The Daily Ping

You know, consciously changing your handwriting can be difficult. There have been a number of seismic shifts in my own handwriting over the years, and I’ll share the major ones with you.

• Dropping cursive for printing. It really feels like fewer and fewer people use cursive just for fun anymore. Maybe it’s because we’re increasingly relying on typed words (screen, paper) but cursive just feels like an old-fashioned thing to me.
• Moving to small caps. Boy, what a bad idea. I somehow figured that just writing miniature versions of capital letters would save me time and be great. No. Any of my school notes from this era look OVERLY AGGRESSIVE AND BOTHERSOME.
• Moving back to regular ol’ printing. As it should be.
• Changing my lowercase “g”. This has saved me a lot of time, and at the same time has made my penmanship even more difficult to decipher. My lowercase “g” is pretty much like an open-loop “9”, but it’s my own – I’ve only seen a handful of other people write g’s like this.
• Changing my lowercase “a”. So a few weeks ago I tried modifying my lowercase “a” to look… well… pretty much like the font you’re reading now. It’s not sticking. Two reasons: first, as I get older I’m less likely to change these things because I’m getting older; second, writing an “a” like that is just too damn many steps. So instead I’m living with an “a” that looks like a sad “o”.

Someday I’ll chronicle the changes in my signature, and detail how it de-evolved from lovely perfect 2nd-grade Palmer Method to a “P” and two lines.

Posted in Just Plain Odd