How Bad Handwriting is Good in School

I finished my final exam today afternoon in “Introduction to Probability” class that I never attended in-person because I had another class at the exact same time. Also the class was pretty easy as I already know most of the stuff since primary school.

You are probably wondering how does it have anything to do with my topic today or am I just casually flexing. Well, my girlfriend was also in that class and I was borrowing her notes to prepare for the exam. I noticed that her ‘6’ looks really like ‘σ’ (the greek letter sigma).

I personally NEED to make my writing CLEAR, maybe a little compulsive even. But as for my girlfriend, I doubt she even care about if other people can differentiate her ‘σ’ from ‘6’ (it’s probably not even systematically possible with her writing). And this is not the first time I noticed that. I also find her ‘α’ exactly like an ‘a’ sometimes. Also, her handwriting is super small. Thus, reading her handwriting is the worst reading experience one could imagine. If it were up to me, people who write that kind of indifferentiable text lacks a certain degree of rigor and should not be allowed into academia. Yet she is and so is Psychology. But apperantly they are allowed into academia and there’s a reason for that.

This phenomenon is not uncommon. In fact, I have many Physics professors who use blackboards and write confusing text styles. For example, the way they differentiate ‘n’ and ‘m’ is either non-existent or European. (No disrepect here. I love all the professors who’s taught me. Thank you.) This got me thinking. Bad handwriting can be advantageous sometimes. A lot of the times people don’t look too closely at your calculations when they can’t understand what you are writing. Like they were following your calculations when they saw a ‘6’. When they started to wonder whether it’s a ‘6’ or a ‘σ’ and you had already finished your calculations for the part and they wouldn’t bother understanding your whole calculation anymore. Also, I know that my writing is messy sometimes because I often cross words out because they were not clear and I found out my TA in a math class doesn’t look into my homework at all because of that. Thus, I got high scores in all the homeworks in that class.

In addition, the published works are always typed. Thus, handwriting rarely impacts anything in that aspect.

Admittedly, it might be a bit frustrating communicating by writing with a person with bad handwriting. In that case, you’ll just have to post an article in your own blog to complain about it.

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