Techniques for good board handwriting

Question

I'm a math TA and I find that my most consistent comment for improvement involved my board handwriting. Anybody have some tips or techniques I can use to make things a little neater on the board?

There are, of course, time constraints with teaching any course, so I don't want to simply write more slowly in order to assist in writing more neatly. Thankfully in a math course much of what I write is symbols which are easier to (borrowing a typography term) kern than sentences, but I still feel like I need to vastly improve my handwriting on a board if I plan on teaching for any length of time.

This is a sample of my handwriting:

Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

EDIT: After checking the room in which I'm assigned to teach this semester, it turns out I do actually have a whiteboard instead of a chalkboard. Like I commented below somewhere, I'm sure 90% of the answers mentioned (those not expressly about chalk, anyway) will be completely cross-transferable and I'll try to make them all work. Thanks again for all the great answers!

Answer 1

I have struggled with this too. Two things that I find help are:

1. Write much bigger than you think you should. It's easier to be neater with bigger letters. You can fit less on a board, but honestly that's generally a good thing.
2. Move your body along with your writing as you go. My writing gets worse the farther my hand is from my center of mass, and tends to trail downward too.

Answer 2

I would say the biggest thing that makes my boardwriting messy is rushing. I know you said you don't want to write more slowly, so my suggestion is to try this: write (and speak) more judiciously. Then you can write slower and more neatly, when you don't need to hurry. It takes practice, and requires more preparation, but with a little more thought and planning, you can often be more clean with your presentation, which allows your writing and speaking to become more clean. [Disclaimer: I don't always practice this, particularly when I'm in a hurry before class.]

Also, jakebeal's answers are good. The angle at which you write (both side-to-side and up-down) is also important, and when you're not in a hurry you naturally adjust your body to write at a more comfortable angle.

Answer 3

In addition to Jake's great answer, what helped me was a chalk holder (you can find them online for $5-10). One reason people write terribly badly with chalk is that either the pieces feel like the are about to break, or they are tiny. Using a chalk holder makes writing with chalk more like writing with a pen.

I'd also recommend having two or three loaded chalk-holders waiting in reserve; having to pause mid-lecture to empty out small fragments, reload a new piece, and regain the thread of your discourse is terribly awkward.

Answer 4

Looking at your sample, I notice a couple of things.

• Size: Some of the writing, e.g. all but the first bullet in the right half, is too small, in particular non-capital letters.

• Whitespace: Be mindful of spacing letters, words, formulae, paragraphs differently and consistently. For instance, "factors over R" has more space between "fac" and "tors" then between "factors" and "over".

• Font: Curved lines are harder to draw with chalk than straight lines. Many small letters and some of your big letters contain curves; try to use a more block capitalish style.

  Whichever font you use, make sure that letters/symbols are clearly distinct.

• Consistency: Make the same letter or symbol look as similar as possible between instances (note your equivalency arrows and small "n" in formulae). Space structure elements consistently.

I think spacing is the biggest issue here, followed by consistency. Note that the basic rules are mostly the same as in typesetting for print, for which lots of literature exists.

As for general advice for avoiding writing yourself in a position where it is hard to write well, these come to mind.

• Keep your hand approximately at eyelevel. That means moving the board a lot.
• Break new pieces of chalk in half; that way they are easier to hold and do not screech.
• Rotate your piece of chalk frequently so you have a somewhat symmetric tip at all times.
• Disregard pieces of chalk that have become smaller than your first digital bones.
• Do not squeeze. If there is not enough space, switch to the next board.
• Write with enough pressure. If you apply too little you do not get enough chalk on the board for clear lines. The necessary amount of pressure depends on chalk and board surface.

As for writing speed, note that at least when you change your font you will have to write more consciously, hence slower, for a while. Train slowly, speed will follow.

Answer 5

In addition to everything above: write with your arm, not with your hand. The movement needs to come from shoulder and elbow, not from wrist. Some people write on paper this way anyway, but some (including me) tend to keep their arm still except for moving along the line, and use their wrist. This simply does not work on boards.

Answer 6

Practice makes perfect.

My own handwriting (on paper) went from hideous to beautiful enough to get me compliments. I accomplished this by making a conscious effort to write neatly when taking lecture notes (even if it meant writing slowly), as well as writing things over and over until it was satisfactory (often compared to a sample).

