Stuff&Things Presents: How to (Attempt to) Improve Your Handwriting

for all the difference I've made I may as well EST stayed in school all I may as well have played by [Music] rules I'm nowhere I'm nothing and now I'm so much older than I thought I would ever be same faces same places same SAR semblance of a lot same drunken stumble to here come com no one going nowhere [Applause] fast he's afraid that he's not going to [Music] last for all the difference I've made I may as well estate in [Music] school all the difference it made I may as well played by [Music] rules I'm no one I'm not nothing and now I'm so much older than I thought I would ever be same places same faces same Sor semblance same drunken stum to S here hello welcome once again to stuff and things where I like to talk about stuff and occasionally even things I'm your good friend Bradley and today as you could probably tell by that little written intro this video is going to be about how I have attempted to improve my handwriting in the last year or so I'd actually gotten quite a few comments on especially my Mador Travelers notebook review in which people complimented my handwriting and asked me to do a video about how I learn to write in the way I do and I was a little torn about doing this video because I am still not very happy with with my handwriting um I think it has a long way to go I've been trying to practice I've been trying to improve but I thought maybe it would be helpful for me to show you the things that I've been doing to try to improve my handwriting so I'm in no way an expert on cursive script on handwriting on anything like that and I still think as I say that I have a long way to go until I could even say that my writing is passable but it could be of benefit for me to show you what I've been doing so I'm going to go through all sorts of re resources that I've been using practice methods that I've been using just all these things that I have here that I've been trying to use to help improve my handwriting and hopefully this will be a benefit to benefit to you this is not going to be me sitting down and saying exercise one hold your pen like this do this exercise over and over and over I'm not going to show you that kind of thing this isn't going to be a birot learning method to teach you how to write in a certain way teach you a certain script and I'm just going to show you how I have been trying to make my handwriting a little bit better so hopefully you find this helpful all right so as I mentioned in the intro my handwriting used to be absolutely horrible I believe I was taught in you know second or third grade how to do cursive I think we had used What's called the denan method of cursive in the school I went to um and we did it for a couple years we were required to write in cursive for a while and then basically we weren't required to do it anymore and I left behind never looked back pretty much never wrote in cursive after that developed this very sloppy very odd style of just printing and a lot of this is due to the fact that I held my pen or pencil in a very incorrect manner I think I showed you in that little intro video I used to hold my pen like this kind of like the caveman way of holding a pen and I think that developed because I I like to draw a lot and I've always liked to draw and I always felt like when I was drawing this gave me kind of more fine control and it just sort of how I defaulted to holding my pen and I would also rest my hand on the paper so when you're writing like that you can't really get a nice fluid flow going because you keep having to lift your hand up over and over pretty much after every word works well for drawing doesn't work really well for penmanship and so in the last year or so when I decided that I wanted to try to improve my handwriting most because I had started buying kind of fancy fountain pens and I felt like my handwriting was an embarrassment to the pen I decided that the first thing I had to do was change my grip I had to grip the pen in the proper way and if you have ever tried to change a habit that you have indulged in for decades and that is just second nature it's as it seems as natural as breathing to you it is very difficult but I made a concerted effort I started looking online I tried to determine which way am I supposed to hold a pen and I knew you know this basic grip where you rest the bottom of the pen or the pencil on your middle finger and then you use your index finger and thumb and then I also had to develop a way to rest my hand on these two fingers here I don't know how you can see this in camera instead of resting instead of resting my hand like this on the fleshy part on the bottom of my hand on the paper I tried to start floating it on these two fingers so I was able to get a more fluid writing method and then using my elbow good old elbow there he is resting that on the table and then using that as a fulcrum for my hand and for my fingers as I wrote this took a lot a lot of practice and not not me just sitting around doing this over and over but just catching myself every time I started grabbing my pen like this I had to say nope you're doing it like this every time I rested my hand on the paper like this nope get it up on those two fingers on the pinky and the ring finger let it just float there get yourself a more fluid motion use large motions with your forearm and your wrist as opposed to the Fine motions that I was using with my fingers just the tips of my fingers hold your pen like this rest your hand or rest on the paper with just these first two fingers or these last two fingers use your elbow as a fulcrum as you're writing now a lot of people when they write they rest the pen in the crook of the thumb knuckle basically or the web of the thumb I still have trouble doing that so I hold my pen further up here so it comes kind of right where the knuckle the last knuckle of the index finger is and I discovered that that's called the calligraphers grip so your hand is a little more upright as you're writing and the pen is angled this way a little more as opposed to this way and I find for me that works really well for other people it might not work so well so basically what I would suggest is for you to just do some research online look at different methods of holding a pen find a way that's comfortable for you but if you have a very odd way of holding a pen if it works eh maybe that's fine but I think a good indication of knowing whether or not you need to change your grip is how do you feel after a long writing session first of all are you able to write in a nice flowing natural way without your letters being all cramped and after writing for a long time does your hand experience a lot of fatigue do you get cramping in your hand cuz I definitely did holding it like this kind of in a death grip this way I can write for much longer I don't get any fatigue it's much much nicer to write this way so don't think that oh it works for me um and so I'm just going to keep doing the way I'm keep doing it the way I'm doing maybe that's the case but look into some other methods try some of these other methods and see if perhaps they