Handwriting

The key to having “nice” handwriting is not really legibility (on a per character basis), but to have consistency. Sure, when you see someone else’s handwriting, the sight of her “d”s may startle you at first, but after reading a few sentences, all of that will come in a flash. I wouldn’t even say the characters have to be consistent. It’s more of the surrounding shape that we recognize—character details are only there when our first glance confuses us.

I think people’s handwriting changes overtime. It’s like a hairstyle. You grow into it. And just like how science describes evolution, there are steps; periods of time where there is drastic change. The last drastic change in my handwriting came in middle school. I remember wanting to change how I write because we had to write so much in our history class. I had two goals in mind:

1. I wanted to be able to write without looking down.
2. I wanted to be able to write quickly.

Legibility would be nice, but at the time, it wasn’t a strict requirement. It’s hard to talk about the first point because with practice, I actually became quite good at this. However, over time, it’s utility diminished and now I don’t think I can even hold a pencil without looking at it.

The second point has stuck with me for whatever reason. In order to make myself write quicker, I changed how I wrote all my letters so that I could write them in a single stroke, without doubling back. I wrote my b’s like 6’s, a’s and d’s like backward 6’s. Everything shrunk vertically so my strokes were shorter, and I wrote slightly above the rule so I wouldn’t get bugged if I was slightly off on my alignment.

(In reality, my handwriting isn’t really that streamlined, especially after taking math classes. My middle school history teacher taught me the “correct” way to write 8’s (drawing 2 circles) and I’ve never changed that. I also distinguish between a normal x, and in math contexts.)

I would like to think that this is partly due to my computer science mindset. I can’t think of too many other disciplines where one can change their working environment so quickly. Good engineers love good build processes. One thing I particularly like about working with my grad students, is that everything gets done right. I found that a bit startling. For some reason I always imagined academic code as being sloppy, but in reality, it’s the other way around.

I worked on my signature in middle school too and it hasn’t changed much since then. In case you’re wondering, that was optimized for gangsta-ness.