First Published: 2023 April 14
Last time I talked about my handwriting, I made the claim that the speed my handwriting changes was slowing down over time. While I think that may have been true then, a large part of that had to do with the fact that I had been working in the same journal for nearly two years.1
Unlike that journal, the journal I began around the time of my last post only lasted a few months. Also unlike before, I had no issues finding a new way to change my penmanship. It ended up being a two-fold change.
The first major change is that my handwriting has become much tighter than even before. I attribute a large part of that to the fact that I got 0.3 mm mechanical pencils for Christmas, which give a significantly smaller line, especially how I use them.2
The other major change was the deliberate change that I made. I apparently didn’t talk about this last time, but I made a goal with myself to change my handwriting in some obvious and notable way each journal.3 In my first journal, this meant writing in all caps.
In my second journal, it was all caps with the first letter of each word capitalized. In the third, I think I added my double letters.4 In the fourth I stopped writing every other line, shrinking the vertical space on my page.
And, as I mentioned last time, in my fifth5 journal, I made overhanging letters. I said then that I would do that with “t,i,s,c,g,j,f still unsure of b,p,r”. The list is now slightly different. I do it with B,C,E,F,G,I,J,P,R,S, and T.
Since I didn’t alphabetize it last time, the differences are as follows. I became sure of B, changed the way that I wrote my E so that it overhung better6. I became sure of P and R. All in all, not a huge difference between the first pages and the last.
In my new journal, all that remains, but now I write it with a slant. I’m still not sure what angle to my vertical strokes is ideal, but I think I tend to be somewhere in the fifteen to twenty degree range. Comments this week have included 7, “looks like a medieval scribe’s handwriting”, and “it kind of looks like Arabic.”
I like how it looks, though I do think it’s funny that I went from messy and illegible to pretty and illegible. Maybe my next journal’s handwriting change will be legibility to a broad audience.
It might be nearly three, but my journals are far away, and I don’t feel like finding one for certain right now.↩︎
rotating the pencil in my hand every few words so that the sharpest point is always what I write with.↩︎
when asked why, I often respond with my joking (but truly and legitimately held belief) statement that people should set arbitrary goals and then strive to achieve them↩︎
assuming that I have five. Otherwise ignore this one and treat all the numbers after it as one smaller↩︎
again, assuming there were five before my newest↩︎
i.e. made it less like an epsilon↩︎
looks like elvish↩︎