My handwriting sucks.
In high school, I learned Stenography (Shorthand) - precisely the Gabelsberger Noe method - which is a very cool way of writing super fast with a mysterious secret "alphabet". Oh god, I feel so old now.
I loved it and I continued to use it afterward to take notes quickly. Maybe I wasn't writing 100% like that but still using lots of abbreviations for the most common words.
Anyway, I never had nice calligraphy but all my attempts at writing fast and my decreasing use of normal writing made my handwriting worse and worse.
As soon as I started working, I began writing less and less. The fact that my writing looked like a mess did not bother me anymore, I was typing all day after all. And to take notes... either I use a voice recorder or I type on my laptop ( learned typing too - and even participated in competitions back then).
Recently I also tried out Live Transcribe which is amazing.
The fact that my architectural designs and UML looked like crap on the whiteboard or on my notepad did not really bother me: they were sketches improvised during meetings, anyway.
Then I went to a couple of interviews where I add to solve a coding task on the whiteboard, it looked horrible. Therefore I decided to practice coding challenges on whiteboard with a colleague.
Even though the code was good on both sides, his solution was - literally - more readable and elegant.
Then I accidentally read this illuminating article and I realize I had to do something with my handwriting skills.
For a couple of weeks, I woke up earlier and practiced handwriting
First on a notepad ( i felt in primary school again, pages and pages of a b c...) then on a whiteboard.
It is not yet perfect, and when in a hurry I tend to go back to my usual terrible writing, but all in all, I am very happy with my improvement.
What do you think?
Photo by Deleece Cook on Unsplash
Top comments (2)
The funny thing is, I have a similar hand writing as your old one, which was enforced on me in school. I started to transition to a more plain writing years ago naturally. I always thought, I am an idiot, transitioning to a simple version of hand writing instead of working on the enhancement of my existing one :D
When I have to take quick notes, I fall back to the ugly one, though. Not sure if you can learn to write like this super fast.
But the second version is definitely the way to go and again it resembles my current style as well :)
Your story isn’t rare.
As a handwriting teacher/remediator, I often hear from programmers who need better handwriting.
To improve your progress and results, here are the teach-yourself links that I most often recommend:
graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/09/08/opinion/OPED-WRITING.1.pdf
briem.net
italic-handwriting.org
studioarts.net/calligraphy/italic/hwlesson.html
BFHhandwriting.com
handwritingsuccess.com
Lexercise.com
HandwritingThatWorks.com
freehandwriting.net/educational.html
youtu.be/nvVgoo6it1g