Editing The Pen Addict 136/transcript (section)

== Handwriting Practice ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, the, there is no easy way to change your handwriting. Just like everything else, you have to put in the time. I wrote about how I would get a legal pad and a pen that I liked and I would just fill line after line mostly of a single letter or a single number, not a full alphabet, right? That's too much change every letter. So, if I wanted to change how I did my A, for example, my lowercase a instead of a circle and a line down, you know, I wanted to have kind of like that open top A. So, you would just get your pen and just start writing A's all the way across the page, line after line after line after line and then change to something else because you're going to need to practice that in reality when you are writing and see if it sticks and things like that and just kind of refine the shape and it's totally muscle memory and that's where that time is going to, you're going to have to put in that time. So, what I did to put in that time, I wanted to have like an architectural style handwriting. So, I was in a drafting job so I'd look at blueprints and I'd say, oh, I really like how this A looks and then I'd just copy it over and over. I'd go home at night and just write and write and write at my kitchen table letters. that's what I did for fun back then. Just all over and over and over again. And then eventually that becomes an entire alphabet. You figure out which ones are poor and you work the hardest on those and some come real easy, some come very difficult like a G. G's are generally pretty hard to get right. And yet, like Mikey's talking about in the chat room, these things are digital now. You know, you get, you know, drafting and design work, you know, are done. You don't have to write this stuff anymore, right? There's not a lot of handwriting going on. So, it's kind of a lost art. And my handwriting now is so poor compared to what it used to be when I really practiced this all the time. I don't sit down and do that anymore.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, if I could give everyone just a couple of quick pointers, it's one, it's find a style that you like. And you're going to have to put in the time to mimic that style, whether it's a full alphabet or a single letter. And we'll have a couple links in the show notes. Stephen Brown has a YouTube video out there. And, um, there's also an architectural writing video series, which I actually don't like his style, but the way he works through it is actually very good on shows how he practices. He also uses a ruler, which I really don't like. Um, that's not practical. For non-architects, but you can go through the, you can see the process, um, in his practicing. So, pick a style you like and just start mimicking those letters. Two, you need to understand that the pen you use is going to affect how your letters look. For me, my letters look the best if I use a squared off nib, like a cursive italic nib, or a stub nib, or a art or drawing type pen, which doesn't bleed and leaves a very sharp line. Those are the two pens that I use to practice the most with. That's how I want my lettering to look.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Um, and that's it. I mean, you, you're just going to have to put in the time. It's all about the practice and repetitiveness and eventually just works its way into your muscle memory. So, I don't have an easy answer for this. Um, but I do want to go through, you know, some of these comments I got and touch on that and see if, you know, maybe I can help out a couple of people because this always comes up. Um, but since we talked about, you know, what pens we use, how about we talk about our last sponsor of the day who, uh, happens to have some really, really good pens.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Our friends over at the Pen Chalet are back to sponsor again. These guys sell authentic, amazing rollerballs, fountain pens, ballpoints, mechanical pencils and so much more from all of your favorite brands like Pelican, Lamy, Pilot, Namiki, Kaweco, Sailor and many, many more. They have great reliable service, very fast, very quick at getting back to you and they have great shipping stuff too. They have free shipping on orders of over 50 bucks in the continental United States and they also have reasonable shipping rates to all international destinations too. They run special discounts all the time and they have super special discounts for pen addict listeners which I'm going to talk about in a moment. And as well as all the brands that I mentioned earlier and all the types of pens that they sell, the Pen Chalet also sell pen carrying cases, pen holders, refills, fountain pen converters and so many more. They also have a bunch of limited edition pens and stuff that you're going to find just over on the Pen Chalet because they're cool like that. Pen Chalet has low prices on high quality pens and they offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee. So go to penchalet.com that's P-E-N-C-H-A-L-E-T.com and use the code penaddict. It's going to get you 10% off your order. But what you want to do to find some of our special offers this week, so you can use Pen Addict on anything in the store at the checkout screen you're going to get your 10% off. But you want to go and check out the special offers that we have. If you go to the Pen Chalet website, penchalet.com and you just click the podcast link right at the very top, it's going to take you to a page. You enter the code penaddict there and it's going to show you a bunch of super special offers. There's a ton of offers this week just for Pen Addict listeners. I want to talk about a couple of them. So they've got the Field Notes Ambition Memo Notebooks. They've got them for $6.27 with a sale price and then after you use the coupon as well. What about the Covecos? They have a few different Covecos. They have the Classic Sport, the Ice Sport and they have the Deer 2 as well. All on sale. They have a Lamy 2000 which you can grab for $134.33 which is fantastic. Great pen. Love that pen. Retails at $199. Anything caught your eye there Brad?