I've actually learned how to hold a pen ergonomically by Taylor Swift. [1] Sounds crazy, but I use the grip with a drawing tablet pen and it just feels natural.
I hold the pen between index finger and middle finger and use the thumb to click buttons.
I started to get some RSI pain using a normal mouse, because I believe the hand seems to rest too flat on the table. I first switched to one of those crazy ergonomic mice [2] without much success, because I think, there the hand position is just too steep/vertical. Then I completely switch from a mouse to a drawing tablet and I fully recovered. I also think, that you don't need as much force to move around your hand compared to a mouse.
Oddly enough, when i'm going for long writing periods, the Taylor Swift method is how i do it. I've been writing that way since high school when we had to write out 5-10-page essays instead of typing them. I get slightly less control, but can chicken scratch for hours without any fatigue.
I laughed when I saw this was the top comment on this post! My first thought reading this article was, dang, wait til he learns how Taylor Swift holds a pen. It looks weird at first but it's surprisingly comfortable and easy to write with!
As a left hander, writing is difficult. Western writing favours right handers; from the direction of flow, down to the formation of letters.
That coupled with mild dyspraxia, meant that I have a death grip on a pen - I grip it so hard the ends of my fingers turn white, all the while trying to control my movement as if an invisible force is constantly tugging the nib in random directions.
And don't get me started on fountain pens - they are explicitly designed to be 'dragged' across the page. As a left hander you mostly 'push' - I broke so many fountain pen nibs, until I eventually gave up using them.
Changing my grip on a pen now, would probably make all my issues worse, not better!
So people used to think there was only one standard-issue type of brain, and that everyone's brain operated in the same way and could learn the same things equally well, and a single optimal technique could be developed and taught once to everyone. The Taylorist dream, among others. But left handed people kept stubbornly existing, despite the beatings. And then education discovered that dyslexia and dyspraxia are things. And the not-well-understood category of "non-neurotypical" people currently classified into conditions like autism, Aspergers, ADHD etc. Eventually we're going to learn to fit the technique to the human rather than the other way round. People over processes, and all that.
This may explain why people have strong-but-wildly-different opinions about which programming languages are "intuitive". Maybe some are just ""left-handed"", in a very non-literal sense.
(I'm a left hander from just slightly after the "beating children for being left-handed" era, but I expect there's someone in the audience who remembers it)
Even if we make lots of adjustments to teach according to the child's needs, I think one glaring issue will remain and it's that we read and write left to right. Which is an issue for left handers no matter what. Pushing the writing implement and dragging your hand over what you just wrote seems inevitable.
I have heard that there are left-handed pens. Geometrically and mechanically, they're the same as regular pens. The difference is that they hold faster-drying ink.
I have not actually confirmed this, or even seen them for sale. I don't even know where you'd go to buy them (Amazon, probably). But if you're a lefty, it might be worth looking into.
Here in Germany (where fountain pens are normal in school) you see them all over the place. Never heard about variations with in ink though, rather it's about the shape of the pen (many aren't symmetric) and the cut of the nib, so it works better at typical angles.
I remember that era. I was taught in the transition from the Socialist System (1991) to the Capitalist in (Eastern) Germany. Thanks for your comment, it very well resonated. Maybe that is why I constantly criticize process-driven tools, e.g. Jira, SAPCRM. We need creative tools like AutoCad or Emacs even for service clerks.
Also left-handed - and I also hate fountain pens, but for another reason: as a left hander you move your hand over the fresh line you are writing, so the text ends up smudged with a fountain pen. Ball-point pens work better (mostly), and I refuse to contort my hand or write at strange angles to avoid this, that's a recipe for trouble. Fortunately I don't have to write a lot by hand anymore...
I don't think I'd describe my hand position as a claw. My wrist is straight but my hand wrests above the line of text and the pencil meets the paper at basically a "north-west" angle.
If some people write at a more extreme angle than that, I agree that sounds like a recipe for a bad time.
I'm also left-handed and dyspraxic. At school they gave me a triangular rubber grip [0] to put on my pen to help me hold it properly. Though I didn't get much better despite spending hours doing handwriting practice.
