Handwriting

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When I describe my Handwriting, I use the term "Chicken Scratch". When I was in School, I had teachers that would give me zeros and say they could not read my work, that was sheer laziness on their part. Did that happen to any of you? If I was a parent and a teacher did that to my child, I would have them fired. Ok, rant over.

My handwriting is messy alot of times and I also write slow. In middle school and high school I was able to use a laptop in my classes like in English class. For the fact i type faster then I write.

I didn't have dysgraphia as a kid. In fact I was ambidextrous and wrote quite well with both hands. I also wrote stories, and would spend hours writing them down by hand.

But when I was 23, I had a massive mental breakdown/autistic withdrawal, which affected many skills I had by that time--computing, some math skills, playing musical instruments, drawing and handwriting. Since then, I don't write with my left hand, except on rare occasions when that ability seems to awaken in my brain for short spells. And now I have standard motor dysgraphia. if I take my time, I write OK, but my hand gets tired easily and my concentration fades, and it just devolves into back-ward slanting scratches.

When I was dx'd with AS well after my breakdown, my dysgraphia was not considered part of my AS, as I didn't have it until after age 23.

My dad described mine as a spider having climbed out of the inkwell then crawled across the page!

Sean, Ich weiss... aber I enjoy studying both as well. Jeg vorstoor Norsk und Deutsch og Ich liebe mixing them all up. Did you master both languages or lose interest?

As I said in another thread, pure chicken scratch. I go back and forth between cursive and print too. I can give a mean signature tho lol.

my handwriting is pure chicken scratch when i rush but when I don't it is a lot better.

in school I did get teachers that would say I took way longer to mark your work as It is hard to read.

My handwriting is very precise especially when I use pen. I sketch every letter and people have always told me my handwriting is good. I heard most aspies have disarrayed handwriting, but I guess everyone is different.

My printing is decent and if I pay attention I can write very beautifully (like greeting card quality). . I do have good hands that are precise, steady and well trained (did painting for years). My hands can fix so many things and almost never break anything. I wish I can say that about the rest of my body.

Oh my aspie children didn't get my hands, though. Their writing are like bugs dipped in ink crawled over the paper.

*I should mention I do write slowly and hold my pen in a non-standard position - between index and middle finger and controlled by index finger only, thumb does not play a part.

Last edited by y-pod on 13 Jan 2011, 6:55 am, edited 2 times in total.

Oh yes my mom actually failed to graduate elementary school because of her messy writing. The examiner said he didn't grade it. She had to redo grade 6. But that was a long time ago and things have changed a lot now.

Even to this day her writing have very large letters with long strokes sticking out and cross over with each other. They look like they're fighting each other for space.

My handwriting was pretty much illegible until I got to high school.

How are your typing skills? I was never able to type with both hands on the keyboard and keep my eyes on the screen.

I always had horrible handwriting as a kid. Probably because I had to rush. My hands would eventualy start to hurt up to my elbows and I couldn't hold my pencil anymore. My teachers thought I was lazy and I had to spend countless recesses rewritting asignments that were too "sloppy" for the teacher's approval. I would definatly be diagnosed with dysgraphia today and am going to seek a diagnosis for it when I go to college.

Total garbage.

In first grade most report card grades were an A, a few were B, except handwriting, which stuck out as a D. It never became much better. When I write fast then only I can read it, and even then sometimes I have trouble figuring out what I wrote if enough time passes. Perhaps because it was so unreadable when written quickly, I invented my own code for recording homework assignments and test schedules where I could abbreviate things into short symbols like this so that readability wasn't a concern and I didn't missed an assignment:

S.S.
M - R 2-4, P 5
W - T

M.
1-3
F - Q

Yes, that makes total sense to me.

Tony Attwood's book mentions this. He says even aspies tend to be perfectionists, and even those with bad handwriting sometimes latch onto being a perfectionist with handwriting. They will write every letter with careful precision and have better than normal writing. But the problem is that it takes so long to write this way that they often fall behind in school, unable to finish timed tests or even homework on time due to focusing on the crafting of the letters rather than answering the questions.

I can do this. If I focus on the letters, I can make calligraphy. But then I can't think about what the words are saying. Writing as a communication tool is entirely different. My thoughts are never in sync with my hand.

I don't recall me being like this when learning modern Roman script, but I tend to be like this when I learn a new script for a new language. I was especially perfectionist about Hebrew script which was the first script I learned other than Roman script. I spent hours practicing it. Right now, I'm doing that with Cyrillic. I will say I do this to make it easier for me to read in a different script, but, yeah, it's in good part me being Aspie obsessive about being very proficient at it.