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so before the episode Myke told me that Pen Chalet is sponsoring and he told me not to go look at the page until it was time for the ad read because we don't have one pen. Like sometimes with Pen Chalet we feature one pen plus all these extra deals. Well this time we just have Ron has just added things into our regular deals page at the Pen Addict specific page so Myke told me not to look at them until he brought this up. The first thing I choked on was the Field Notes thing. Field Notes Ambition the current colors edition $6.27 for a three pack of those. You're not going to find a better price than that. It's 30% off. Yeah the Kaweco Dia 2 it's 9788 which is a really really good pen. I compared it to the Pelican M205 although it's not a piston filler just in the feel and look and style of the pen. And there's one pen on here that might fit a lot of people's needs and I consider this what's the best way to put it a play pen. This is a pen you get and you fidget with and you know you just kind of mess around with it's not going to be like an all day everyday writer but that's the Noodler's Ahab fountain pen. What that is is that's a steel flex nib pen and for $14 you're not going to find a cheaper pen than that. Now I'll be up front and honest Noodler's does have some quality control issues with these pens and people have to take them apart and put them back together again but that's what this pen's for. It's for learning how to it might give you a problem and you're going to learn how to take it apart and mess around with it. These nibs are swappable with other pens and for $14 I mean it's not like you're losing anything here if it's you know all of a sudden you hate it. But a lot of people want an inexpensive flex nib pen. This is your one. Your Noodler's Ahab fountain pen. So I wanted to point that out as that's not something I've even noticed Ron have on the site before. So that's very very cool.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So it's a bunch of fantastic stuff that you can grab for yourself over at penchalet.com Thank you so much to penchalet for the continued support of this show. We love those guys.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Love them. Very cool. I'm gonna have to go back and dig through that a little bit more. So back on the handwriting thing. This is something I could do post after post after post and videos of. I mean this just never people really can't get enough information on how to work on improving their handwriting. So let me go over a couple of comments that people made about this post and just about handwriting in general. And a lot of it's just to show that it makes me feel good that I'm not alone in my insanity. for these little minor tweaks that I do that are like super important to me. So Charlie D on one of the comments in the blog post says over the years I've made a number of transitions to my handwriting. Started putting a cross on my sevens, mostly a stylistic choice. Changed from a round lowercase a to one with the cap, which I've done to legibility and confusion with lowercase o's. Started putting a slash through my zeros, which I've played around with. I love that look, but I have not committed to that yet. A two-part capital G, which means you write the C part and then you kind of do a seven over the G. I don't know the exact terms of the parts of the lettering. Anna can fill me in on that. She's a pro.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And putting a cap and a foot on my ones. almost everything that he's done here, I've messed around with at some point or do exactly like I do my G's the same way, I do my lowercase a's the same way, and I'm always messing around with something else. Do I want to put a slash through to zero? I mess around with that a lot. Then we had an architect, a real live architect, chime in to the post, Mr. Brian Acom. He said, it's a bit amusing to me that others would want to learn to write like an architect considering that the sentiment amongst my studio and later my students while on that forced march was of pure resentment. So in architecture school you're forced to learn to write a certain way. It says, nothing like being in architecture school and having handwriting homework. We soon learned why it was done that way and learned to love it. It is second nature. I commend your pursuit of the perfect five and your struggles with the four, although it can be said that the reason we close the four in architecture terms is so it can never be construed for an H.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Why is there such strict handwriting in architecture?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Because you cannot make a mistake. You cannot have someone read your plans and make a mistake or have confusion about what it's saying.