[Loughla]

Do you have any advice for helping a child who is left handed and sucks at penmanship?

My youngest is left handed, and his writing is just trash. I have no idea how to help him outside of specific left handed writing tools (that I'm pretty sure don't help at all).

[NRHuntoon]

I'm left handed and had terrible penmanship as a child and all through undergrad. A few things have really helped me. 1. Get pens that write with low friction. As a lefty you're 'pushing' the pen instead of pulling it, and tools with higher friction cause the pen to tilt up in your hand. I found writing with gel pens, a nice fountain pen, or now I use 0.2/0.25 inking pens as my main 'daily driver'. 2. Focus on a few 'problem letters' and get them well sorted. I always struggled with things like 'u' and 'v', '5' and 's', etc. In college I had to make these work, so I spent a lot of time developing a specific style for all of the problem symbols and got *really* good at them. 3. Print vs cursive. I know in school they make you learn cursive, but a lot of the connections between letters decrease readability, and increase complexity for writing them. I no long write in pure cursive, but I have a sort of hybrid print/cursive script. I write many letters in their cursive form as they are faster and flow better, but I never connect letters together. It is a good compromise between speed and readability. 4. Practice, practice, practice. I know this is probably self evident, but it really does take practice. Practice writing letters slowly. It's like martial arts, you go slow and get the movement perfect. Then do it over and over again. That builds the muscle memory better.

[DougN7]

I don’t know if it helps, but Tūl brand pens in the US are gel pens like you mention. I’ve never had a favorite pen, but I do since a friend introduced these to me.

[luxpir]

Lefty, but also someone who has a brain that prefers the right for sport (bat/ball games), as disclaimer... Handwriting is clear and can print or use cursive.

When I used to write more on paper, many moons ago, I'd turn the paper 90 degrees to the right. Many lefties curl their hands over. I never got that, I just turn the paper. The body has to compensate a little but much more natural for the wrist when writing for longer spells.

Come to think of it, I don't do it much at all now, have probably got workarounds I'm unaware of at this point. My notebook stays aligned with the desk. Perhaps a slight tilt.

Either way, experiment with moving the paper, not the wrist, and get smooth pens as mentioned elsewhere. Fountain pens from Parker used to be my go to. Gel or roller are fine though.

Good luck!

Edit: I also learned to write under the line, so didn't drag my hand through the ink. Probably due to fountain pen use forcing that. Back when blotting paper was a thing!

[loup-vaillant]

My SO is left handed, and here’s her trick: slant the paper.

If you write with the same positioning we teach to right handers, the hand hides the writing, and if you use a fountain pen you just smear the writing before it has a chance to dry. So don’t: slant the paper, like 45 degrees counter clockwise, and position your hand above the line you’re writing. Somewhat. I’m not the leftie, I’m working from memory here.

The key idea is to keep the text visible, and keep the writing position relatively comfortable. Then it’s just down to training. Target a specific style, draw individual letters… write stuff while concentrating on the writing, not whatever you need the writing for (you can’t really practice and take notes for instance).

Mostly boring advice, that apart from slanting the paper probably applies to everyone. (Note: I also have terrible hand writing, grain of salt and all that.)

[xenospn]

I’m left handed, and my handwriting writing goes from really nice to shit when I use different pens. My advice is experiment with different types. I love BiC pens, they feel super smooth.

Also, growing up in Israel, where we write right to left, I don’t recall any of my right-handed friends having issues with handwriting.

[seanmcdirmid]

Hebrew is strange because maybe it was first written in stone rather than ink, so smearing wasn’t an issue? This page at least puts that forward as a possible reason: https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/why-is-hebrew-writt...

[xenospn]

I think clay, no?

[seanmcdirmid]

That makes more sense, but the article speculates otherwise. Cuneiform which was definitely first written on clay tablets is left to right.

[SoftTalker]

Learn to write upside down, then turn the paper upside down and write from right to left.

[lloda]

I've seen left handed people tilt the paper 90° and write more or less downwards. Their writing looked fine.

[throw2836384]

Learn Chinese.

It's traditionally written right-to-left, top-to-bottom.

[clown_strike]

They didn't say in what way the kid's handwriting is trash, but I've noticed that westerners who have spent time writing kanji end up with handwriting that looks like it was done by a machine.

Probably the same concept at play, but what helped me as a kid was getting one of those black Pentel 0.5mm engineering mechanical pencils (used to be $5 apiece or so at Staples) and using it to write everything as small as possible. On college-rule paper my lettering would occupy 25% of the vertical space while strictly adhering to the bottom line in neat rows.

Few teachers could read my writing without a magnifying glass, but they got their revenge by specifying essay lengths in number of pages. I had to do 75% more work to meet the page count.

I wasn't intentionally being an asshole with this-- in writing such tiny lettering it forced me to pay attention to clarity of my lettering to an autistic degree, otherwise my writing would be entirely illegible to the teacher and my work would be rejected.

[luxpir]

Also of interest are Arabic, Hebrew and other RTL scripts. Not sure if more myth than fact, but their origin was apparently in stone masonry and right handed hammer use. I can't quite believe it though, given the difference of ease in sourcing materials and the curves present in the scripts.

[seanmcdirmid]

I studied Chinese, and modern mainland Chinese is written left to right and a pain for lefties to pass Chinese exams with. But the IMEs are great so you never have to write them out yourself, so you just need to focus on how the word sounds and what it looks like.

[belval]

Not sure if it can be found online, but there is a hand position trick that allows left-handed people to "drag" the pencil instead of pushing which makes it much closer to right-handed motions.

I am left-handed and my handwriting is terrible, but my partner is also left-handed and her handwriting is very nice but she position her hands as described above to "pull", so clearly it can be done if you apply yourself.

She also hand writes a lot more while I am almost exclusively typing these days so practice definitely helps.

[arisAlexis]

I'm left handed and all my life people need to decode painfully what I'm writing. Most lefties write like trash that's reality

[Moru]

Most people write like trash if they started school after the school computer revolution. It's just about practise. I'm right handed and my handwriting is also realy bad. I started with computers much earlier than others in my class. The people in my class were pretty good, including the lefties. The English teacher was really bad but we got the explanation to that one: When he was young he was forced to switch from left to right hand. This was before the whip was outlawed as a teaching instrument...

[pclmulqdq]

Most people write like trash, but I am also left handed and haven't noticed a correlation between handedness and handwriting. For what it's worth, I have very good penmanship.

[seanmcdirmid]

Learn to type? I never got over my penman ship problem, I just learnt to type and printed all my exams in college. And then it didn’t matter much after school since I would mostly type anyways.

If I had to do it over again, I would probably force myself to write right handed. It should be possible to get used to it, but that would really be a choice they have to make for themselves.

[Moru]

My english teacher was forced to switch from left to right when he was young and his writing was the worst in school. This was before the computer revolution so he did write all the time.

[seanmcdirmid]

I know it isn’t ideal, but I just like the idea of seeing t what I’m doing. Like the extra vision you get with contacts as opposed to glasses.

[Moru]

Some lefties have some tricks for that, have you looked into them? I'm no expert on the topic, just know there is some tricks to learn :-)