The TPK blog focuses heavily on calligraphy, which is the art of creating beautiful letterforms (usually with a dip pen). Until now, though, I’ve never touched everyday handwriting! In this post, you’ll learn eight tips for creating great handwritten notes with the pen of your choice. You can also download a free worksheet to improve your cursive handwriting!
People often think that calligraphy and handwriting are synonymous, but they are not. In general, calligraphy consists of stylized, ornate letters – it’s really more art than writing. In contrast, handwriting refers to the style and technique you use to write things down every day. Handwriting needs to be faster and more practical than calligraphy. Although everyone has their own personal handwriting style, there is always room for improvement! In this post, you’ll find eight tips to help you improve your handwriting.
1. Use a good pen.
The adjective “good” is subjective — you’ll have to find the pen that works for you! My pick for everyday writing is the Pilot G2 05 because of the stroke width, grip and jet black ink. I also like that it is very responsive; I don’t have to put a lot of pressure on the pen to ensure consistent ink flow.
You can find thousands of pens on the market, so I encourage you to shop around. Pick up a pen here and there, and give it a try! It doesn’t matter if you prefer gel pens, fountain pens, ballpoint pens … whatever you connect with is perfect.
2. Maintain a comfortable grip
A good, comfortable grip is one of the most important things that will improve your handwriting. A “comfortable grip” means that none of the muscles in your hand are overly flexible, and your nails shouldn’t turn white from squeezing the barrel of the pen.
Many people tend to grip the pen, resulting in hand pain minutes after writing. We often clutch without realizing we’re doing it, so try to mentally check yourself every few minutes to make sure you’re still holding the pen comfortably.
3. Start with practice.
Whether you plan to write in cursive or print, it can be difficult to make good letters without heating. A few simple exercises will help you write clear, confident characters. You can use the Drills section of the Improve Your Cursive Worksheet…
… or you could make a few “telephone wires” or similar shapes. If you are interested in additional exercises, the Improve Your Handwriting online course has several features! Handwriting exercises are simple but powerful, and the more you do them, the more difference you’ll notice.
4. Experiment with paper rotation.
As children, we are usually taught to hold our paper in a vertical position in front of us. If it works for you, great! If not, feel free to experiment with different paper rotations. Holding the paper at a certain angle can go a long way in helping you improve your handwriting!
Most right-handers are fine with the traditional vertical paper position… but I’m not one of them. I’ve always found it easier to write – especially in cursive, which is my style of choice – when my paper is rotated 90 degrees. I’m not kidding: you can watch this super short video to see!
Paper rotation is a personal thing, so I encourage you to try it from all kinds of different angles. Right-handed people should start in a vertical position, and rotate the paper to the left until writing feels easy and comfortable. Left-handed people should start in a vertical position, and rotate the paper to the right.
5. Practice with the worksheet.
If you want a systematic way to improve your handwriting, I’ve created a free worksheet for you! It’s three pages long and focuses on cursive writing—you can download it by clicking here. Basically, the worksheet takes you through exercises, upper and lower case letters, words, and sentences.
The cursive writing featured in the worksheet set is not a formal style. Instead, it focuses on the letters that I, personally, use in everyday cursive handwriting. Those letters are easy to create, and they connect beautifully to create quick writing.
6. Sneak in practice when you can
As with anything, you can improve your handwriting with practice. The more you write using good habits and implement a style you like, the better your handwriting will be.
You can get practice in a number of ways—for example, you can send someone a handwritten letter instead of an email or text. If you have the time and interest, you can start writing in a journal every night. Entries don’t need to be long; They can be short accounts of how your day went!
7. Write on lined paper or use a template.
Writing well, even words are a great shortcut to neat handwriting! If you want to write a letter to someone, you can place a piece of notebook paper under the printer paper. More than likely, you will be able to see the notebook paper lines through the printer paper, and you can use these lines as guidelines for writing. Or, if you don’t mind lines, you can write someone a letter directly on notebook paper.
This point reminds me of another tip: always use a piece of “padding” paper. No matter what piece of paper you’re writing on, there should always be another piece of paper underneath. For some reason, the slightly kosher surface provided by two pieces of paper makes writing easier for all pens!
8. Embrace your personal style.
Handwriting is a very fluid, personal thing that is always evolving. It’s not like calligraphy, where you write more or less the same thing every time. Instead, you’ll have clear days, and not-so-clear days (as noted below).
