To think many adults have terrible handwriting?

[MaryFuckingFerguson]

I am ironing curtains 😩 in front of ‘Four in a Bed’.

When the guests leave a B&B and write their reviews, I am struck by the fact virtually no-one has nice handwriting.

They either print like a small child might, write in capitals or have a messy and barely legible scrawl. Often they hold the pen in a cack-handed manner too.

My husband reckons hand-writing is not taught properly at state schools. But our kids (early 20s) went to state school and were taught cursive.

Is it just not a thing that matters anymore? I think it’s a shame as I love writing, even a birthday card, and take pride in it. Adults should have decent hand-writing unless other influencing factors are present. Or do we just not write enough nowadays to be any good at it?

If I sit and be patient, my writing is ok.
But like a PP said, my brain goes too fast for my pen, so I end up with a scrawl that even I can't read later on. It is like a spider crawled through ink and had it's death throes across the paper.
Weirdly, I find my writing changes depending on my mood too.

I could never write in cursive. I even had special 1:1 in school, and I could not get it. At best, I could copy what was in front of me. Take that away... and I found it impossible. My paternal grandmother had the most beautiful cursive writing.

I've never been good at proper cursive, and I stopped using it nearly as soon as it was no longer required of me. For all of my adult life I've used a style of handwriting that is a mix of print and my own version of cursive. I don't know if it's neat, but it gets my point across.

It is a shame when people can't write legibly, but the decline in handwriting quality is nothing new. Compared to the beautiful handwriting in so many historical documents, I doubt many adults living today are up to snuff. Apart from those who practice calligraphy, that is.

As well as bad handwriting, I also write the wrong thing all the time. It’s like my brain gets ahead of me and I write the wrong word or letter, so I end up with loads of crossed out bits 🤦‍♀️ I have to really make myself concentrate to avoid errors!!

Same here. Also the same typing too. Believe me, the amount of red lines I get is unreal. And a lot of my attempts at spelling are so bad, it says "add to dictionary".

There have always been people with illegible handwriting - we used to have a family competition to decipher a couple of people's Christmas cards. Historical documents are full of illegible stuff - sometimes it's a question of getting used to reading a particular handwriting style, but sometimes, it's just unclear.

I was one of the last in the class to be allowed to move from pencil to pen age 8 or 9. The next year, my maths teacher said I'd never pass any O-levels as my handwriting was so bad - well, I didn't, because they were GCSEs by then, but I passed those well. I think my handwriting is pretty legible now - I can read back in old diaries and so on. I do write pretty much every day - I'm forever writing myself notes, to-do lists, shopping lists and the like, but I also do evening classes, and take notes in class. I think differently when i write, rather than type, and I'm more like to remember it. I also write old fashioned letters sometimes.

There's a book by Philip Hensher, the Missing Ink about how we used to know our friends' handwriting, and now we often don't. It was my birthday a few weeks back, and I do still recognise the handwriting of friends from school and my aunt and uncle. I also had a card from a newer friend and was surprised his handwriting looks more like what I'd expect from an 12 year old - bug I suspect, like many of my colleagues in tech roles, he simply hardly ever writes.

I'd probably struggle with a 3h exam these days - my hands are currently aching from 3 days of pulling out ground elder roots from the garden. I asked a teacher friend if they prepared for exams, and he said they do at his current (private) school - they give them hand exercises to do. I don't know if that's common in most secondary schools - back when we used to do writing all the time (and i did essay-heavy subjects, particularly history,) even then, my hand could start cramping towards the end of an exam. It's probably a lot worse these days for more people

I think that the decline in "nice" handwriting is mostly down to lack of use these days - many people can get by with almost never using a pen, and a writing hand is like any other muscles, use it or lose it. To be good at something, you have to practice.

I enjoyed reading Rosemary Sassoon's history of handwriting in the 20th century (can't remember the exact title. It may be a niche interest, to be fair... but it reminded me at school doing lines and lines of zigzags and waves and loops as part of learning to write.

I have lovely handwriting.
Almost never used. Laptop for everything

My kids have awful handwriting
Almost never used - Chromebooks for everything.

It really doesn't matter. As long as people can communicate.

