Bad Handwriting >twitch<

[anakhouri]

I do payroll part-time for my dad's small company. This means I deal with lots of handwritten pay sheets. All his employees are male but I don't know if that has anything to do with this.

Their handwriting SUCKS. It looks like they wrote their sheets while riding on a roller coaster. Even their printing sucks. I have to enlarge the scanned sheets about 20 times to make out a little of what they wrote. And this is important, since it involves account numbers and job numbers (strings of letters and numbers together) as well as HOW MUCH THEY GET PAID. You'd think they'd pay more attention since it involves their money!

I have a beef with bad handwriting anyway. A signature doesn't concern me but if you can't make out anything someone writes at all...I learned cursive in 3rd grade and printing way before that and I often get compliments on my handwriting; it's nothing special but at least you can read it. And I don't write slowly either, I just pay attention to make sure it's legible. How hard is that?? Even my husband has terrible chicken scratch; I know he learned all the same things I did and is really smart so why can't I read his handwriting??

I know some people will say everyone types now so who cares, but you can't type everything and eventually after the machines turn on us we will have to learn to write again.

[Ginger Tea]

I never had great handwriting to begin with, but yeah typeing killed my script.
Now I could be hired to break OCR's.

Most times I have a pen it's just to tick against my picking sheet, I don't have to write much either, normally a few notes for myself, stuff I have to find in the freezer to replace stock I don't have fresh. It's only when I have to document my shortages/surples* or order lables to add surples stock to the freezer that I have to make it legible, but the shortages sheet rows are very short to how I write*, but as long as the code is legible, that in a way is all that matters.

*We are meant to make 100 Lasange's, we make 100, I should not be short boxes, yet most days I'm down stock, mostly sandwiches.

*To compensate for my devolved scrawl, I took to writing on 5mm square paper, one letter per square in caps and occasionally use 3 for 'handwriting'.

[Andara Bledin]

Gah.

I do part number and customer data entry and maintain the databases for the company I work for.

I can't tell you how often I've got sheets from stock or sales that were too illegible to be useful.

And people who mix case for letter/number strings should be shot. >_<

But better than that are the customers that send in RFQs or POs with illegible scrawls where part numbers should be.

^-.-^

[AdminAssistant]

I just finished grading a stack of blue book essay midterms. Some of the guys have the chicken scratch thing going on, but what's worse than that are the girls who write in an overly large, too flowery style that's a weird hybrid of print and cursive. The words tend to run together, and often there's no distinction between capital and lowercase letters. It's awful!

There's always a surprise, though. One of my frat boys has some of the most beautiful handwriting that I've ever seen, and he actually did pretty good on the test.

[MaggieTheCat]

I dunno, I think something with hand writing must be genetic or something. I remember when I was in school, there was a girl who had really, really pretty hand writing. I commented to my mom that I wished my hand writing was as nice as her's, and my mom said I just needed to practice more.

So I practiced, and I practiced, and I practiced. My hand writing still sucks, and I wrote a LOT by hand when I was in school. My cursive was nigh unintelligible. My print is at least readable, but it's not really pretty.

[HYHYBT]

My handwriting, in whatever style, is atrocious. But when it matters, I can and do make it legible...

[aurelemsrealm]

My handwriting is legible, but it's not necessarily neat. It just depends on how slowly or how quickly I'm writing. If I'm writing for my own reference later, I'm less precise about it. If I'm writing something for someone else to read, I try to make sure it's as legible as I can possibly make it.

[blas87]

Most of the boys I work write extremely small, and for the life of me, I can never figure out their darn numbers they write.

It's not all stereotypical, the lead on second shift writes worse than a guy, but that's because she's always in a hurry.

I've gotten in trouble because of the way I make my 7s and 8s.

[Hyena Dandy]

My handwriting's damn near illegible, whatever I do. And I do handwrite a lot. I have practice. I had some tests done, and evidently there's something wrong with my head that keeps me from writing legibly.

[Ginger Tea]

I've gotten in trouble because of the way I make my 7s and 8s.

Even though I loop my 6's and angle my 4's I sometimes get the wrong ammount of lables (or 1/6 instead of 1/4 marked in the corner) and I have to do the European 7, the one with the line in it as my capital T is very similar, my H is very similar to the cyrilic leter backwards N.

[Racket_Man]

for some reason my handwriting just sucks. always failed pennmenship in grade school. after a while I started doing my own "brand" of printing/cursive shorthand mixture until I could make a Dr's eyes bleed.

for my own personal use I can decipher it. if I am writing an order form or making a handwritten sign for "public use" then I try and make my letters understandable.

Once I got into computers, keypunching, wordprocessing and PC's my handwriting skills went waaayyyy downhill.

[Boozy]

We still use those old blue columnar accounting ledgers at my store. The columns are very small, and two of my co-workers absolutely CANNOT write small enough to fit the numbers in. It drives me crazy.

I've also asked several people to take their time when writing memos for me, because I can't read their writing. It never helps. I think they're genuinely trying and just cannot control their hand.

It doesn't help that my company is still in the Stone Ages, and insists on using paper for everything. If we could just switch to software for some of this stuff, it wouldn't be a problem.

[Sableonblonde]

That is definitely a peeve of mine, too. My job involves a lot of typing of handwritten papers. And a good deal of the time, there will be words that are hard to make out or understand. I understand a lot of the time people are rushed, and just want to get their work out as soon as possible. But if I get something to type up and some words are illegible, I just take my best guess and send it back to them to approve. If I got it wrong, oh well, they can write me a note and send it back to me to fix. I don't care how long it takes me to get it completed. It's really their work, not mine. If they want me to get it right the first time, then maybe they can take the time to make sure what they write is readable.

I especially love when someone hands me a long document full of chicken scratch and says "Here, if you have any trouble reading my writing, come and ask me." Um no, I am not going to bother to get up and go looking for you to ask you what a word is, when you know your writing is crappy and you can't even make the effort to write so that the person typing your crap up can dechipher it. I will just GUESS and put it back in your mailbox, and if it's wrong then I'll fix it. I'm paid by the hour, I don't care how long it takes me to finish it. You are the one in a rush, not me.

[guywithashovel]

I've been told that I have really good handwriting. I had a professor in college who had really bad handwriting, and he would often make cracks about that in class. He said that when he was in K-12 school, he had a teacher who berated him for his abysmal (his word) handwriting. One day, he left on her desk a list of accomplished, intelligent people throughout history who were known for having abysmal handwriting. He said that teacher never berated him about his handwriting again.

It is important to make your handwriting legible, but I think some teachers spoil this for a lot of kids. When I was in elementary school and middle school, I had teachers who would berate students in front of the whole class about their handwriting. One of the third grade teachers I had actually sat at her desk one day and started going through a stack of papers and calling out students who had (to use her words) "garbage writing." On top of that, she also called out students who had good handwriting. I guess she wanted to both humiliate students and play them against each other.

[AdminAssistant]

While I don't think students with poor handwriting should be humiliated, there's nothing wrong with telling a student that their handwriting is poor or illegible, just as there is nothing wrong with praising students who do well.