work a little better for you maybe a little more ergonomic and maybe result in less fatigue and a a better ability to actually write clearly and precisely so after a period of several months where I was trying to force myself to grip my pen correctly I would always catch myself doing this over and over because it was just second nature it was sort of ingrained in me what I needed was a nun with a ruler to smack me on the hand whenever I held my pen wrong but eventually I got that kind of drilled into my brain and when I would pick up my pen I would naturally hold it in the proper way or in the way that I determined was proper for me to be able to write fluidly and easily and gracefully then I decided I wanted to pick a method of writing in school we were taught what I believe was the danelian method of cursive which I'm showing you right here or pretty much a variation of this I think this is what most kids were taught at least when I was in school I don't know what they're taught now if they're even taught cursive now in American schools and and I'm talking about American schools by the way so this danelian method is a pretty basic cursive method the letters to me seem kind of just ungraceful a little chunky a little squatty I wasn't a huge fan of this method of cursive and so I wanted to look around and see if there were other scripts that maybe I could try to learn maybe something that I was a little more attracted to or I thought was a little more aesthetically pleasing so I looked online there a lot of great resources online one website I would like to point out to you is ii.com um and it's basically a very exhaustive handwriting resource I will put a link to that in the description below and I will try to remember if if I mention any resources at all I will try to remember to link to those in the description box below so you can check those out and I just started doing some research and I stumbled upon spencerian script which was a method of handwriting developed in the early to mid 1800s and it kind of developed as a business handwriting script so it was something that was supposed to be easy to read for correspondents for clerks and things like that to you so it wasn't too ornate but it looked a lot more classy to me than this method this denian method of cursive so I found some resources online this is my very well-loved where well-worn little writing guide where I just have the capitals and the lowercase letters here give a little closer view there um and this is something that I found on that iath website this is from a guide written in the I think 1860s maybe 1870s not totally sure and it was called the aims guide to self-instruction um to Artistic and business penmanship something like that and I will put a link to this as well in in the description and I printed out several pages from this I didn't read the whole thing it's interesting because it's you know written in the 19th century so a lot of the verbage a lot of the ways that they tell you to practice are kind of odd um and a lot of it's using dip pens and things like that but just to show you some of the things I printed out there's some exercises that they recommend and this is just sort of getting you to learn how to make the movements that you need to make the letters correctly um oh these are the more flourished capital letters I didn't really um get into that very much here are rated capitals if you want to be a little more I guess clear in in your writing or not quite as ornate and then there's just some several writing samples that that they include and I found it really helpful to just try to copy these writing samples things like this so these are just some of the pages I printed out things that I liked the look of and as I decided that this is pretty much the method I wanted to use and there's a lot of variation in the spencerian method but there were several prominent teach teachers back in the day I kind of settled on Ames as my teacher he's my guy so this is kind of the way I decided I wanted to write and obviously if you learn a new method you sort of sort of learn by rot the proper way proper way and then you will probably adapt that to your own style I'm sure that some changes will occur there are certain Capitals in this method that I don't really like very much so I kind of change them myself just some more of these exercises here and then basically the thing I used the most was this writing guide and you can see the capitals there um I don't really like their F or t the T there so I change those to kind of suit what I like um the lower cases I really like the looks of these lower case it's just a more there's more of a pronounced slant in this method than the method I was taught for cursive the letters are just a little more ornate but I think just I don't know more pleasing to the I so I really enjoyed this method I use the lowercase letters basically exactly the way they're printed here or at least I try to and then the capitals pretty much the same but as I mentioned I changed the F and the T to suit me a little better so my method of learning this script was basically I printed out some of these guides I'll show you here I don't know if that's really showing up I have one that's a little darker this has a 52° slant line which is what this script is supposed to be written at and then it has this divided up Margin or this these these spacings that are divided up so the the lowercase letters are supposed to fill this middle line and then the ascenders and descenders will fill either two of these top lines or one of these top lines or two or one it's basically all these proportions are supposed to be correct to make the writing style look correct and so using this guide you can do exercises like this where you just start writing the letters this is an early one I was kind of not doing too great there but um you can see that using these guides you can really get the proportions of the letters correct and also the slant of the letters and that's really important but you know if you pick a different method if you pick a different style of cursive a style of script that's fine just print out the resources that you want find what you like and then just practice and basically that's what it is it's it's making these letters it's drawing these letters over and over and over writing them over and over and over until you get comfortable until it becomes second nature to write these letters these guides I also found on theith website um I will try to post a link to these resources you can print these up obviously if you're using a fountain pen this is just copy paper so it's not great for that but if you just want to use a pencil or something just to get used to forming the letters in the proper way and the proportions of the letters and then I just started doodling and writing um here is kind of I'm starting out just doodling around let's see see some other stuff some Japanese stuff and here I'm just sort of playing around you know trying to make the letters this is pretty early on and there were the kind of the ingrained cive that I learned would pop out every once in a while and so I'm just sort of playing