I write every day, terrible handwriting unless I’m really focusing on it. Didn’t stop me doing well…

It’s not a moral failing.

Yep, doctors are notoriously bad for their handwriting.

I appreciate and admire good handwriting. I wish my handwriting was better. Sadly, a combination of health issues and lack of practice these days, means it’s unlikely to ever be what it was when I was at school.

My handwriting is crap for various reasons. It always was. I found so frustrating when I lost marks in tests/exams because of it. Not because it was ineligible, but because it wasn't pretty enough.

I can do pretty if I force myself to, but it takes a long time and I have to be very careful and think about every stroke. That's fine for a card, but not for an exam or essays or trying to take notes at fast pace etc.

I've got carpal tunnel in my right hand and can't grip a pen properly. My writing looks dreadful. Avoid it as much as possible, it's embarassing.

I used to win awards at school for my handwriting and it's sadly gone to shit now. I can just about write a card nicely, but if I try and write a page of notes it turns to scrawl. I assume it's down to lack of use?

When you are writing something that is intended for someone else to read, legibility is much more important than anything else. My teacher daughter is currently marking a pile of year 12 exam papers. I don't know how she can read some of them (though of course it helps that she knows what words she is looking out for)!

I'm in my 60s and my writing looks pretty neat, especially when I use a fountain pen. I don't have much writing stamina though. It obviously uses muscles I don't otherwise use. I write Christmas cards in batches of about 10 at a time. I certainly couldn't write constantly for three hours these days, as I used to have to do for school and university exams.

My husband's handwriting is atrocious. He is in his 70s and has always printed. Even so, it's barely legible.

One of the things I love about handwriting is that it is so personal. It's also very evocative. I have a book that has an inscription from my grandfather to my mother (for her birthday in 1941). As soon as I saw his small neat handwriting, it brought back so many memories. I also have some old letters and other documents handwritten by my parents (both now dead). They seem much more personal than they would if they had been typed.

Like a PP, I always recognise the handwriting of people I have known for a while. At Christmas I usually know who cards are from before I open them, because I recognise the writing. A couple of times in recent years I haven't recognised the handwriting on cards. When I opened them I realised that they were from my uncle. My aunt always used to write the cards and I would have recognised her writing, but she had died and he was now doing it. It was such a small thing, but the change of handwriting really brought her death home to me.

So 🤷‍♀️ Life has moved on, most people type emails/use their phones to communicate. What difference does this make to you?

Mine is barely legible, never has been despite remedial lessons at school. They tried to teach me italics but gave up and let me switch to biro. I suspect I have mild dyspraxia to be honest, my dd does, other dd is dyslexic plus one is autistic the other ADHD, it does run in families

I can never work out how spell-checker chooses alternatives, I get some really weird ones.

I have absolutely terrible hand writing. It's the worst hand writing I have ever seen. Often I can barely read it myself later. It does cause me problems at times and I'd like to learn how to write better. I rarely need to handwrite for anything official but I often makes meeting notes and then struggle to decipher them later. And I'm too embarrassed to write greeting cards.

Even if I write slowly it looks horrible. We did do handwriting in early primary and i used to do ok. Not great. I think, having good or at least legible handwriting is a great skill.

My handwriting looks ok on the face of it, but is hard to read because of the way I join my letters together. And it gets more illegible the longer I write. Also there are loads of scribbled out mistakes because I start randomly writing words that are in my head for further down the line in the sentence😆 Or a cat walks past the window and I'll write the word 'cat' out of nowhere. Jesus, seeing that in print makes me seriously worried about my sanity!

My handwriting used to be lovely, but lack of practice and arthritis have changed it.

I suppose, in the grand scheme of things, it matters so much less these days, but I do think flowing cursive writing helps with spelling, because it encourages muscle memory. But then, plenty of people aren’t really bothered about spelling and grammar either.

People on four in a bed invariably have horrific handwriting, lol. I guess you don't need to have good writing that much in this day and age.
I always think on that show there's that really fat, bulbous writing that reminds me of secondary school in the 90s, then you get this mad spindly shit, then third effort is a mix of caps and lower case, and devoid of any grammar, spelling or punctuation. The producers must force it somehow?!