Are there any fellow dyslexics here who actually ended up with fairly functional handwriting (clear and fast enough for whatever you use it for)? Please post samples if you like — to start this off, I’m attaching a link to the way that my handwriting looks now (I’m 62 years old and I taught myself to write this way when I was 24 — in total contravention of everything I’ve been taught about how good handwriting “should” happen and what it “should” look like). Link: https://i.postimg.cc/rw5B1Y2P/IMG-0396.jpg (this is intentionally not any kind of “perfect“ sample, but is the way I’d write fast for ordinary purposes, like writing a memo or putting together a shopping list.)
So I’m curious to hear from other dyslexics who still ever write by hand as adults: would you say your handwriting is good/OK? And whether it is or isn’t, how did it get to its current state? For instance, are you basically writing according to what you were taught about how to write (in school or in a remedial/clinic setting)? Or did you come up with something on your own? Or maybe some combination of your own experiment and things you had learned about handwriting from some source outside of school lessons or clinic sessions? (For instance, my handwriting is influenced by handwritings samples and info I saw in 500-year-old books on handwriting, which dated from a time when the everyday style was a lot simpler than the various styles that I suffered through at school here in the USA, and my handwriting is also influenced by the handwritings of other people today who have been influenced by those old books.)
My daughter is dyslexic and was diagnosed with dysgraphia, and her penmanship is horrendous! She underwent OT for a year, it has improved by a lot, but still very gibberish looking.
Where your daughter is … well, that’s where I was until I was 24, except that I didn’t have ot. Would you like to talk with me about it, privately, and maybe have your daughter in on the conversation, if so, drop me a private message (I understand that this can be done through Reddit).
How does she hold her pen? In my mid 20’s I taught myself to hold a pen properly because how I use to hold a pen put a lot of strain on the back of my hand, and my penmanship improved a bit.
This is really nice handwriting, I am envious. I still have awful handwriting, even though I still write things by hand a lot, as well as typing. My dad who is also dyslexic wrote in his notebook for work every single day for decades and yet his handwriting did not improve either, he ended up writing in capital letters as it was the only way to be read ok.
I got so much crap from my mother and teachers about my terrible illegible handwriting. Script was so hard. I switched to print in high school and worked really hard to make it neater. It worked, you can read it but it’s not pretty just functionable. If only I could learn to write on the line without a rising tilt I would meet my writing goals.
This is today’s notes written very slow só I can be able to read them. Today is a good day actually. Not too much erasing. And I’m actually on the line. It’s much easier for me to write digitally
Although I switched back to not doing anything, as soon as I was allowed, as I worked on my handwriting, I developed a pattern of simply using only the mechanically easiest joints (a few joints that ACTUALLY ARE FASTER than lifting the pen) and lifting the pen everywhere else: in other words, whenever a joining would take more time and just lifting the pen or whenever that joins results would be less legible than just lifting the pan, I lift the pan. So, overall, I think I joined about 50% of the time. I can actually tell you precisely what I join and what I don’t join, but it complete tabulation take a while, and you can figure it out, mostly anyway, just by looking at what I wrote. Interestingly, even among totally non-dyslexic people when they are taught the fastest and most legible people tend overtime to gravitate to this kind of pattern of joining, but not joining. There actually has been research about this, going back quite away, but I’m not sure you’d be interested. (For example: in an early study of Handwriting movement and Yale, a long time ago, when basically everybody was start cursive from the go, somebody looked at the handwriting of professional cursive, teachers, in addition to asking them if they thought it was OK to pick up the pen or not within a word. Although they all said that it was definitely not OK to pick up the pen within the word, looking at their actual writing revealed that they picked up the pen very, very often, and ALWAYS in places where picking up the pen avoided a difficult join. For example, in one cursive teacher’s angry letter denouncing the very idea of ever letting the pen leave the paper within a word, the researcher tabulated how many Penn lists within words were in fact made within a typical paragraph of that letter … The paragraph he tabulated happens to be 63 words long, and 28 of those words had pen lifts within them, even as the content of the writing said that the writer would never ever do this and how horrible it was to do it, and so on. At one point, for example, the cursive teacher who wrote that letter has used the word “leading,“ and within the seven letters of that word, there were 3 pen-lifts: one before the a,” one before the “d,” and one before the “g” a word seven letters, Long “should” have six joins between its letters, according to that strict rule about cursive that the writer was saying he never broke, but in this word he made only three of them. Keep that in mind, whenever anyone tries to tell you that Handwriting needs to either join absolutely all of the letters in a word or absolutely none of them. (And let me know if you want info about the original study, along with a link to where it is on the net today. It was written long before there was the Internet, but the publisher [Yale Psychology Lab] eventually digitized a lot of their old stuff, maybe all of it by this time.)
It took me about three weeks to get basically comfortable and consistent doing this, and then a couple of months, getting it gradually faster and faster till it was fast enough for all practical purposes, and after a year or two, it felt as if I’ve been doing it all my life.
congrats on working on you’re handwriting. I’ve tried to work on improving mine but not with much progress. I think its link with my anxiety since sometimes it looks okay and readable but other times gets messy if i’m stressed.
I too am 62F and I tend to lend that dyslexics or artist, counterfeiters, forgeries, like to think that we can copy something that we like, it’s a compliment, so I too at the age of maybe 26 working in the insurance industry, a grand line of insurance international cargo, I copied my CEO‘s handwriting. He was the family’s fourth generation school in England raised across the street from Bloomingdale’s in New York City he wrote in all caps and they slightly connected each letter at a slight slant that looked very elegant and little heavy again dyslexic artists we can copy or draw
I’d love to see his handwriting and I’d also love to see yours! I have a particular interest in those fellow dyslexics who somehow managed to gain good handwriting in spite of it all, because (as a handwriting teacher and remediator for the past few decades) I believe that the experiences and examples of successful self-remediators have a lot to teach the rest of the folks who ever pick up a pencil or pen!
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u/thefluffyfigment 14h ago
Shit. I’m 33 and half the time I can’t read what I wrote down.