around and just doing a lot of doodling a lot of writing nonsense phrases over and over again just forming those letters trying to get the proportions right and it's a process it's something that's not going to happen overnight here was just trying to do some exercises with ovals and things like that and then eventually I would just start writing out Big Blocks of text so here's something this is from um a Patrick O'Brien book The the Aubrey Martin Matan series and I would just write several pages of text and maybe it's kind of tedious but it's also kind of fun because you're again this isn't perfect but you're you're learning a whole new method of writing and you're trying to make it second nature and so I was very disciplined with myself that anytime I wrote anything I would try to use this script and I often had this paper with me so when I was writing something if I got to a letter I was like oh yeah how does that look in this script I would have this right near me I actually had printed out a little small version of this and cut it down to fit in my madori Travelers notebook so when I was on the go writing in my journal or something I could still write using this method using these letters and i' would always have it right in front of me if I needed it for reference and so you just write that's what you do you just write here's a couple Pages you know of just writing in that style and you can see again this isn't perfect but when you start start getting it down that slant if all the letters are slanting in the exact same way and all the ascenders and the descenders are the proper proportions it really starts looking attractive and you can really start seeing some results for the effort that you've been putting into it and that's basically the most important advice I can give you if you really do want to improve your handwriting is pick a method that you like pick a script that you like work on the mechanics if your grip is wrong it's going to be very difficult to make to to write in this way you have to have a nice um Easy Motion you have to be able to move across the page without jerking it if you're just resting your hand on the page it's really hard to do this with Grace you have to keep lifting your hand over and over again so those that's the main thing you have to correct first and that just takes practice it takes just ingraining it into your brain and into your fingers and then once you've picked a method write in that method always write in that method and don't Don't cheat if you're writing a little jotting a little note to yourself don't don't just do it in the way that you've always done it force yourself to write in the method that you have chosen and there's other resources too if you're interested in spencerian there's this um Theory book that you can actually still get on Amazon it's a reprint obviously of an original this is actually by Spencer who developed the spencerian method um this guide was by Ames who was I don't know a disciple or someone who had been taught by Spencer I I don't know I haven't looked up all the history but this is spencerian so there's there's some differences between this and what I learned and I haven't really even gotten into this book yet but it actually goes letter by letter and kind of teaches you some of the theory behind each letter how to form the letters properly and from what I've noticed so far in this it's very close to this method the one that I've been using and then it also you can buy all these copy books um where there's just exercises and you copy these exercises what is this this is number five so this is the more advanced one I guess so here you go you can just practice each letter over and over and over and over and you know I haven't been extremely disciplined with this I'm not sitting in my room every day for two hours practicing this this is basically just the kind of thing that whenever I write something I try to write in this way and it improves improves slowly but you know if you catch yourself doing it incorrectly and you just keep you know just having it in your mind that I'm going to write in this way and then whatever happens happens no you have to look back over your work you have to see okay right here this P I don't like this P very much the Ascender doesn't go up high enough it's not quite right if you look at the P here you can see how this Ascender goes up comes down again it's it's not quite right the P that I wrote and so I look back at that and I go okay I need to practice that P and I might write a half a page a p over and over and over I want to make it second nature I want to drill it into my brain I want to drill it into my fingers I just want it to be I don't want to have to start searching for the letters that's the other thing too and that's why it helps to actually copy something down so if you just have a book that you like start writing what's in that book so you don't have to think of what you're writing you just think of forming the letters and you want to get to the point where you don't have to think oh how does the g go in this script or how does the Capital H go in this script and for a while you'll have to look at your guide you'll have to check your work you have to see okay what was that U oh yes okay the U is formed this way but after a while you won't have to anymore and I'm to the point now where I know the way all the letters are supposed to look um I don't have to think about that I don't always succeed I still don't have the kind of muscle memory to to properly produce them every single time but it's getting closer and closer and I think eh maybe a year or two if I'm disciplined and if I keep to this I think that my writing will be even much better than it is right here this is still not up to my satisfaction I'm still not happy with this there's a lot of things about this that I do not like but it's improving and that's kind of the point so there you have it those are the methods I've been using to try to improve my handwriting now as I said I'm no expert and I still think my handwriting has a long way to go but maybe just seeing the methods I've been using some of the resources I've been using will help you if you would also like to try to improve your own handwriting and I'm going to link to all the resources I mentioned in the description box below so make sure you check that out but until next time until we meet again I've been your good friend Bradley you been the audience this has been stuff and things good [Music] day no no no no no no no no no no no

Channel: STUFFandTHINGS

Views: 210,740

Keywords: handwriting resources, Handwriting, stuff&things, spencerian writing, handwriting practice, proper pen grip, Writing (Interest), stuff'n things, yt:quality=high, how to hold pen, iampeth.com, how to improve penmanship, stuff and things, d'nealian cursive, ames guide, improve your handwriting, spencerian cursive, improve your penmanship, stuffandthings, spencerian script, Fountain Pen (Product Category), stuff & things, how to improve handwriting, How-to (Website Category)

Id: cmsYcxDTUkA

Length: 23min 5sec (1385 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 16 2015