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| And I remember thinking... if only I could write as neatly as a computer. |
I was sitting in lecture last week, when my pofessor instructed us to gather into groups to answer the questions that he had put up.
I did as I was told, and grouped-up with two other girls. One girl tore out a piece of paper and set it in the middle of the table.
“Who wants to write?”
...this is always a problem when a group of people is required to work together, and hand in only one sheet of loose-leaf paper.
Obviously, the girl who had torn-out the paper felt that by designating a sheet from her personal notebook, she had already contributed her share to the group. Why else would she have asked who wanted to be the scribe, so to speak, if she had had any intention of doing it herself?
Sometimes, you get lucky. You get into a group and one kid at the table whips out his or her notebook, a pencil, and writes everyone’s names at the top of the paper, and poise, looking around at all of you with thier pencil just above the sheet ready to write, signifying their full intent on donating the paper and doing all of the work. Most the time, if not all, you’ll find the reason being that these people don’t trust other group members to do the job correctly. I don't honestly think I've ever had anyone complain about these people, for fear that mentioning so would lead to having to write.
As it was, the two gals in my group seemed to be friends, and I was the odd duck out. It was clear to me that neither of them was about to pull out a pencil, so I "volunteered" as if I had the choice.
While we spoke and discussed I penciled in each persons' thoughts on the matter, forming their words into my own style of writing. You know, how you hear someone express their idea in one way, and you write it in such a way as to twist their words to suite your own personal thought process.
Well paper-donator girl was watching me write down her verbal sentence, and exclaimed loudly,
“Woah! You have really nice handwriting!”
I thanked her. When we had finished and everyone was ordered back to his or her previous seats, I looked down at the group work I had written and gave a thought to what she had said.
I remember sitting in fifth grade, Mr. Nelson’s class, during a history project involving a large wheel littered with a made-up story. It was a group project, and my job in the task was the final touch: to write the story on the board, and draw the illustrations.
Well I took the project home that night, and I remember sitting at the kitchen table with it all laid out in front of me. I drew the pictures first, so that I’d have enough room, and I later moved-on to the writing. I remember erasing time and time again, hating the way that my words looked, how they “ruined” the board. And I remember thinking... if only I could write as neatly as a computer.
That night, I wrote each individual letter with care, trying with all of my effort to write as if I had typed it all up myself. It took me forever, and when I went to school the next day, I received so many compliments on my handwriting that I practiced the same method for everything I did that year. In sixth gradeI kept my style but changed the way I wrote my letter “E” three times. Come seventh grade, I wrote everything in cursive because I felt it was faster, then switched back due to too many teacher complaints.
In eighth grade I wrote so small in an attempt to conserve paper that I had my teachers drawing magnifying glasses next to my scores, in fact, I can name at least four or five times that my style of penmanship has changed throughout my years of schooling, and I’m curious as to why that is.
I can only decipher the neatness as being one thing: My compulsive need to strive for perfection.
I can Depict my constant use of comas to define the difference in the way I think and write,
And I can tell by the amount of space in between my words just how much of a hurry I am in when I write something.
Although my time spent grading papers as a student aid my senior year of highschool has left me with the conclusion that men generally have the sloppiest handwriting,t is not just men that have bad penmanship. Women can write just as illegibly. Why? Why is no one style alike, and what does it say about the person? My mother, father, and sisters all have a different style than myself, so it’s not due to genetics. It’s not something passed-on, nor something inherited.
So why after years and years does our individual handwriting look as it does? And what does it define about us.
What does your handwriting, if anything, say about you?
