive letter-shapes and always, absolutely always, keep your pen on the paper from the beginning to the end of the word. However, research shows that the fastest and most legible writers break these rules.

The highest-speed, highest-legibility join only some, not all, of their letters — making only the easiest joins, skipping the rest — and tend to use print-like letter-shapes when the printed and cursive forms of a letter disagree. This helps them produce legible, accident-resistant handwriting — and you can, too.

Some tips for successful handwriting:

1. Whatever your writing style (print, cursive, or some efficient mix of the two as recommended above), you can write it much more quickly and easily if you position your paper for greatest writing ease. Your schoolteachers may have told you to place your paper vertically in the center of your desk — however, most people write much more clearly and comfortably if they move their paper a few inches to one side or the other (right-handers should move their paper to the right, left-handers to the left) so that the center of the paper sits in front of the shoulder of the writing arm. Then tilt the paper so that the left and right edges of the paper run parallel to the forearm of your writing arm.
(NOTE: if you tend to “hook” or bend your wrist in order to write — this applies to about half of the world’s left-handers and to about 1% of right-handers — then you will need to make one change to these instructions.
In your case, the top and bottom edges of the paper — not the left and right edges — need to parallel the forearm of your writing arm.)

2. Whenever a join between letters feels as if it might be difficult, or causes you to lose control, make that join in the air instead of on the paper.The two most usual culprits (worth omitting by turning them into “air-joins”) are joins involving loops (such as the joins out of g/j/y or the joins into h/k/l) and joins which require moving upwards from the writing-line into a curved shape
(such as the joins in combinations like “ma” or “sc” or “ng”)
The curves required by these troublesome joins are difficult to do well. For most people, the only way to do these joins well is to slow them down so far that they are actually slower than just picking up the pen. So simplify your script — and speed your handwriting — by letting your pen leave the paper wherever this is convenient in the move from the end of one letter to the beginning of the next.

3. When a letter will need a dot (i or j) or a cross-bar (t or x), cross or dot the letter as soon as you have finished writing it: write the letter, pick up your pen, add the dot or the cross-bar, and keep on writing. (Note that the cross-bar of t can usually become the join to the next letter.) Crossing and dotting “on the go” in this way makes sure that the dot or cross-bar is placed accurately, and it avoids the lengthy back-and-forth detour that you would otherwise need to make at the end of every word to locate every t/i/j/x and insert the dots and cross-bars in the proper places before continuing to write.