No matter what your handwriting looks like, it’s a great reflection of you and your personality. That’s why people love receiving handwritten notes: they represent a piece of you! So, don’t spend too much time on a radical change: instead, focus on creating clearly structured characters that are easy to read.
I hope you enjoyed this post, and that it inspires you to dig out the keyboard and write something by hand this weekend! Don’t forget that if you want a cursive refresher, you can download the Improve Your Cursive Worksheet for free. This is not a complicated little worksheet, and it should be helpful!
Ways to Improve Your Child’s Handwriting
1. Make exercise fun.
Offer your child a special pencil or colored rainbow. Don’t just quote his words. Try simple word puzzles, anagrams, a game of hangman, or ask her to brainstorm lists around a theme to give the writing exercise a purpose.
2. Encourage drawing and puzzle games.
To develop the physical demands of writing—holding a pencil correctly, posture, control, dexterity, coordination—the more time your child spends manipulating objects, the better. Even using silverware can help him develop his fine motor skills.
3. Identify the problem.
Common handwriting problems occur in four main areas: letter formation, size, spaces between words, and line alignment. Focus your child’s practice on letters or concepts that challenge her and make sure she’s using two hands to control the paper.
4. The right tools
If your child struggles with regular pencils, try a smaller, or smaller, child-sized one. Make sure he has a good cleaning hand so he’s not afraid to make mistakes.
5. Writing outside the box
A frosted mirror, a piece of mud, or a bowl of leftover sauce make excellent surfaces. Whether your child is practicing with his fingers, a stick, or a pencil, tapping into his creativity will spark an interest in writing.
How to Improve Your Handwriting Speed Easily
Handwriting is one of those skills you usually learn as a child, and then never actively try to improve as you grow up. However, there are some significant benefits to being able to write quickly, which are especially important for people who often need to write things by hand, such as university students. These benefits include:
Increased automaticity, which reduces the load on working memory. This means that you don’t have to actively focus on the writing process itself, and can instead focus on thinking about what to write.
Increased overlap between the mental generation of output and the resulting production of text related to that output. This means you can write down your ideas immediately as you’re forming them, without any delays interrupting your thought process.
Better performance in various academic tasks, and especially those that require a lot of handwriting under time constraints, such as taking notes during lectures or writing essays during class exams.
Below is a collection of tips and strategies, which can help you learn how to write by hand faster. Some of them can be implemented immediately without any effort, while others require a little practice.
You don’t have to do everything listed here. It’s okay to just pick one or two things that you want to focus on when writing. Doing so will only require a minimal effort on your part, and will still allow you to significantly improve your writing speed in a short amount of time.
Correct your handwriting technique.
Improving your handwriting technique is a good way to improve your writing speed.
Good handwriting technique involves using your fingers as a guide, and using your arm and shoulder muscles to move the pen. This allows you to write quickly without fatigue or pain.
Poor handwriting technique includes drawing letters using your fingers, constantly moving your wrist, and repeatedly lifting your hand from the paper to move it as you write. These problems slow down your writing, and cause fatigue and pain in your hands.
How to get your technique right: To understand which muscles you should be using, try holding your arm out in front of you while writing capital letters in the air. Use the guidelines above to see which techniques you should follow, and which you should avoid.
Once you get used to these movements, try applying them when writing on paper, making sure to keep technical guidelines in mind, and check your technique periodically as you write.
Maintain good posture
Maintaining good posture is an easy way to improve your writing speed, while also helping you stay healthy and feel more comfortable while writing.
To help improve your posture, you ideally want to sit with your feet flat on the floor, and your hips and lower back supported by a chair. At the same time, your knees should be bent to about 90˚, and your elbows should be slightly bent, with your forearms resting flat on the surface of the table.
You should avoid leaning over the paper while writing, as doing so puts unnecessary stress on your arm, making it difficult to write. Also, be sure to set the desk and chair height appropriately, in a way that encourages proper posture, based on the guidelines we discussed above. When the desk/chair combination is set at the wrong height, you’ll find that it’s more difficult to maintain good posture, which hinders your writing.
Hold the pen wherever feels comfortable
Research shows that your grip (ie, the way you hold the pen) doesn’t have much of an effect on your writing speed. Additionally, note that when writing for long periods of time, it’s natural to sometimes have differences in the way you hold your pen, so this doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem.