At high school after I finally got diagnosed they lent me a little Amstrad laptop to do my work on [1]
I can write neatly if I "draw" the words, but it takes ages. My handwriting hasn't been an issue since I left school, so I don't worry about it too much.
I was left-handed until about 4, but I don't remember it. The right-ies forced me into their cult.
It's kind of moot because my handwriting looks like I'm having a seizure writing on a washer on spin-cycle in an earthquake. It also crawls up or down vertically over time, and looks just awful. Base lines are of no help to me at all. And then there's this Turkish artist friend of mine who can write at exactly an 60° angle freehand on a rough wall, backwards and in a mirror-image, perfectly beautifully (he does interior commercial work to pay the bills). :sigh:
> I can write neatly if I "draw" the words, but it takes ages.
This is exactly me. If I treat words as little pictures I can draw each one neatly. It takes about 30 seconds for an average word though.
I wasn't lucky enough to be allowed to submit my written work typed out at school, but I was given a concession to write 100% in capital letters, which at least meant my handwriting was legible (somewhat).
> And don't get me started on fountain pens - they are explicitly designed to be 'dragged' across the page. As a left hander you mostly 'push'
A left-handed childhood friend of mine would place her folders at a ~45 degree angle, and write at an angle. That way, she was not pushing the pen from the left (smudge the paper with her hand), but rather pulling from top-left to bottom-right.
That said I also abandoned fountain pens - writing with them looks nicer, but writing math quickly is a pain.
A lefty myself, I actually prefer a fountain pen and haven't had much trouble with them. I find with a good fountain pen, I need much less pressure to write solid lines, and they don't get jammed up like ballpoints, making the inkflow more consistent. I also tend to write with the paper at an angle to match the shape of my arm.
Handwriting education is sorely lacking for left-handed people. Most often they are left to figure out things for themselves.
Things you -- or other left-handed people -- could try:
- Rotate your writing surface. The more you rotate your writing surface the more it changes the writing direction from left-to-right to top-to-bottom which solves a lot common issues. It may take some getting used to but it's a lot better than using a claw grip to bend your wrist out of the way of your writing.
- There are "left-handed-inks" for fountain pens available these days. They generally dry quickly and resist smudging. Combine this with a pen that has a round tip: it won't give a hoot about which direction you're applying force in since it won't dig into the paper like a square or chisel tip will.
- Use a calligraphers grip. Place the pen in your hand, the body of the pen resting in the web between your index finger and thumb. Rest the grip of the pen on your middle finger in a comfortable spot, some people rest it on the side of the fingertip but moving it up till past the knuckle places it in an area with more padding. This does necessitate rotating your paper to avoid smudging but it does make applying less force to your pen a lot easier. If you still have pressure problems with this grip you can try modifying it by resting the pen on your index finger instead and holding it with your thumb.
- I'd consider this somewhat of a last resort since it's not quite the best writing technique but you can try holding the pen some ways above the grip. The extra distance from your writing can be just enough to avoid smudging.
The world sure isn't built for left handed people, but it seems to me that a lot of suffering could be avoided by including specifics for lefties in writing education.
I used to get a really painful "cave" in the side of my middle finger, from the pressure that I applied to the pen, after writing a page or so. These days I'm barely handwriting, so I'm good.
When I was a kid, several hundred moons ago, writing a certain sentence in cursive hundreds or even a thousand times was a real punishment. (Bart had it easy.)
I feel your pain. I am also left-handed and during school times switched pen nibs every other month since they kept deteriorating. And I never quite got the hang of avoiding smearing.
I switched to writing almost exclusively on tablets a few years ago and it's so much better for me. I can't quite put into words how much of a difference it makes for me. Smearing is a non-issue and the pen glides fine either way on a glass surface.
There are some other benefits as well: I can no longer loose my notes and I'm a lot better about filing them away neatly digitally than I am with physical notes, but I suppose that might be a very personal thing. Having them indexed occasionally comes in handy as well.
I went from a Surface to an iPad Pro and vastly prefer the latter. If you haven't yet I would recommend giving it a try. These days even the normal $329 iPad supports the Apple Pencil and provides incredible value in my opinion.
