7 tips to start writing by hand

At our company, each employee was gifted a reMarkable. Something I have looked at many times but could never convince myself to buy it. After all, I have a perfectly good tablet that also has a pencil. So why should I buy another one?

But to be fair the writing experience on the remarkable is a whole lot different than what my iPad provides me. This brings me to another topic: Writing!

If you are like me (a developer) then your first instinct might be to grab a keyboard and use that to write out whatever your currently thinking of. However many studies have shown that writing by hand is better than typing.

Here are 7 tips to help you start writing by hand.

1. Start slowly and focus o being accurate. You will become faster over time, but if you write fast then you will have a hard time becoming accurate.
2. Do your fingers hurt? This is often the result of squeezing the pencil without thinking. Try to relax your grip. Not certain if you’re squeezing or not? Just use your other hand and try to pull your pencil. You are squeezing when you feel any form of resistance.
3. Use lined paper. This ensures that every letter starts at the same height and it prevents you from changing the size of each letter too much.
4. If you use lined paper try to leave an empty line between each line that you write. Not only does it prevent you from accidentally writing over a previous line when you write a capital letter. It also gives you space to write a quick fix.
5. Talking about fixes, try to get into the habit of crossing out mistakes instead of erasing them. This is faster and doesn’t pull you out of the “writing”-loop too much.
6. Turn and move your writing tablet instead of your hand so that your writing hand stays comfortable.
7. Be patient. Writing by hand for a long time is a skill most developers have lost. Like most learning experiences: If you’re not having fun, you are doing it wrong.

Hopefully, the above tips are useful. Over time people will compliment you for your readable handwriting even though you might consider it chicken scratch.

So grab your tablet or piece of paper and start writing!