I changed my handwriting in high school because I was bored af. In primary school I learned a little bit of cursive and we were required to write with fountain pen back then so I thought that’s what I had to do to fix my writing in high school.

I bought a fountain pen and started writing the alphabet in cursive and trying out different cursive styles to find out what I liked. I fully personalised my alphabet and then I started practicing with the letters I found most difficult to train my muscle memory. Just write the same letter 100 times over with intent. Start really slow and speed up when it starts to look better. Keep focussed on your goal of improving though because if you just write in autopilot then you’re not actually training your muscle memory. I had to change my script a little bit because some letters were just impossible to keep pretty in my preferred style while writing fast. So that’s something to keep in mind too.

Guidelines were pretty important for me to keep a consistent letter size, but I also practiced on paper without lines whenever I felt that my letters looked good enough with lines.

You don’t need a good pen and paper to write nice but it helps against cramps and it looks a bit better. They also can make practicing more fun and easy because you can feel how smooth the pen glides.

I love oxford and clairefontain notebooks because their paper is extremely smooth. So smooth that fountain pen ink can take a while to dry on them which is not nice because you don’t want to wait every time you need to turn to a new page. So I no longer use a fountain pen and switched to a €20 rollerball pen which also writes very smooth.