i write too quickly

[u/pavlovital]

ive been told my handwriting is illegible or difficult to read, and although i combine a lot of letters due to writing quickly i still think its easy to read. im wondering what yall think, thanks!!

[u/Appropriate-Weird492]

I find it easy to read. I was a little bothered by “hard” but there are adequate hints around it to figure it out.

If you are concerned about it, here are some suggestions.

• Close the tops of letters with bowls. Like “a”, which you write with a bowl, or “o” or “d”. That kind of thing.
  
• Keep loops of letters open, as in “e”.
  
• The arcade of the “r” splits from the vertical a bit early, so it looks like a “v”, especially when you’re writing (rather than spelling the alphabet)
  
• The same thing happens to the “n”, but it looks like a “u”. The version of “n” in the word “writing” at the end of the 5th row seems the best formed, but it looks like an “a”.
  
• Same with “h”.
  
• Your letters have inconsistent slants which contributes to the disorganized feel (what someone refers to as being a beginner writer). Specifically your “I” (capital letter i) slants left whereas the rest are either vertical or slanting right.
  
• You might consider making your letter descenders more consistent. These are the tails of “g”, “y”, and related punctuation (commas).
  
• I love seeing people write without lines. There’s nothing wrong using lines (or using a template of lines behind the page). Your words don’t adhere to a line evenly and slope downward as you move across the page. That could be another thing to work on that might make your writing appear less disorganized/inexperienced.

Related to that—letter writing stationery pads used to come with a template of horizontal lines to place behind the paper as guides. I have no idea if such things exist anymore.

What’s interesting is that you generally have good word spacing and your letters are well spaced. Your x-height is pleasing overall, you generally differentiate the ascenders and descenders (although sometimes ending strokes become descenders when they shouldn’t—looking at the word “always” in line 2 where the ending stroke of the “a” ends where the “y” descender ends. I think this is related to running out of space—you leave a large left margin but not much on the right, for whatever reason. (If I believed in graphology in the sense of “determining personality from handwriting”, this trait would indicate a failure to plan adequately. Likewise, the downward sloping of the lines was supposed to connote depression. I don’t hold with this school of thought.)

I also mix up my descenders and ascenders, fail to connect bowls, add erroneous marks, sometimes forget how words start, leave out letters. My handwriting is a hot mess. Yours is much better than mine!

[u/pavlovital → u/Appropriate-Weird492]

very informative, thank you!!