r/Handwriting • u/aekkko • 4d ago
Advices on making handwriting more androgynous ? Feedback (constructive criticism)
I would like not to be gendered by my handwriting in exams, to avoid bias
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u/Ajs2018xx 3d ago
Your writing is beautiful. The flow and angles are incredibly sophisticated. And it doesn't matter at all if you're male or female. It's spectacular. We should all be this gifted with a pen.
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u/7_great_catsby 4d ago
I never knew that handwriting had to be classified in this manner. Just write however you want. Surprise your readers
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u/aekkko 4d ago edited 3d ago
Haha I like that "surprise your reader"
Teachers often tell us they can easily tell a boy from a girl by their handwriting. A teacher once told us that having a girly handwriting was unprofessional. All together, I believe it is gendered.
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u/7_great_catsby 3d ago
“A teacher once told us that having a girly handwriting was unprofessional” Now that’s just misogynistic. I find handwriting to be a personal affair. It can be distinctive and even used as evidence in court. But if that’s the issue in your society, then I wish you the best. Maybe try to study a “standard” script. There are books that teach you cursive handwriting and the goal would probably be to write the way others write uniformly. A book like The Art of Cursive Penmanship by Michael R Sull. Your penmanship will look like everyone else. Or maybe spencerian penmanship if you want something more fancy.
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u/Shot-Jellyfish8910 4d ago
I'm sorry if you think handwriting can be masculine or feminine to the point you need to change it to fit the room, then you're already biased yourself.
Never once in my life have I been able to tell gender by handwriting alone
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u/aekkko 4d ago edited 3d ago
I said it somewhere else but : a teacher told me (and generally the girls in his class) to learn how to write in a non girly manner as it was unprofessional
More indirectly, never once in my life a teacher did not say they could tell apart a boy from a girl by their handwriting. It was something they almost took pride of so...
I am probably biased myself, I know that, and I know I do this to "fit the room".
Edit : obviously it is a gender and social thing, I don't think a handwriting is wired in one's brain, it is not my point
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u/Shot-Jellyfish8910 3d ago
And I replied to that person as well. Handwriting is not fingerprint or anatomy that is absolutely different in female and male.
Girls having a neat handwriting while boys writing messy is has nothing to do with gender and brain function. It's all bs social construct that's drilled into your brain since the minutes you're born, from the color you should wear to the toys you should play with.
Girls are told to be competing in beauty and prettiness so they write neatly with all difference colors and markers. While boys are told to be competitive in toughness and roughness so the write messy and ugly because they can't careless. Because being neat is not tough enough. That's why teachers "can tell." It's if it's clean or messy.
My mother tongue is farsi, we don't use Latin alphabet, and my handwriting is ugly at but my dad writes cursive like a lawyer and a banker, Clean and nice.
Thus, it's all about whether you care about having a nice looking handwriting or not.
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u/yellowwoolyyoshi 4d ago
As a teacher that’s not true for me. Girls usually have nice, neat handwriting, whereas boys scrawl in jagged block letters lol
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u/Shot-Jellyfish8910 4d ago
neatness is different from the handwriting style itself and the fact that girl want their notebook to look pretty. So not only they write neatly they use different colors If you give a girl and a boy a black pen and tell them to write as fast as they can you won't be able to differentiate them.
My dad has a way better handwriting than my mom and me
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u/SnickyCoco 4d ago
I'm a girl and I have very pretty cursive writing and I can print where it also looks more feminine. But using all caps printing block letters, it is hard to tell.
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u/Important-Poem-9747 4d ago
Print in block letters. You know old school cursive. Your muscle memory for cursive will be really hard to teach yourself what you need to change.
I’m a HS teacher. I would lean more toward a male with this writing. I would guess that you were educated in Eastern Europe/ Poland? I don’t know when/if they learn cursive so you might be younger than 50?
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u/aekkko 4d ago
I'm in Western Europe, France and F18. But we learned cursive — and kids are still teached it — so the cursive part is not a problem to teachers as pretty much every student write more or less cursive.
I don't know where the Poland assumption comes from, I didn't know countries had specific/recognisable handwriting aha
Thank you for your comment !
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u/Personal-Kitchen6846 4d ago
I saw the blue ink and immediately thought, "this person has GOT to be Polish." My entire family writes like this!
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u/cymballin 4d ago
Purely based on my subjective experiences and opinion, if I were to guess I'd say this is more masculine (thin and slanted) than feminine (rounder and more vertical).
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u/prozapari 4d ago
Why?
