School gave me a bad handwriting

 

The other day, I had to participate in a class room training. Nothing good comes when a room full of grown-ups are asked to behave like children. Then are given chartpapers, sticky notes, and sharpies, and asked to come up with ideas. This particular session I was mandated to be in, was about design thinking. I thought that fad was over and out. Turns out, upper management still likes doing these kind of trainings and sessions.

Pretty soon, I was asked to scribble and draw on our group-acitivity sheet. And that is my ugly secret came out.

I have bad handwriting. Like, really really bad. Sometimes I have trouble reading my own writing. Its a miracle I have made it so far in my career, with people having to decipher my scribblings.

But here is a fact. At one point, I actually had nice, legible writing. The letters were evenly spaced, and even those with bad eye sight could read my writing. This was upto class..hmm…6 or 7 ? In fact, I had such good handwriting, that I was routinely asked to write on school charts, and whiteboards. I used to gleam with pride and joy whenever I was whisked away from class to write a section in the monthly notice board chart. I considered it the only gift I had, the gift of good writing.

And then, it all came tumbling down. And it was not my fault. You see, I was still writing in what was called ‘block letters’. This is the style one finds today on whiteboards, where each letter is separated and clear and legible in a word. The pen/sharpie is lifted after every letter.

It was not cursive writing. Cursive is the style when the pen is lifted only after every word, and all the letters in each words are connected. Like this:

 

I know , I know, this looks better. Brings in a sophistication, like its written by a Post Graduate in English. Like a Duke or Prince. Got it. Well I did not write like that. And some-one in my school decided that this was the only way to write. And that henceforth, every student had to write like this. In what they called ‘running letters’. What the hell is that ?

We were all given cursive writing books, you know, with those dotted sentences already printed, and asked to write over those letters. This was intended to ‘improve’ our ‘writing’. Also, it was supposedly faster, as the writer saves all those precious micro-seconds otherwise lost in lifting the pen between each letter.

It was an easy sell, not to mention, mandatory for all of us learn the new style of writing. Also, we were supposed to write only with fountain pens. Ink-pens. Aaah, those were the days, every body had fountain pens. Every student had little pieces of clothes in their pencil boxes, to absorb the extra ink that may spill from the pens. Some of use also used to carry those little ink bottles of black , and blue inks. There were ink blotches all across the classroom floor. Some even on walls. And definitely on our white uniform shirts. And what does one do, when one forgets to bring that piece of absorbent clothe ?

We used our ties ! You see, we had to wear blue ties as part of our uniforms. And that was our backup ink-absorbent.

I wrote and wrote and wrote. Hundreds of pages. Then proceeded to write the same way on every test paper. For a while, there was improvement. I could actually write faster, if not prettier. But my teacher used to ‘cut marks’ for handwriting. Pretty sure it was illegal, but who knew that ? So , in an effor to further improve my beutiful writing, I went over-board with the cursive writing stuff.

And destroyed it.

Now my writing was a gibberish mess. One could make out the words, surely, but it took more effort. After 1 hour of continous writing on school tests, my words would start to tilt and tumble. My F and T became the same. And my u, v and w were now identical triplets.  g and y used to swap places.

By 10th grade, I had degraded my beutiful writing to cursive gibberish. Until I was one day told they no longer need me to write on the school board.

Ouch.

And I have paid the price for my had handwriting ever since. Pretty sure I lost a lot of marks in college because they could no decipher my handwriting. Definitely sure some of my meeting notes were spat on in my team. But by that time, we had computers. So I could now just type out my e-mails, and it would turn out pretty and legible on the other end.

But life is not perfect. Every now and then, I have to write on a whilteboard, or chart-paper. And then my secret would be out.

So I curse my school. And my class teachers who wanted to ‘improve’ my writing.