So, as long as you feel comfortable while writing, you can hold whichever pen or pencil is comfortable for you.
However, if the way you naturally hold your writing utensil feels uncomfortable or causes you discomfort, and you decide you want to improve it, then using It is recommended to go with a dynamic tripod grip, which is shown in the picture below. .
Using a dynamic tripod grip means:
- Hold the pen between the thumb and forefinger, just above the point where the point of the pen meets the shaft.
- There should be an open space between the thumb and index finger.
- The pen should rest with the middle finger.
- The ring and little finger should rest in the palm.
Avoid holding the pen too tightly.
People grip their pen or pencil too tightly, especially when trying to write quickly. The problem is that doing this slows you down, and your hands get tired.
The best way to avoid this is to consciously check yourself while writing, and make sure you’re not gripping the pen too tightly. It’s fine to hold it tightly, but you don’t want to actively crush it with your hands.
If you consistently correct yourself over time and avoid too tight a grip, eventually you should be able to naturally maintain adequate grip strength.
Note that if you constantly find yourself holding your pen too hard, it’s possible that you need to get a new one, one that fits better in your hand. You will read more about this in the next section.
Use a good writing process.
Using a good quality writing process that fits your hand properly can make a huge difference in your writing, without much effort on your part. There are three main things you should pay attention to:
- Thickness – Pick a pen that isn’t so thin that you have to squeeze it tightly, or thick enough that it’s uncomfortable to hold. If necessary, you can increase the thickness of the pen by attaching a small rubber grip to it. The right pen size depends on how big your hand is and your personal preferences so experiment and find what works for you.
- Tip Size – Choose a pen that has a tip size that you feel comfortable with (eg 0.5mm vs 0.9mm). What works best for you will depend on your needs and preferences, so you should experiment and find what works for you.
- Quality– Use a good quality pen, it doesn’t require you to press too hard on the paper to get the ink out. That alone can make a huge difference, and a good pen doesn’t cost more than a few dollars, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t just buy one.
Improve your handwriting style
You can speed up your handwriting by making some simple adjustments to your handwriting style and especially by simplifying the way you write letters. This means that you should try to get rid of unnecessary numbers and styles, as long as leaving them out does not affect the plausibility of your writing.
It’s also possible to modify the size of your letters, and in theory, if you make your letters smaller, you’ll need to move your arm less while writing, which should enable you to write faster. Will
However, this is not necessarily true in practice, and reducing the letter size can slow you down, making it more difficult for you to write individual letters. Since this is also something that varies from person to person, you can experiment to see what works for you.
Use a shorthand writing system.
Shorthand writing systems use a variety of unique symbols, which can replace letters, common letter combinations, sounds, or frequently used words to save you time typing. You can either learn an existing shorthand system, or develop your own. Commonly used types of shorthand include Gregg, Pitman, and Tee line.
One way to get the most out of using shorthand is to focus on just a few words that appear frequently in the language, such as ‘the’, without putting too much effort into learning the full shorthand writing system. Simplifying these words and ‘from’ is relatively easy, and doing so can significantly improve your writing speed, while making your writing much more readable.
Finally, keep in mind that the more you rely on shorthand, the harder it will be for others to understand your notes. This can be either an advantage or a disadvantage depending on your preferences.
Summary and conclusion
- Improving your handwriting speed can have significant benefits, such as increased automaticity, increased overlap between mental output and text production, and improved performance on academic tasks.
- There are many things you can do to improve your handwriting speed, and you can choose the aspects you want to work on, as each of them will lead to significant benefits in itself.
- In terms of writing technique, be sure to use your fingers as a guide, and move the pen using your arm and shoulder muscles while maintaining good posture. Avoid drawing letters with your fingers, constantly moving your wrists, repeatedly lifting your hand from the paper, holding the pen too tightly, or bending over the paper.
- Make sure to get a good writing process that is comfortable for you to write with, not too thin or too thick, and a comfortable tip size. Additionally, make sure the pen is of high quality, and you don’t need to press too hard on the paper to write with it.
- Finally, to speed up your handwriting, you can also choose to simplify the way you write letters, or use a shorthand writing system. One of the biggest benefits of using such systems comes from simplifying frequently used words (like ‘the’), which saves you a lot of time while requiring relatively little effort.
