The pen is mightier than the sword. Except maybe in swordfights

I decided it’s long overdue that I change my handwriting. My ridiculously untidy, but surprisingly readable handwriting had the characteristic splitting of individual characters, thereby the sizes of the characters were inconsistent and it was about time I changed it.

I spent an hour practicing cursive again, and plan to do it for a few more days because I’ve been writing with split letters for the past seven years, and it will be hard to change it.

I realized that even though it might be difficult, conciously rebooting my handwriting will give me a second chance not only to redefine how I write, but the finer characteristics. For instance, I’d always wished that I made the tops of the ‘t’, ‘l’, ‘h’, etc and the bottom of ‘g’, ‘y’, etc longer. Also I wanted to make the characters more round, so the ‘e’ won’t look like an ‘i’ because the loop is merged into a single line.

Also rethinking my handwriting gave me some startling insight into how amazing certain things are. For instance, when you write a word like “institutional”, you don’t look for the ‘i’ and the ‘t’ to dot and cross over respectively, you just do it. It just comes. In fact, I noticed there’s almost like a little buffer memory, and you remember to dot the character after finishing writing the word. Odd but true.

So I decided to change my writing style and my good friend, the internet, told me to start of doing simpler exercises first. I spent two pages drawing small straight lines and small circles to merely get stability of writing. Then I spent some time writing a single line over and over again on six pages of paper (for the curious, the line is “With Oden on our side, we are victorious.”)

At the end, I noticed my notes were looking nicer and I’m sure with a little more practice my writing will actually be bearable to look at, and I’m sure most of yours’ ain’t better. I’m actually thinking of uploading a “before” and “after”, but I really don’t think too many people are reading this right now.

But still, writing a little sentence over and over on a piece of paper kindof looks nice, especially the back of the sheet, and is almost beautiful and symmetric in a twisted kind of way.