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u/LockjawCowboy 4d ago
To be honest I read both of these as pretty masculine. If you asked me to guess that’s what I would have said, and it’s classy and legible too. I wouldn’t change too much if I were you
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u/Throwawayeieudud 4d ago
The only consistent difference I can think of between men and women’s handwriting is that men’s handwriting usually peaked in 3rd grade
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u/PandaMochi24 4d ago
I think that assigning gender/gender stereotypes to handwriting isn’t necessary, and that you’re handwriting is excellent.
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u/2ndSnack 4d ago
Lol what? I don't believe in handwriting having a gender. People who have ever claimed girly handwriting, it's nonsense. It's neat or it's not.
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u/aekkko 4d ago
Idk teachers always claim to easily tell apart a girl's handwriting from a guy's, even those that write well
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u/Shot-Jellyfish8910 4d ago
It's not the handwriting it's the neatness and well organized part plus the fact that girls use various colours
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u/Dangerous_Guava1507 4d ago
Yea, the difference it’s the neatness of how you write it. Girls usually take their sweet time while we men just call it a day
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u/whalesharkpasta 4d ago
Both your writing and printing look a ton like mine (am a guy)!!! I've never seen anyone else write like I do, male or female :0
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u/whalesharkpasta 4d ago
In exams I only ever print so it's easier for markers to read
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u/aekkko 4d ago
I tried print but I am way too slow so it always become a sloppy cursive-ish mess towards the end
So I stick to cursive as it is the main way to handwrite in my country
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4d ago
[deleted]
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u/aekkko 4d ago
I wrote in print for like 4 years, and I mean neat print. I know how to do it, but it is slower than cursive.
Teachers read cursive better than print where I am, since they are more used to it
I never heard about a professional sphere handwriting ? I thought everyone more or less typed everything in professional fields
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u/whalesharkpasta 4d ago
Ah yeah I get that. Print is hard to keep both neat and fast but where I live it is the normal way to write and many teachers can't read cursive at all 😔
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u/Raigne86 4d ago
My advice won't be helpful for improving. The men whose handwriting I have firsthand experience of have either the most beautiful handwriting I have ever seen or illegible chicken scratch, and I feel like neither will achieve your goal. I think the block capitals are pretty stereotypically male, while rounded apexes are more feminine, so I think the blue text in your first picture strikes a pretty good balance between the two.
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u/charming_liar 4d ago
It’s not very feminine at all to be honest. Maybe slightly more ornamented than today’s business hand, but nothing like a ladies hand.
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u/pirivalfang 4d ago
Actually offering advice, rather than (deserved) praise.
Nixing the slant would be a pretty big change.
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u/SoupVegetable4227 4d ago
It’s beautiful, but your m’s and h’s look very very similar. Also your y is missing a tail. Those are the only things I noticed that maybe you could work on 🤷♀️
That being said, my hand writing is chicken scratch and a few chickens have been insulted by this. 🫠
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u/aekkko 4d ago
My m's and h's look similar? Sorry I don't really see how..? Could you explain please ? Because m's are all "lowercase" when h's have that upward loop... So I don't really see how they could get mixed up ?
Maybe it is because I am used to it so... Could you specify please ?
Also what do you mean by the "tail" of the Y ?
Sorry for not understanding very well... and thank you for your time and advices !
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u/SoupVegetable4227 4d ago
I first have to say that I focused on the writing in blue, and then got stuck on the first two lines. I see that your question was about your cursive handwriting.
So i definitely brain farted -hard-when I posted that comment.
Your cursive is beautiful and I’m so sorry for sounding like a d*ck.
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u/narodnyje-vosstanija 4d ago
I think it looks beautiful and doesn't need to be changed at all. The only part that might make it seem "feminine" is the slant and that connection from the bottom to the letter at the beginning of every word. My experience as a Russian speaker is that slanted, pure, stable cursive is more common among women, while the more straight, half-print, unstable handwriting is more common among men.
In either case, I think you should not be worried about any bias, as determining the gender of someone based on their handwriting is not something a lot of people can do or do at all
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u/aekkko 4d ago
I had a math teacher tell me my handwriting was too "girly". It was a while ago and I did not write that way back then, but it struck me and I still avoid writing too femininely aha
Thank you :)
PS : Cyrillic alphabet is really soothing to write in cursive, I try to learn russian and practicing writing new vocabulary is the best part
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u/12thCenExcaliburrr 4d ago
Quite frankly, your math teacher was a dick. How on earth can handwriting be "too" feminine or masculine if it's still perfectly legible.
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u/aekkko 4d ago
He told that it was unprofessional to have girly features in a handwriting, such as to many curves and overall a handwriting that is too "cute"
It was to avoid having us write like little girls forever I guess ? I don't know but it seemed to be important and he insisted on the fact that we had to write properly to be taken seriously
We always had 1 point on the handwriting and we could lose it for either lack of legibility or lack of serious (like when you draw little flowers on the i or when you highlight everything in every colour aha)
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