How Bad Handwriting is Good in Academia

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 is 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. Well my girlfriend is also in that class and I was borrowing her notes to cram 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 differetiate her ‘σ’ from ‘6’ (it’s probably not even possible in her writing). And this is not the first time I notice 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 ever. If it were up to me, people who write that kind of indifferentiable text lacks a certain degree of rigor and should not be allow 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 a bunch of Physics professors who use blackboards and write confusing text styles. For example the way they differentiate ‘n’ and ‘m’ is either doesn’t exist or European or last-century standards. 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.

Well, just speak jibberish and get a PhD. No, it doesn’t really work that way. To be successful in academia, you need to at least make people appreciate and acknowledge your work, publication specifically. Hmm let’s see. Does bad handwriting affect paper quality or content? Of course not. Everyone types the official stuff nowadays so handwriting doesn’t affect them at all. So I guess bad handwriting is actually a good thing now.

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

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