# Title: Learning to write

I spent quite a lot of time trying to figure out what would be the best way to
take notes, mark TODOs and in generally make sure things I should remember don't
slip through my fingers. After checking out almost every single available
solution, even those with privacy concerns, I realized there is nothing that
would suite me. I must admit I'm a bit of a nerd when it comes to tools and if
I'm to keep using a tool, the tool has to do exactly what I want and more
importantly exactly the way I want it. For a while I thought about building some
kind of a tool myself and in the end I did, just in a slightly different way
than you'd might expect. I went back to paper and pencil.

That is just the intro to give you a bit of a background to what will follow.

Even at elementary school I wasn't particularly good at handwriting. I mean, I
could write, but the result was a tad hard to read and my writing speed wasn't
particularly high. That's why at highschool I switched to print script instead
of cursive. That way I would still write slowly, but at least I could read what
I've written faster, without having to stop and decipher what the lines were
supposed to represent. Another drawback was, I was often getting hand pains
while writing, but I thought it was normal, so I just kept it to myself and
carried on.

Fast forward 15ish years, I'm trying to take handwritten notes again. I switched
back to writing in cursive, but still write slowly, the writing is inconsistent
and I'm getting hand pains. I started talking to people around me, but noone
really recalled having hand pains. This gave me a tiny bit of hope, maybe even I
could learn to write painlessly. Also I noticed there were differences between
how me and others wrote.

My style of writing is to place the wrist somewhere, twist the wrist fully as
far to the left as I could and start writing what I needed, only moving my wrist
and fingers, slowly turning the wrist to the right while having the wrist firmly
placed and the original place. When I couldn't twist it any further, I'd just
lift the entire hand up, shift it a bit, place it down and repeat. Others would
have their wrist slide across the paper while writing. I tried that for a while,
but it never really clicked. My hand would get sweaty, stick to the paper and
when sliding it over the lines I was writing would be all squiggly. Also writing
on a blackboard was a major problem for me, because needed to have my wrist
placed firmly. Of course I could place my hand on the blackboard, but then I
would limit me in how large letter I could write.

I search the interwebs for a while and stumbled upon this[1]. In the article the
author describes almost exactly, what I was experiencing and suggests a couple
of exercises to get rid of it. I started doing those, all my notebooks are now
full of lines, circles, squiggly lines and whatnot and I feel like a total
madman writing imaginary letters into air with my arms. So far I cannot tell if
it actually works, as I started only a couple of days ago.

At least it makes me happy about myself by working on a problem I have. I just
hope it is not a load of nonsense and I'm not wasting paper, ink and more
importantly time.

[1] - http://www.paperpenalia.com/handwriting.html