Write With Your Arm, Not With Your Hand?

My handwriting has sucked eternally- I still remember neatness coming up as the single issue at my parent-teacher conferences in elementary school. I never ran into legibility problems, but had a tough time keeping vertical lines vertical, horizontal lines horizontal, and everything landing on the baseline. I made some improvements with the long-letters-long approach (make tall letters as tall as you can, and shrink the shorter ones), but I've always envied people with neat writing.

I once googled a few variations of "improve your handwriting," and found absolutely nothing of worth: "sit up straight, practice individual letters, just write slower until you get better." Today, though, I stumbled across this article:

People who inevitably have trouble with handwriting and calligraphy write with their fingers. They "draw" the letters. A finger-writer puts the full weight of his/her hand on the paper, his fingers form the letters, and he picks his hand up repeatedly to move it across the paper as he writes.

If you use the right muscle groups, your writing will have a smooth, easy flow and not look tortured. People for whom writing comes more easily may rest their hands fairly heavily on the paper, but their forearms and shoulders move as they write. Their writing has a cadence that shows they’re using at least some of the right muscle groups. They don’t draw the letters with their fingers; the fingers serve more as guides.

This exercise may help you determine which category is yours: Sit down and write a paragraph. Doesn’t matter what. Pay attention to the muscles you use to form your letters. Do you draw each letter with your fingers? Pick your hand up repeatedly to move it? Have an unrecognizable scrawl? Does your forearm move? Chances are, if you learned to write after 1955-60 (depending on where you went to grade school), you write with your fingers.

(full article here)

Blew me away; I'm a complete finger-writer. Finger-writing makes intuitive sense to me- writing means small movements, and small movements seem like they'd be best facilitated by small muscles close to where the motion is happening. When I thought about it a little more, though, I realized that I write a lot better on a whiteboard than I do on a paper, and a vertical surface is the one place finger-writing is impossible (I've surprised myself in the English class I teach with how regular my writing looks).

I've started practicing the techniques the article talks about: writing lines at various angles, circles, and loops, keeping the fingers and wrist as still as possible and writing with your arm and shoulder. It feels weird, and gets a little tiring, but when I concentrate my rhythm and regularity improve a pretty good amount. One thing that gets me, though, is my Japanese writing is horrible when I write like this. At first I thought that the more multi-directional, jilted nature of kanji languages means that you use your fingers to write instead of your hand, but then calligraphy came to mind- those guys definitely use their whole arms.

What kind of a writer are you? Do you switch muscle groups between western and asian languages?

Comments

[Benjamin]

Oh man, does this come at a timely moment! I found this very article about a year ago and it's made a world of difference. Years ago I was told I needed to use a heavier pen (rather than a disposable plastic barrel type) and that made my cursive handwriting legible to me. But it wasn't until I found this article and worked on the difference between arm and finger-only writing that I could write any kind of cursive so that anyone else could read it.

Now that I've started to practice hiragana, it's odd that I can write well either way. It may be because I've been putting my "whole arm" into these characters and am starting out with a decent habit but who knows?

[David]

So you do kana with the whole arm? Interesting. I talked to a Japanese
guy on twitter about it, and he said only heavy calligraphers use
their arms in their writing.

On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 8:47 AM, TypePad

[Maddy]

That's a pretty sweet article--very informative. I've always had "neat" handwriting and I guess it's because I do sort of move as I write.

[Shawn]

i am a total figer-writer; i use my fingers for both asian and western languages :P

[kasper]

I also discovered that article recently. I used to spend quite some time perfecting my handwriting, but using only my fingers. It's only now I have tried using my whole arm that I feel how tiresome it is to write with only fingers. It's still a bit sloppy, but it feels much more natural to use the whole arm. Quite a pity this isn't learned correctly nowadays at primary school.

[David]

It does feel more natural, though to be honest, I didn't really stick to it for that long. For the time being, I'm back to sloppy finger-writing.

[Idiot]

I don't even know how I'm supposed to write with my whole arm! I really, truely don't understand. Wow, I'm dumb...