Master Better Handwriting: Tips to Improve Your Penmanship

You might think bad handwriting started in the 20th century, when typewriters, word processors, laptops, and mobile phones replaced pens as our go-to method of communication. But you would be wrong—bad handwriting has plagued humanity for centuries.

Even when literacy was a privilege enjoyed by a select few, letters looped and slopped into illegible nonsense. Bad handwriting was so commonplace it earned the name cacography. Business as a scribe boomed in an era when letters and documents were dominated by cursive. Dutch humanist scholar Desiderius Erasmus even told one of his correspondents that he had used a scribe “so as not to torture you with my cacography.”

All this is to say: you shouldn’t despair over your sloppy handwriting. After all, the great scholars of the past—people who relied heavily on their handwriting—struggled too. But that doesn’t mean you should resign yourself to illegible chicken scratch, especially if you’ve pre-ordered Nuwa Pen.

Nuwa Pen is amazing in so many ways: digitizing handwriting from any paper, converting it to typed text, and summarizing your notes at the click of a button. But all that magic can be unraveled by illegible handwriting.

Most of us don’t realize our bad habits until someone else points them out. The cruel reality of ‘genius’ is that it often comes with weaker motor skills—just ask Erasmus. In general, the smarter you are, the worse your handwriting is likely to be. But that’s no excuse to employ a personal scribe.

What’s the source of bad handwriting?

Messiness is usually the result of impatience. People with an idea or an answer in their head are desperate to express it, often rushing through their letters to finish a sentence. This haste can, and often does, lead to h’s that look like l’s or o’s that look like u’s. Nowadays frequency also plays a part. If you don’t pick up your pen regularly you start to lose your discipline. 

So, what can you do to fix your bad habits?

As you might expect, we’ve spent a lot of time researching handwriting. We’ve even conducted our own experiments to understand how people write differently. There are endless variations—pen grips, speed, angle, rotation, and so on—but some techniques have a greater impact on legibility than others. Alongside our research, there are helpful pointers from the past, like this gem from the 1600s:

Our Top Tips to Improve Your Handwriting

1. Slow Down
   One of the advantages of handwriting is that the pace complements your brain’s natural rhythm. Rushing through sentences will not only make your handwriting worse but also negatively affect the quality of your content.
2. Practice the Basics
   It might feel demeaning to trace over grade-school worksheets, but it’s one of the best ways to improve your most troublesome letters. This is essentially the same as hitting the driving range to refine your golf swing.
3. Pause
   Write for an hour without stopping, and you’ll notice your handwriting descend into a leaning, sloppy mess. If you’re not accustomed to extended writing or note-taking, your hand will tire, and your handwriting will suffer. Take breaks to keep your letters sharp and consistent.

One great way you can get into writing shape is by participating in Notevember. Every day this month we’re providing prompts to inspire you to write by hand. Of course we love to see your work, but you can also keep it to yourself. The important thing is that you regularly put pen to paper.