Penmanship: Make It Readable!

You are sitting at your desk going through emails when you open a PDF consisting of redlines from a colleague and as the page loads you notice their writing is illegible. You start trying to decipher their writing, “what does that say (squinting at the screen) shift over tow inches commuter…emytime drop velvet points?” and you sit there for a couple of minutes trying to decipher what it says and finally cave in and ask your neighbor what they see and it’s “shift over two inches towards commercial core and drop valet spaces” …. how in the world did they decipher that!? We see this more and more in our profession now that everything is being done electronically, so why is handwriting going out the window? Why are people writing illegibly knowing they too cannot understand what they just wrote?

For many years, we have heard that bad penmanship is a sign of high – intelligence meaning that our pen cannot keep up with what our brain is telling us to write down. But, when you scribble on a sheet of paper giving redlines or comments and it looks like ‘chicken scratch’, just remember that this is telling your reader “I don’t find this as important as you do and I’m wasting my time”. Remember penmanship is a key element of communication.

It is time to embrace picking up a pen or pencil, honing down our fine motor skills and begin writing legibly. All you must do is write on a piece of paper once a day, scribble until your heart is content, learn how to re-grip and move the pen across your paper. Just doing these basic things every day will improve your penmanship! Research shows that good handwriting improves brain activity in ways that keyboarding cannot. Penmanship etiquette is easy to uphold and maintain and keeping in mind that by slowing down and shifting the angle of your pen you can make everything that much better to read and understand. So, here is to your newfound hobby of making your writing readable again!