In this post, you’ll learn eight tips for creating nice handwritten notes with the pen of your choice. Handwriting refers to the style and technique that you use to jot things down day to day. Handwriting needs to be quicker and more practical. While everyone has their own personal handwriting style, there’s always room for improvement! In this post, you’ll find eight tips to help you improve your handwriting.

1. Use a Nice Pen

The adjective “nice” is subjective — you’ll have to hunt to find the pen that works for you. You can find thousands of pens on the market, so we encourage you to shop around. Pick up a pen here and there, and give it a try! It doesn’t matter if you prefer gel pens, fountain pens, ballpoint pens … whatever you connect with the best is perfect.

2. Maintain a Relaxed Grip

A nice, relaxed grip is one of the main things that will improve your handwriting. A “relaxed grip” means that none of the muscles in your hand are overly flexed, and your fingernails shouldn’t be white from squeezing the pen’s barrel. Many people tend to clutch the pen, which will result in an achy hand after a few minutes of writing. We often clutch without realizing we’re doing it, so try to mentally check yourself every few minutes to make sure you’re still holding the pen comfortably.

3. Start with Drills

Whether you plan on writing in cursive or print, it can be difficult to form nice letters without warming up. Doing a couple of simple drills will help you to write clear, confident characters. Handwriting drills tend to be simple but mighty, and the more you do them, the more of a difference you’ll notice.

4. Experiment with Paper Rotations

As children, we are generally taught to keep our paper in a vertical position in front of us. If that works for you, great! If not, feel free to experiment with different paper rotations. Keeping the paper at a certain angle can go a long way in helping you to improve your handwriting! Most right-handed people are fine with the traditional vertical paper position. Paper rotation is a personal thing, so we encourage you to try all sorts of different angles. Right-handed people should start at the vertical position, and rotate the paper to the left until writing feels easy and comfortable. Left-handed people should start at the vertical position, and rotate the paper to the right.

5. Practice with a Worksheet

If you want a structured way to improve your handwriting, we have made a free worksheet for you! It’s three pages long and focuses on cursive writing — you can download it by clicking here. Basically, the worksheet takes you through drills, capital and lowercase letters, words, and sentences. The cursive writing featured in the worksheet set isn’t any sort of formal style. Instead, it focuses on the letterforms. Those letters are easy to create, and they connect to each other beautifully to make for quick writing.

6. Sneak in Practice When You Can

Just like anything else, you can improve your handwriting with use. The more you write using good habits and implementing styles that appeal to you, the better your handwriting will get. You can get practice through a number of ways — for example, you might send someone a hand-written letter in place of an email or text. If you have the time and interest, you can start writing in a journal every night. Entries don’t have to be long; they can be short accounts of how your day went!

7. Write on Lined Paper or Use a Template

Writing nice, even words are a big shortcut to neat handwriting! If you want to write a letter to someone, you can put a piece of notebook paper under printer paper. More than likely, you’ll be able to see the notebook paper lines through the printer paper, and you can use those lines as guidelines for even writing. Or, if you don’t mind the lines, you can write someone a letter directly on notebook paper.

This point reminds of another tip: always use a “padding” piece of paper. No matter what piece of paper you’re writing on, it should always have another piece of paper under it. For some reason, the slightly cushier surface provided by two pieces of paper makes it easier for all pens to write!

8. Embrace Your Personal Style

Handwriting is a very fluid, personal thing that is always evolving. No matter how your handwriting looks, it is a wonderful reflection of you and your personality. That’s why people love receiving handwritten notes: they represent a piece of you! So, don’t get too hung up on a radical change: instead, focus on making clearly formed letters that are easy to read.

Hope you enjoyed this post, and that it inspires you to ditch the keyboard and write something by hand this weekend!