Cleaning Up My Handwriting: The End of an Unannounced Challenge

I have horrible penmanship. It's always been horrible. Back in elementary school, when it sat on my report cards along with things like "gets along with others", my otherwise glowing grades and "Exceeds Expectations" was a glaring exception. Under penmanship, it pretty much always read: "Needs Improvement".

Eventually, they stopped grading me on it, but from there it actually got worse. As I entered college and had nearly everything carrying a requirement of being typed, it both continued to get worse when I actually did write things down (because no one else was reading it and criticizing it) and the culture surrounding me enabled me to keep heading further and further down this path.

I started feeling more exposed recently when I wanted to hand-write some thank you notes and write a paragraph in a birthday card. It's downright embarrassing and, with the 1st of the year, I decided to do something about it.

I wasn't sure how far I'd get on it and so I didn't mention it on this site. Similarly, despite being convinced of the benefits of doing this, and feeling embarrassed by what I had, I still felt *really* weird doing penmanship exercises. I pretty much kept my activities on this under wraps for all of January.

After looking at some of the materials online and in books for teaching handwriting, I ended up working on something fairly close to "standard" italic handwriting. It seemed the most reasonable approach for an adult to take. It doesn't have nearly as many wasted strokes as the cursive I was taught as a kid, but still made the kinds of connections I was already making between letters in my chicken scratching.

I put in about 2 hours each weekend and made an attempt to use my "new" writing whenever I needed to write something down during the month.

A month or so into this, I thought I'd share my results. At the moment, it's not as neat as it can be when writing REALLY slowly, but the samples were written fast enough to be useful in real life. That means that I can write like the "After" for real at this point.

Here's the text I used for my before and after samples. It's a poem by Stephen Crane that I've always liked.

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
-Stephen Crane

Here's what my handwriting looked like at the beginning of the year.

You can imagine how difficult it is to read that 6 months or a year after you write it down. The letters aren't the same from word to word, some are on top of others, and others are little more than slightly darker spots on a line.

And, here's what it looks like now after 30 days of working on it. I used a book I picked up at Amazon: Write Now: The Complete Program For Better Handwriting as the guide for practice. It felt a bit silly as an adult to be tracing letters, but I think it was good for retraining the muscles.

I'm still going to keep working on it a bit here and there as an ongoing project. Given that it's now no longer humiliating to share handwritten notes and those of you who have to stare at a whiteboard that I'm writing on are no longer subject to the punishing experience you were before, I think further increases in speed and legibility are definitely feasible. I've also got plenty of room for training the muscle memory for words I'm not used to writing regularly.

Overall, this is one of the better 30 Day Challenges I've done. I'm really happy with the results.