My dad is left-handed and learned with fountain pens. He writes with his wrist bent inwards very sharply so that he can drag the pen without smearing the ink.
To get an idea of what it looks like: bend your wrist to about 90 degrees, hold it so the "point" of your wrist is pointing towards the top of the paper, hold the pen so that it is tilted to the left of the paper going down and the right of the paper going up. Your pinky should be the only thing in contact with the page, and should be far enough towards the top of the page that it doesn't drag through the tallest letters you draw.
It's the most awkward looking way of holding a pencil I've seen.
In Japan I believe the (true and only correct) way to hold a pen is taught and emphasized from a young age, while the United States maintains a "do it your way" mentality about it. It may have to do with chopsticks requiring similar precision or that it is difficult to follow the detailed prescriptions for writing Chinese characters otherwise - I'm just speculating here.
On a related note, there are pens whose grip is shaped to teach/enforce the "correct" way.
For example the Pilot penmanship or many Lamy fountain pens are popular ones.
That said, teaching handwriting is surprisingly very country specific. For example, in Germany proper grip and writing with a fountain pen was something you were taught in elementary school (I think now less emphasized) and simple cursive. In the US they seem to instead prefer throwaway pens and seemingly hard to read cursive.
What's different about German cursive? I live in a German-speaking country now and I haven't really noticed any defining differences where I am, though I also wasn't looking for them.
Throwaway ballpoint pens seem to be the norm at least in university settings here, in my experience.
The other problem with the American approach is that you are never taught the proper motion patterns ("Arkaden und Girlanden", anyone?) that cursive handwriting consists of. You are expected to write properly but aren't given the tooling.
That's funny I kind of developed to writing in Ausgangsschrift naturally having been taught the more florid US style of US cursive. It's basically just connecting the normal print version of the characters so you don't have to lift the pen. Mine's more of a mutt though since it basically came out of just writing in print without lifting my pen as school demanded faster note taking.
I learned how to write in Kurrent a year ago or so. I'm not quite up to speed with it, but it looks nice, and I think it has the potential to be faster than British/American cursive styles.
In the 90s most schools still taught cursive, but the US is big, so your school might have been an exception.
> In a 2007 survey of 200 teachers of first through third grades in all 50 American states, 90 percent of respondents said their schools required the teaching of cursive.
Working in an international school, I find that my German students routinely have the best formed handwriting of all. Many use Lamy pens. Chinese writing (in English) is easy to read, since they don't usually do joined up writing, and craft each letter.
Same in Russia, to a lesser defgree. For pens\penls\forks\knives.
My grip was always 'right' but I clearly remember my father commenting every time he saw a person holding his tool the wrong way. To him me doing it the right way was like a little victory or something.
In India Punjab, I learned to jold the pencil between thumb, index & middle finger. Imagine these three finger ends touching each other with ends at same plane, & touching from opposite of nails side.
Now imagine a pencil between these three, with thumb & index fingers' opposite of nail side touching the pencil; & pencil resting on left of middle finger nail side.
But general idea is that you have to do simple exercises with a kid before school so that a kid won't be just clenching a pen like they usually do with a spoon when they a small.
We even have a short poem for breaks during such exercises. :D
I don't remember being taught how to grip a pen correctly. I'm pretty sure my grip is wrong too, since I developed a callus on my index finger from writing too much during school. FWIW I grip like "dynamic tripod grip" on "figure 3", except the thumb is perpendicular to the pen.
I’ve studied ペン字 a bit (the art of writing Japanese with a pen instead of a brush as was traditionally done). Grip is emphasized as bad grip makes it very difficult to write beautifully: certain strokes become crooked and/or shaky. Posture is also emphasized.
I don’t think it has as much to do with chopsticks as children are generally proficient with chopsticks before they can write in my experience.
As dwg says, there is an optimisation of the grip for what is seen as good writing.
The interesting part is that stroke count and order is important, sometimes more important than the exact resulting shapes. That puts an emphasis on how the letters are written, and changes the tradeoffs between precision and fluidity.
