Skipping through twitter this morning, I came across a tweet by the author and broadcaster Natasha Devon. In it, she lists 25 books which she regards as “fantastic” and “life-changing”. I get that with books. Although many of her selections would appear to be well above my levels of intelligence – I own two of them: David Baddiel’s brilliant Jews Don’t Count and Eddie Izzard’s Believe Me – it’s not just the book selection that impresses me. It’s her handwriting. I just love it.
By contrast, mine is terrible to the point of embarrassment. Yet on the face of it, you might be forgiven for thinking my writing should be good since I’ve spent a lifetime writing stuff, albeit mainly before computers came along. I’ve had loads of practice so you’d expect that I’d honed a specific style, but that’s far from the truth.
I’m only guessing why my writing is so terrible. I reckon it’s due to a number of different reasons. One is that I was always taught to write in an Italic style, specifically at primary school. With the assistance of Mr Google, I have managed to show you what this means here. In theory, it’s a good idea. The style is clear and crisp. You don’t have to make a special effort to work out what the hell the person has written. In reality, at least for me, it was a disaster.
Teaching me the Italic style was all very well when I was able to write relatively slowly. But I found that I needed to write much quicker in actual school lessons and with the emphasis on speed, the quality deteriorated to the extent that my writing became messy and often difficult to follow.
One teacher described it as ‘spider writing’, as if a spider had clambered into an inkpot and walked haphazardly across my school books. It was, by far, the kindliest comment I would get about the standard of my writing throughout my life. Many comments at school and at work were far more hurtful, or would have been had I worried about it. But I didn’t. I had long worked out that my poor writing was, at least in part, down to being taught a form of writing that was not compatible with writing at pace and because of my ‘condition’, which later turned out to be ADHD, where I would always feel the need to reach the end of a sentence because I was desperate to commence the next one.
Ms Devon’s writing makes me so jealous, albeit in a nice way. Oddball that I am, I even enjoyed reading her list far more because of the pleasing nature of her presentation. I love the occasional flourishes and the spacing is especially conducive to the reading experience. I reckon that if she hand-wrote a book, I’d probably read it, regardless of the subject matter.
Now I’m old and thanks to the advance of technology I barely have to write at all, except for small shopping lists and jotting ideas in the small notebooks I usually carry around with me. And if anything, my writing is even worse than when I was a spotty schoolboy at Holymead Primary School in Briz. Arriving at Sainsbury’s thinking, “What the hell does this mean?” and trying to work out the item of shopping I require isn’t a good look.
At least I no longer have the requirement to write quickly and on a good day I can still compose a coherent sentence. On a bad day, that old spider still comes out to play, though.