I don't feel like it really slowed me down all that much. Occasionally, during exams or fast speeches, I still revert to uglier handwriting in hopes of saving precious seconds, but rarely gain all that much. Conversely, I doubt you will really end up losing significant lecture time by writing neatly during real lectures, but of course you can always try it out in a mock lecture (note that writing neatly the at first will be much slower because you are not used to it). However, it did take me time to get better: The bulk of the improvement was over several months, and even after several years the quality of my handwriting was changing, though not as noticeably. Keep in mind that I would spend several hours taking notes in lectures every day, in addition to writing in my free time. Perhaps you can be a more diligent student than I was, but I would still say don't expect big changes overnight.

That said, I don't see why my experience wouldn't translate to board writing also. If you want your handwriting to be better, find a board and keep writing on it until it is better. It helps to actively force yourself to write neater.

As I said, lectures are a great opportunity for getting some regular, intense practice. If you can at all afford to slow down even a little bit, you should do so and you can get results sooner.

Regardless of whether you decide to risk slowing down your lectures, you can always practice by yourself. As a grad student you will almost certainly have access to a blackboard. Go up there and write on it until your hand gets tired. Then erase and do it again. Keep an eye out for motions that make letters come out particularly ugly or pretty.

Small children learn to write by tracing dashed lines of letter shapes. You could simulate this by using some kind of projector to project "worksheets" on the board (with a blackboard, white on black would probably look better, and a dim room helps).

If you feel like this is too much of a waste of time, write out material that you are having difficulty learning, research ideas and notes of future lectures. That way you are both practicing your handwriting AND doing some useful work.

Answer 7

The first few lines are quite legible if not that neat, but as you go on the font gets smaller. If someone was at the back of the room they would have a hard time reading it.

I would try and keep the first lines as the minimum size for your writing, but if you are in a large lecture theatre it probably needs to be larger.

I think this is a problem lots of people have. I don't know of an easy solution other than to consciously make your writing bigger than you think it needs to be.

Answer 8

You say that you can read the text at

but is that partly because you're familiar with what it should say. There has been a meme over the last few years something along the line of:

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghi t pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh?

It's the same for other presentation skills too. I know I tend to speed up a bit when talking in public, probably due to nerves, etc., which doesn't help sometimes.

Answer 9

In addition to good suggestions above, I can suggest one improvement seeing your writing.

Alphabets like a, p, e, g d, all have very small 'compressed' circles. If you consciously try to make them larger(while of course, keeping the circle proportionate to alphabet size), the writing will be more readable.

You can write a paragraph on board which has all alphabets in it. You can then observe which alphabets have the problem I mentioned above, and improve on that.

Answer 10

Use simpler letter-forms. In particular, your upper-case 'L' and lower-case 'f' are very intricate: compare them to the shapes of those letters in a simple sans-serif font, such as Arial or Helvetica. And make sure you finish writing every letter: many of the ones in the sample just deteriorate into a squiggle, as if you got half-way through the letter and were so eager to start the next one that you abandoned the one you were writing.

Answer 11

I think most people have already covered the important points.

For me the main items are 4 -

1) Size: Write BIG! Then go back to the last bench and see if you can read it without squinting. At the beginning, a good way is to write a sample in a corner, go to the last bench, and if that is ok, dont rub this throughout the course. Use it as a reference all through till you get the hang of it.

2) Write in capitals

Avoid cursive.

A bad capital handwriting is far better than a bad cursive. and sometimes better than a mediocre cursive too.

Added edit: exception - If you write in small letters, write spaced out and avoid running handwriting. I write small letters like a child on the blackboard so that it is readable. It is much different from the cursive that I normally use for writing on paper.

3) Use a little more space between letters and words It tends to make your existing writing neater and nicer! A useful illusion.

4) Use flow charts and text boxes - Just like 3, they create the illusion of neatness and order.

PS: I think 1 and 3 have already been mentioned by many others, but that just reminds you how important it is :)

Answer 12

you could counter your tendency towards cursive ligatures by trying block capital letters for natural language text. the height of those letters is consistent, they are less likely to disappear among their neighbors, and the text fills out a rectangular block. i do it that way, but admittedly, i am used to handwriting in all caps.

Answer 13

The calligraphy - well that is fixed with paper, pencil and patience.

On the chalkboard it tends to be just slightly different.

The main trick that helped me was just to push the chalk into the chalkboard instead of pulling it, like we do it with the pencil on paper.