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That makes sense. It feels like there would be other industries though, right, as well, that would be like that. I mean, I'm not being funny, and this is your joke. No, no, no, no, what I'm about to say, you would expect that doctors might have the same sort of restrictions, but yet they are known to have the worst handwriting. So that kind of is surprising to me in a way. But who am I to speak about?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I can agree with that. I can agree with that. And that's why my four was closed at the top, because that's how I learned how to do it when I was changing my handwriting. So that was just part of it. He says, he continues, he says, my threes and fives all dip below the baseline into the slug akin to the style from a few centuries ago, and I'd love to be able to effectively change my one into a European style one that has an up and down stroke. So how do you, how was your one, Myke? How do you write a one? It's just straight line or do you have like a foot?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Straight line unless there's a reason to do it the other way.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Unless you're making a point to have clarity in that number.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, well, let's say I'm writing, I don't know, I'm writing a one close to an I or an L. I don't know what the reason would be, but Mikey Reactor said in the chat room, and I'm not sure, he says he's not sure about this and neither am I, but it would kind of make sense if it's true that doctors are encouraged to write poorly so people can't fake prescriptions, but I don't know, that seems like an old wives tale to me, because anyone can write poorly.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But anyway. Yeah,

'''Brad Dowdy:''' just get your kid to write it and that'll turn out about the same as a doctor's handwriting.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, Brian goes on, he says, so he, he's talking about this one that he says, considering it took me over five years to finally get my nine correct and natural, I think I'm going to wait for a while to change some of his other letters, but just, that's one of the points that hit me. Took him five years to get his, to settle on his nine. That's how this handwriting thing is. It's a huge challenge. So, even just fixing one letter, it's just so ingrained in your muscle memory that it took a guy whose handwriting would probably blow all of ours away five years to lock down his nine. So,

'''Myke Hurley:''' this is not nearly enough of an issue for me. I can't even, like, you know, obviously for architects and stuff, but I can't, I don't put enough, I don't put any thought into this, you know, about my handwriting. Thank you. But it's weird to me that even you do, like, why would you change your four? It just seems like such a strange thing to me to do.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I know. And apparently I'm not alone. I mean, that's why we have this blog and podcast thing because we're all weird this way.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's just, yeah, it's just the

'''Brad Dowdy:''' dangdest thing you've ever seen in your life. It's like, you know, how do we all have this same thought process about the minutia? But that's, I mean, that's why this whole community is so great and that's why we love everybody and everybody so much. So, so, yeah, I mean, that's pretty much it. You know, I had a couple other small comments like David Ray asked me, you know, in the past I've always said I've been a tight pin gripper. Like, I really gripped the pin hard and he wanted to know if I've made any progress in relaxing that and I have and that's all thanks to fountain pens to be quite honest. My angle of attack has changed because of fountain pens and my grip pressure has changed because of fountain pens because the way fountain pens lay ink on the paper is so different. it allows for that. It allows for that relaxation and to get more of a flowing style even when you're a printer like me. I mean, if I wrote in cursive, I'd probably have a really, really light grip, but I have to keep some form of pressure because I print because I'm up and down off the page a lot. I can't, the pen can't slip between every letter. It would take me days to write a sentence. But yeah, honestly, using fountain pens and relaxing my entire arm and fingers as I grip the pen, it has made a difference. So yeah, and that's pretty much it. Like I said, we've got a couple videos that we'll put in there, one from Stephen Brown, who everyone who listens to this podcast knows. Definitely check that out because he talks about writing with fountain pens in that. So it's something I want to talk about, something we'll talk about more in the future because it continues to come up just like a fountain pen 101. How do I clean a fountain pen and how do I make my handwriting better? Those are such recurring topics and I love them and I'm happy to help anyone out that I can who has questions about these things because it's things we're experiencing and things we continue to go through. So it's all great stuff.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But don't ask me because I can't help you, I'm afraid.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, yeah, don't ask Myke about the handwriting stuff.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because I'm no good.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Forward those questions to me.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh dear. I look forward to your new handwriting addict podcast to some other person.