Relaxed forefinger, not bent inward like the authors original grip. The reason is that vertical downward strokes are made by bending the index forefinger downward.
(I don't speak Japanese but) That seems the same as I was taught for writing English in the UK. I'm sure a child using 'Correct #3' of OP would have been corrected.
(Computers existed throughout my schooling; I'm pretty sure handwriting's still taught. Mine is of course unpracticed and poor.)
I’m surprised they don’t teach this in US schools. I just Saturday had a large stack of documents notarized and I observed the poor notary getting hand cramps. Then I saw her grip on her pen and it was no wonder. I felt sorry for her.
I was born in Russia, we were taught to hold a pen a certain way. We had exercises too (one I remember: grip the pen (with 3 fingers) and dab it forward-and-back by bending the three fingers and unbending them). I was shocked at the way people help pens in the US when I arrived.
The grip we were taught I believe gives you more control over the pen, with no straining -- just an elegant extension of fingertips.
The most important thing I did to "ease" my pen grip was to stop using ball-point pens. They require a lot more pressure in order to put ink to paper than, say, a gel pen. My hands thank me!
Ball-point pens actually were very painful for me to use after breaking my dominant hand thumb. Fountain pens forced me to both grip and stoke much more gently, and even fifteen years later I still use fountain pens almost exclusively.
Rollerball require the least pressure (of the ball-point pend family), but the near-complete lack of resistance actually makes it harder to write neatly, since you can't rely on the friction to keep the pen under control.
A good fountain pen nib is similar, since it tends to glide over the paper on top of the ink.
Interesting. When I found out gel pens exist, I just couldn't go back to ballpoint - the scraping gives the same sensation as a pencil, preventing runaway strokes due to being too slippery.
Somewhere online (maybe here) I read the suggestion to hold the pen between the index and middle fingers (with the thumb slightly below and to the side, where it will naturally fall). I've done it this way ever since - it's much more comfortable, and I find it easier to control the pen.
I've held a pen like this all my life. Long term effects are a callous on the middle finger front-most knuckle and a slightly crooked index finger. Gets the job done, but I wonder if there is a better way.
1. Touch the pad of your thumb to the pad of your index finger.
2. Curl your middle finger slightly so that the side of the tip of your middle finger just touches the side of your thumb. There should be no space between your middle and index fingers.
3. If you've done it properly, your hand will feel completely relaxed, and there will be a little triangular-shaped hole created by your thumb, index, and middle fingers. Stick the pen in this hole and hold it just tightly enough to keep it from falling out. It should take almost no muscle tension to hold it in place.
This is very similar to what you've described. You may still get a callus on your middle finger, but your index finger should not be crooked.
I've used the dynamic quadrupod grip my entire life, fingers very close to the tip of the pen by the way. I used to draw a lot as a kid and I think this grip gives good precision. It's not ideal for extended periods of writing perhaps, but it's not too bad of a compromise.
Same here. Teachers tried to push me to the "correct" grip, but it just did not work for me. They said I would get severe hand pain if I grow older. Never happened, always felt comfortable with this grip.
I use the same grip. I just tried several different grips using fewer fingers and I feel that they all impede pen movement because the fingers not on the pen are in the way. It just feels less versatile or something.
I use what they call the "dynamic quadrupod" grip. I've tried the "correct" grip but I find that either the pen is at a lower angle or I have to turn my wrist more to get it at a higher angle. Maybe it is because I'm left handed but neither of those options work as well for me.
I try not to judge but when I see someone hold a pen between their index and middle finger I find it hard not to. A few years ago Taylor Swift was in a Coke commercial where she was writing lyrics. The first thing I noticed was how she holds her pen and it drove me crazy. https://imgur.com/QyTQpre
Grip matters a great deal for a calligraphic hand. Take a chisel-tip felt pen and try to write sensibly with the broad part of the chisel, and you’ll quickly discover a few things: why calligraphic hands look like they do, how to form letters with a mixture of line widths, and how your hand has to hold the pen in order to produce legible text.
