Reply #16: I had a miserable time handwriting from about the third grade through high school.

[hunter]

I can't write fast and it's hard to explain but my thoughts don't stay in synch with my handwriting or my keyboarding. I used to erase big holes in my paper, or hold my pencil in a death grip as if that would force my words to flow correctly.

My fifth grade teacher couldn't figure me out. Cursive writing and good penmanship eluded me so it was torture for both of us; she thought she could teach any kid to write cursive, and I thought I could learn anything. It got so I could produce a reasonable fascimile of cursive writing, but it always felt like I was trying to draw something incompletely pictured in my imagination. I could never get the hang of reading or writing cursive fluently despite hours of daily practice.

By the time I was in college I'd learned a couple of things:

1. Computers are wonderful. Backspace keys and cursor keys make writing a joy for me.

2. I stopped worrying about my handwriting. One of my high school English teachers told me to relax and simply draw single lines through any mistakes -- sort of like the marks copy editors use. So what if my writing looks like that of a second grader?

3. For exams I'd bring lots of extra paper or blue-books and not worry too much about staying between the lines. If it took me two blue-books to do an exam that everyone else was doing in one blue-book, so what? If I couldn't fit everything in the space provided I'd use extra pages.

The more anxious I was about my writing the worse it got. The problem didn't go away until I started to get teachers who simply accepted the way I wrote, some in high school and nearly all of them in college.