I’m generally a big fan of technology and I’m usually an early adopter of most new gadgets. Except I have this one old school quirk: I love writing things out by hand. I generally think more clearly when writing things out on paper as opposed to on screen. But as there are less and less opportunities for writing, our adult handwriting seems to deteriorate. Well, at least mine did anyway.

I think handwriting is experiencing a resurgence these days, with more of us getting into scrapbooking, art journaling, etc. About a year ago, I started to make a concerted effort to improve my handwriting, primarily to relearn cursive. I hadn’t used cursive writing for years, relying on a hybrid-print for my daily writing.

I started by referencing handwriting guidesheets aimed for elementary aged children. You can find some at Donna Young’s website and ABC Teach.

Then I started to just practice anytime I had the chance on the margins of various papers that I had lying around. Instead of doodling during meetings, I was cursive-writing.

The toughest part for me was getting comfortable with letter transitions. Whenever I hit a letter combo that was tough, I’d just repeat it a few times until it flowed better.

After awhile, I found myself needing a variety of words to write out, so I tried out some different things I thought would be engaging and give me some change in letter combinations. Here are some of the words I tried:
– Fifth grade spelling words
– US cities, counties, and states
– SAT vocabulary words and their definitions
– Notes and lines from books I read

Some additional resources to get you started on your path to better handwriting:

Melissa Esplin, Rukristin, Joelle Charming, K. Werner: The common theme for all of these is you need a lot of practice and to slow down the pace.

There are also a ton of tips and resources on these threads of AskMetafilter, where the askers have requested help on improving their chicken scratch:
– I want to write right
– I never learned to write
– Handwriting without tears

Let me know in the comments if you’ve tried any of these strategies or if you have any other awesome resources to share!