Incidentally there’s this often implicit belief that people’s handwriting was better in the
past than it is now. I mostly don’t believe this—there’s just a sample bias towards only showing the nice writing that was often made by professional scribes. And some scribes had shitty hands, too.
> implicit belief that people’s handwriting was better in the past than it is now
I, on the other hand, believe this. When typing doesn't exist, and your livelihood depends on your records being legible, you put a lot more effort into legibility (and having heard a few stories about the corporal punishment associated with poor handwriting in schools a century ago, you'd get better out of pure self-preservation).
To back that up with an anecdote, I found a box of private bank ledgers maintained by my maternal grandfather, and I was absolutely astounded at how neatly he wrote. These were for only his own consumption, but the handwriting was clearly legible to me a five decades later.
Even my mother's handwriting is quite legible, even though computers became popular in her 40's (and typewriters in her teens).
Occasionally you'll find old notes from some club that Newton was a member of or similar historic handwritten notes posted to this site and usually the handwriting is horrible, but also highly variable. Some people having nearly impenetrable script while other script looks beautiful.
One person with amazingly clear handwriting: Donald Knuth. I showed one of his handwritten notes to a colleague and they asked why he had typed it up in a Comic Sans derivative.
On the other hand, you can find a consistent thread throughout written history of scribes bitching about punk kids these days and their crappy communication styles...
I was just discussing this with my wife as my 6-year old daughter developed an interesting grip (not shown in any of those pictures). With humans being creatures of habit, I'm curious if there is generally a certain age where the grip should be corrected, especially if it looks like a straining one. I remember having a co-worker who held her pen in her fist, like she was writing with a boxing glove on (puts all the strain in the arm, elbow & shoulder).
My 6 year old does the grip first described in the post. Her school teacher has shown much apathy in correcting it and even suggested it was "too late" (UK state school). I'm going to try and help her myself. Tips include shorter pencils and "pinch and flip": http://mamaot.com/3-tricks-to-help-kids-learn-to-hold-their-...
When I went to school we had little rubber things that you could slide onto a pencil. It had dimples for where your fingers were supposed to go. Also it was soft so you didn't hurt your fingers until you got the pressure right.
I have crazy hitchhiker's thumb, so much so that I can bend my thumb almost straight backwards. When I hold a pen I cradle it with my index, middle, and ring finger all opposite my thumb, which is angled backwards and applies the pressure onto the pen. I don't think I've ever seen anyone else who holds a pen like I do. I get comments on it all the time.
I was never taught how to hold a pen correctly as a child, and self-taught the first bad method from the chart (index finger overlapping thumb). I assumed writing was supposed to hurt, and never questioned this until I was an adult because it was consistent with my perception that the main purpose of school was to inflict suffering on children.
I think this might have contributed to my interest in computers. I starting typing all assignments as early as possible, because it was so much faster and less painful. I later taught myself conventional pen grip, and then switched to a Lamy Safari fountain pen. The Lamy Safari has an approximately triangular section grip part, which forces conventional grip. I think all pens and pencils used in schools should have this design.
I have never able to hold a pen like I'm "supposed" to, or really how I've seen described. I hold my pen between the pad of my thumb and the side of my index finger in the neighborhood of the first knuckle.
I come from a family of schoolteachers and as far as I can tell since the 19th century the grip they taught was something like the "dynamic tripod", which of course is the one I use (and advocate strongly). Modern teachers who don't teach "proper" postural techniques just don't know better or have been told it doesn't matter. I think it does. There's a proper way to hold a pool cue, a golf club, a violin or a chef's knife. They come from people who were good at it and did it for a living, so what you're looking at are ways of doing it fast, accurately and for extended periods of time without injuring yourself. Handwriting isn't any different, it's just apparently not essential anymore.
I concede left-handed proper grips don't have that much tradition. As everything concerning left-handed people, they should get more consideration (maybe looking again at the practical assumptions about symmetry made by right-handed people).
Hmm, I seem to do a hybrid of the dynamic tripod and the lateral tripod. I hold "grip" the pen using the side of my thumb like in the lateral tripod, but I guide the tip with my index finger like in the dynamic tripod.
