Left-handed people have a reputation for writing funny (the "crab claw" style). It's mainly because English is written from left-to-right, and at a slant to the right.

When you are left-handed, writing from left-to-right, not only is there a tendency to over-curl your hand to compensate for the slant, but ink tends to smear, and your hand must "push" along the page rather than pull smoothly. You also can't see what you're writing.

Leonardo Da Vinci was left-handed. He would write backwards, from right-to-left, to avoid having his ink be smudged by his wrist.

I have been interested in left-handed writing styles ever since I was young, because (for me) it's uncomfortable and time-consuming to write in the usual way (another reason why I like typing so much).

I tried writing backwards like Da Vinci, but it felt awkward trying to re-train my hand to write English letters in reverse. It was then that I started researching shorthand.

Shorthand is a rapid way of writing based on phonetical sound rather than spelling. I gravitated more towards Gregg Shorthand because it had many loops and curves; it was not only easy to write, but it looked very pretty.

Left Shorthand

I found practically nothing on the 'net about how to learn shorthand. No eBooks, no tutorials, nothing. From what I can gather, shorthand was really big back in the 1950s and '60s, but it kind of died off with the rise of computers and technology.

So I headed down to the library. It turns out they had some ancient books on Gregg Shorthand. I checked one out, and started thumbing through it.

Over the next couple of days, I read more about shorthand in this old book. I decided to try out my idea on just a few pages, so I scanned in the first few chapters and reversed all the images of shorthand so they appeared to be drawn from right-to-left. I learned the first couple groups of symbols, and tried drawing some shorthand words from right-to-left.

I must say, it felt pretty good! It looks cool, too. I think Leonardo Da Vinci would be proud.

So, here are the first 55 pages of the out-of-print shorthand book, both the left version and the normal version. Enjoy.

Do I use it? Nah, not really. It intrigues me enough to keep reading that old book, and practice it a little. Left Shorthand's impracticality stems from the fact that it uses shorthand: It is easier to write, but it is harder to read. (This could be remedied given enough practice.) It is simply not cost-effective for me to use right now.

If I spent my day writing reams and reams of notes, it would make sense to practice a faster writing style. However, I don't. My notes are usually crammed with illustrations, mind-maps, and source code fragments. If I were going to write a huge amount of text, I would do it on the computer.

Still, I find the idea of left-handed writing accommodations intriguing, and I will definitely keep practicing it.