How to make your handwriting neater, yet keep it yours

There are as many kinds of handwriting as there are people who write. Some hands lean forward and stretch each letter tall and narrow. Others sit upright and round, or stay so small that a whole sentence fits in the width of a thumb.

Some people write a joined script that fills the entire space between the ruled lines of a notebook. Others print each letter on its own and leave generous gaps around it. All of these are fine, because each of them belongs to someone.

What many of us would like is for our handwriting to look a little cleaner and read a little more easily, without turning it into someone else's. That is a reasonable thing to want, and it is entirely achievable. Handwriting is a skill, and the good thing about skills is that they can be practised.

Why so many people stopped trying

Most of our daily writing moved to keyboards and phones some time ago. Now that we rarely write by hand, many adults feel that a good hand is something they either have or lack. As with many skills, we tend to think we either can draw or cannot, either can dance or cannot. Insert the verb of your choice, and you’ll see the pattern.

Some of this hesitation is rooted in what beautiful handwriting looks like to us. It is often pictured as a calligrapher's script, with every curve, flourish, and hairline in its prescribed place. Measured against that standard, an ordinary hand will always look much messier.

Calligraphy is an art form in its own right. It asks for patience and many attempts at a single word, and the results are meant to be looked at. A shopping list, a note in a diary, or the date of a dentist appointment asks for something else entirely: a hand that is quick, comfortable, and easy to read the next morning.

A different use for the worksheet

There is no need to put away the calligraphy or cursive worksheets you may have bought. They are built on sound principles, and those principles are worth borrowing. If you haven’t bought any, please don’t worry, as we will be building something along the lines ourselves.

A good worksheet does three things:

1. It fixes a baseline for the letters to sit on.

2. It sets a consistent height for them to reach.

3. It shows a single angle for them to follow.

Through repetition, the hand learns to return to the same proportions, which is the real secret of neater handwriting. Not the flourishes, as many believe, but the organised rows of letters.

Start with a sample phrase

The first step is to see what your handwriting actually does, and what it does not.

Sit comfortably, take your usual pen and a sheet of lined or dotted paper, and write "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" as you normally would. This sentence contains every letter of the alphabet, which makes it a useful sample to see how each letter behaves in your handwriting.

Please do not try to make it look better; at this stage, it will not help.

This is my own sample, and now we will go through everything that is pictured here.

I am fairly content with how I write, though I can see where it could become more even. To make that visible, I go over the writing with a pencil or a pen in a different colour and mark any inconsistencies I notice.

And this is what stands out to me:

• The line itself. Although I am following the dotted guide, the writing drifts up and down, most noticeably at the start of the sentence.

• The height of the small letters. Calligraphers and type designers call this shared height the x-height, after the height of a lowercase "x", and an uneven x-height is one of the quickest ways to make a line look restless.

• The angle. The tilt is fairly consistent (you had to see what I was writing a few years ago, though!), but if you have a slant, you might notice how it changes from letter to letter.

What to keep, and what to refine

I've chosen to leave some things in my sample alone. Some letters take a different form at the end of a word than in the middle. Some words are joined throughout, while others break in places. I am not trying to correct any of this. I am not signing a Christmas card. I am trying to make my day-to-day handwriting more legible, and I want it to still feel like mine.

These habits are part of how my hand has evolved over the years. Smoothing them away would make the page tidier, but it would also make it artificial.

What I would like to change is the overall evenness of the line: a steadier baseline, small letters of a more consistent height, and a more settled angle. In a nutshell, make it neater.

Name the features of your hand

Before building any practice material, it helps to describe your handwriting in plain terms. This is exactly what I did above, to understand what feels a little off and what I would prefer not to change.

My own hand has these features:

• It is upright, with no strong slant in either direction.

• The letters are elongated, closer to ovals than to circles.

• The strokes are rounded, with few sharp points or angles.

• There are no flourishes.

Your list may look quite different. Your hand might lean forward or backward, which is often seen in left-handed writers. It might have angular strokes, or a strong contrast between the x-height and the loops that rise above it in "l" and "b" or drop below it in "g" and "y". The letters might be round or elongated. It is yours. Cherish it, and give it a little time and love.

Build a practice sheet from your own shapes

A personal practice sheet must be based on your own writing, not the fancy hand you saw on Instagram. Find the small letter in your sample that you like best, often an "o" or an "a", and measure its height. That becomes your x-height. If needed, rule a baseline and an x-height line at that distance. You may even add a line above for tall letters such as "l" and "b", and one below for letters that descend, such as "g" and "y".

If your hand has a slant, you might want to draw light guides at the angle you most often produce. On my sample, I drew one through each letter to spot any angle differences. It also shows which angle your handwriting naturally tends towards.

If it is upright, as mine is, light vertical guides will do the same job, or simply the dots of the page, if your handwriting fits between them comfortably.

Next, choose a handful of shapes that carry the character of your writing. For my hand, I started with these:

• "o" and "c", which hold the oval proportion shared by most of my letters.

• "m" and "w", to see whether the height and spacing are even.

• "l" with "e", and "b" with "g", which practise tall and descending strokes in relation to the x-height.

And now you may apply your desire to write as beautifully as you can. Write a row of each letter or letter pair, concentrating on the evenness of the shapes, height and tilt. Then take the colour you used for the markup and mark every letter's geometry.

When you feel confident in your shapes, short words that combine them make a natural next row: "come", "bloom", "glow".

Practise this way for at least five minutes a day. After a week or two, write the pangram again without guides and set it beside the first sample. The letters should still be recognisably yours. The line they sit on should be neater.

A hand that is still yours

We live in a world where anything short of perfect is seen as not worthy of attention. We at Scriveiner want to challenge this belief and give people their confidence back. In writing, in creative thinking, in drawing, in the 99 imperfect drafts that come before the one they fall in love with.

Learning calligraphy is a wonderful aim, but it often does not solve the problem people came with in the first place. Calligraphy teaches you to slowly write extremely beautiful letterforms, it trains the steadiness of the hand, but it requires years of trial and error to master the craft.

Improving your everyday handwriting is a small first step towards the greater goal, and more importantly, it gives you back the confidence in your own writing. Which opens hundreds of new doors to creativity, better thinking, and a calmer headspace.

So, to begin, sit at your desk and write the sample phrase on the sheet of paper. Do it tomorrow too. And notice how you slowly fall back in love with writing.