Sunday, December 1, 2013

It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Once upon a time, when I was in high school, I decided I wanted to write my lowercase Rs as miniature uppercase Rs. I thought that would be cool and add something unique to my handwriting. I trained myself to do it, and ever since then, that's how I've written them. I don't think anyone has ever really commented on it, but I like it, so there.


However, last fall, when I was substitute teaching, I started writing on whiteboards in front of children a lot more, especially my last name. Before I got married, my last name had one R, now it has two! I worried that it might be confusing to children just learning how to print, so I started trying to write more lowercase Rs. I was only subbing for a couple days a week for a few months, so once I was at a new librarian gig, I stopped worrying about my Rs again.

Now, as fate would have it, I'm working as a K-12 school librarian and teaching library and information literacy skills to K-6 graders and writing on a whiteboard nigh unto everyday. Once again, though no child has expressed concern either way, I find myself worried that miniature uppercase Rs might confuse them, so I'm trying to write more lowercase again.

Does it matter? I have no idea, but I'm trying to have clear and understandable handwriting, at least on things that my students will read. Oddly, I kind of like the look of my lowercase Rs, so I don't actually mind switching back and forth. It's affecting my handwriting in other situations, and I've probably spent way more time thinking about this than I need to.

And now you have too.

One thing I won't be changing about my handwriting is that I cross my Zs. I started doing that in as a result of multi-variable math, so that I wouldn't confuse my Zs with 2s. I haven't needed to do that kind of math for a while, but I still like the way it looks.

Do you have any handwriting quirks? And what you do think about lowercase v. miniature uppercase Rs?



1 comment:

Giggles said...

People think I'm joking when I tell them I took a class on how to write on the chalk board in college. But I did. It was part of our reading/writing methods class and we had to be able to model proper handwriting in both print and cursive and keep the writing parallel to the ground.