Handwritting

I've had terrible handwriting my entire life, and thus revert to typing when ever possible.  Last I needed to fill out a legal form that could not easily digitized, and two words in I realized that my handwriting could hurt my case.

I decided to do some research on ways to fix this, and most suggestions where the same I had heard before, but never helped: practice more, slow down, adjust the way you hold your pen, change your writting utensil.

Admittedly the last suggestion does help a tiny bit, as a fine point pen can add a bit more spacing between jammed up letters.  However, I felt there was a deeper cause to my problem.  I particularly have trouble making my 'a' 'e' and 'r' distinguishable.  In my youth I had written it off as a problem with font as almost everyone makes these the same way, or so I though, but I decided to look a bit deeper to see if there wasn't a serif or something I could add to make these characters more distinguishable.  As I hunted the intent it became a bit more clear exactly what I'm doing wrong.

Practicing writing "in air" or on a white board were mentioned over and over again.  As was the call to pay attention to spacing. My spacing has always been poor, but paying just attention to it never made it any better.  One page, however, gave me giant clue: that the letter 'o' should fit almost exactly between any two words. I could almost always fit almost two 'o's and when I write in air, my letters always looked fine.  After thinking about this a bit the root cause of my handwriting problem became very apparent: I only move my arm between words, instead of moving it consistently across a page.  Writing this way causes me to jam letters together as I get further into a word as my right hand gets to the limits of how far left it can go.  It's never been all that obvious, as my poor spelling also causes me to break words down often, and thus I just move my wrist after each word part.

Clearly changing my habit of having my arm lie static while penning is going to take a bit of time to re-learn.  And even as I practiced, I noticed that my problem letters were still problematic.  So I decided to take some advice and use Google image search to review some handwriting fonts.  The great thing about this, is professional grade computer handwriting fonts have a more obvious beginning and end.  It quickly became clear to me that despite her insistence on where one should begin a letter 'a' or 'o', the people with the best penmanship did not start them at 2 O'clock and 12 O'Clock respectively, but started them much further down.  Moreover, small 'a's that are written like d's with a curve over them are far more legible.  Lowercase 'e's are most legible when the inside is straight, and slowing down and focusing on making sure it's just a 'C' plus a line can go a long way.  Lowercase 'r's are an issue for almost everyone, I had some minor discoveries but have forgotten them before I could finish this post.

here's a list of handwritting samples:
http://www.walterware.com/samples.html

47 is the closest to what my handwritting looks like when I try to make it pretty and add serifs and has the new style 'a' I like, thus I may try to focus on mimicking it, though I'd be happy with 74.

Starting a Life Journal

Moving this post from aad4jhf to here since the former seems to have been taken over by technical bogging:

So I finally decided to keep a journal / blog to help with my self reflection, and allow me to recall exact dates for things like animal sicknesses and such.

I'm uncertain that this is really the right way to go, especially if my goal is what's outlined above.

I may be a good place to jot thoughts until they can be translated into a calendar.

And creating a Ligon Journal definitely would be helpful.