I also don't rest any of my fingers on the paper. Instead I rest the side of my hand on the paper.
I remember as a child I didn't like the feeling of pulling on the pad of my index finger when I gripped with my fingers (e.g. the dynamic grips) which is why I used the lateral style grip.
I have always used the dynamic tripod grip (the same grip shown in Escher’s “Drawing Hands” drawing). I am right-handed but I write “away” from me, at a 60° angle or more. I wonder how common this is. While writing with the Apple “pencil” on the iPad, I typically have to use the orientation lock! Some apps such as Goodnotes allow you to control the angle but not Apple’s own Notes.
My handwriting looks like I had a cerebral hemorrhage and then Parkinson's. I don't know how I made it through primary school when penmanship was still graded, although the grading was in its waning years.
What I've noticed among my friends and family is that the people with the ugliest pen grip also have the prettiest writing. My grip is beautiful but I write like a meth-addicted gorilla.
OK, so you hold a pen like a child. Props for noticing and improving your technique -- ingrained habits are difficult to change, takes a lot of mindfulness at first.
I write with both hands, so maybe I can explain some of the issues that I run into with left-handed writing, and how it differs from my experience with my right hand. This is a topic I have thought about greatly.
Left-handed writing, as a core difference from which all other differences stem, has you pushing on the page, which would make a right-handed writer feel uncomfortable since it is never a muscle that needs to be used for the latter. This results in shaky or crooked writing.
Another experience I have from pushing during left-handed writing is that my hand tires faster, as I try to switch between "bent-inward" index finger and relaxed index finger, which I use interchangeably depending on how much fine control I need. Using the bipod or "index and thumb" grip helps for fatigue, but it loses precision.
Finally there is the angle of the palm which varies greatly among left-handed writers, which is how do I rotate the paper so that I don't smudge my writing, or so that I can see my writing as I go? The more the paper is rotated, the more uncomfortable it gets, but it has utility. Here are some nice diagrams on the variations: http://www.musanim.com/mam/lefthand.htm
For right-handed writing, most of these are never a concern for me. My right hand "pulls" on the page in the rightward direction and I never have to rotate the page in order to align with the writing line. Writing comes by pointing the pencil where I want it to go and then "moving" it right, rather than for left-handed writing I have to push "right and forward".
The rise of writing on tablet computers has improved the writing experience for left-handed writers by a significant amount because it can pan, zoom, and rotate as necessary. Still there remains the issue of having to push.
So if I can choose to use my right hand to write at all, why would I use my left hand? This may be a placebo effect, but I find that using my left hand to write allowed me to soak in concepts and let them ruminate as I write the notes. It becomes a more "personal" attachment to the notes I'm taking, whereas right-handed helped produce as much writing as needed.
One advantage with left-handed writing comes when using a tablet. Many notetaking apps such as "Goodnotes 5" do not present a color wheel to appear at where your pencil is pointing. The color palette stays fixed at the top right corner. Having to change color rapidly but keep the pencil in the same place is possible by using my right finger to change the color. And if I have to use the tools stuck at the top left corner, I switch to writing with my right hand and use my left hand for tool selection.
Finally, one nichr benefit from using both hands to write is simultaneous two-handed writing. Once can produce writing faster by using both hands to write at the same time if you can visualize ahead fast enough. It also helps when using two different pen colors (red + blue) simultaneously. It would be great if I could think in parallel and write notes in two different topics or languages at once.
I wonder if there are any other ambidextrous writers on here who can also weigh in with their experience.
I hold the pen between index finger and middle finger and use the thumb to click buttons.
I started to get some RSI pain using a normal mouse, because I believe the hand seems to rest too flat on the table. I first switched to one of those crazy ergonomic mice [2] without much success, because I think, there the hand position is just too steep/vertical. Then I completely switch from a mouse to a drawing tablet and I fully recovered. I also think, that you don't need as much force to move around your hand compared to a mouse.
[1] http://spdrdng.com/posts/how-to-hold-your-pen-in-the-most-er...
[2] https://www.amazon.co.uk/CSL-Wireless-Vertical-Ergonomic-But...