Before she died, my grandmother spent some time writing out a quick history of her family and all the relatives she could think of.  It was just written in a steno notebook, and the notes were pretty much made as she thought of them, but she wanted to leave a little information for the family and I’m glad she did.  These few pages turned out to be things of beauty.  Over looking the dog-eared pages and the haphazard organization of notes, my grandmother had the most wonderful handwriting!  It was elegant and consistent.

My own handwriting has always been substantially less than stellar.  To start with, I’m a lefty.  Nothing works for us.  Notebook spirals cut into our wrists, ink smears, and your hand hides the letter as you make them.  I mixed cursive and printing with wild abandon.  I capitalized letters for no reason (often in the middle of words).  I felt I was just one handwriting analysis away from being committed to an asylum.  Heaven forbid I try to write something on unlined paper.

I’ve found a lot of people think they have this problem.  In an age when computer keyboards are ubiquitous, no time is spent on penmanship.  No one practices and when they scrawl something across the page they think of it as some sort of birth defect.  “I have lousy handwriting” gets the same inflection with “I was born with a vestigial tale.”

This lack of beauty in their handwriting keeps a lot of people from journaling.  Who wants to fill a book with proof of their weak skills?

I decided, one summer to see if I could fix my own scrawl up a bit.  You know what? It was surprisingly easy to do.  I found a great book to help me out.  Its called  Write Now: A Complete Self-teaching Program for Better Handwriting

Its a simple workbook that you can follow that will teach you some of the basics of improving your own handwriting.

Here’s a list of things I learned about improving my handwriting that summer:

• Consistency is key.  When you decide on how to draw a letter (Capitol or Lowercase) stick with it.  Make all your small a’s look the same.  Cross all your t’s in the same spot.  Ascenders and descenders are the same lengths and bend in consistent fashions. The hump on your h should be the same height as the humps on m’s and n’s” This will go a long way to making your handwriting legible
• Pay attention to letter and word spacing.  Letters go VERY close together.  Words should be separated by about an average letters width (technically the width of an m).
• Start SLOW.  You will need time to build the letter forms into muscle memory.  Draw them slowly at first and very quickly you will get smooth with them.  If you see your handwriting deteriorating, slow down again.
• Practice Practice Practice.  When schools actually taught penmanship (when my grandmother learned) they spent HOURS on drills and copying materials.  It burned the skill into their minds and muscles.  Just like any other skill or sport, proficiency comes with repetition of correct form.  Make beautiful “to-do” lists.  Copy a page from your paperback.  Get in some practice.

When you are happy with your handwriting, you will use it much more often.

Oh and here is a quick link concerning how to hold your pen.

Dan Eldon’s Journals

Several years ago I was browsing through a bookstore and came across something really special.  At first I didn’t really know what I was looking at.  It was a collection of photographs and doodles and maps and all sorts of ephemera randomly crammed into the book.
I was hooked and bought the book.  It was later, when the excitement cooled a bit and I took the time to actually read the introduction and the back of the book that I found what I was looking at was actually a collection of the journals of a remarkable guy.

Dan Eldon was born in London in 1970 but soon moved with his family to Nairobi, Kenya.  He started taking photos for a local newspaper at a very young age, and developed a wonderful sense of adventure.  He also, early on, began to collect both his photographs and his adventures in a series of notebooks.

These notebooks are not the standard diary entries and list of sites you might expect.  They are a collection of layer upon layer of photos, paintings, ticket stubs, doodles, cut outs, hand outs, smears, feathers, coins, invitations and all sorts of important bits and pieces from his life and travels.

Dan took his notebooks with him everywhere along with a bin full of art supplies so that he could use any downtime (when did he have downtime?) at all to update and re-work page after page of his notebooks.

Looking through his books you feel like an archeologist. You dig down through strata of entries and ephemera that seem to be in no chronological order at all.  You can piece together his experiences by finding clues throughout the books.

I really can’t do them justice in this post.  Fortunately you can get a look at them online.

Daneldon.org
Wikipedia