Handwriting?

dooby-duck

Well-known member
I had to have handwriting lessons in high school because my handwriting was so bad. It was a constant thing on all of my school reports from primary school right up until I'd had lessons. I don't know if it was because I am left handed and was badly taught to write or what. My handwriting is quite good these days, and almost always readable anyway.
 

Jake123

Banned
Literacy is not about how good you are with a laptop or calculator, it's about pen and paper and if your handwriting looks like crap you won't get hired.

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. You must be delusional. No one gives a shit if your handwriting sucks. Ugly handwriting does not an illiterate person make.

Are you going to tell me doctors, most of which have terrible handwriting, are illiterate and complete failures because they aren't perfect calligraphists? Yeah, I'm sure while they're performing surgery the most important skill they have is how they write with their pen, not how they use their knife. Wooooooow. I'm at a loss for words. It's clear you're elderly or something, because that's just something an old person who is unable to accept change would say. Handwriting is nigh useless these days.
 

dooby-duck

Well-known member
I wouldn't be too quick to disregard what Sabbath has written. Quite a few employers in the UK at least specify an application letter in your own handwriting. It is so they can judge your level of literacy. They chuck away CV's and applications if their instructions aren't correctly followed. It's how you get your foot in the door.
 

sabbath

Banned
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. You must be delusional. No one gives a shit if your handwriting sucks. Ugly handwriting does not an illiterate person make.

Are you going to tell me doctors, most of which have terrible handwriting, are illiterate and complete failures because they aren't perfect calligraphists? Yeah, I'm sure while they're performing surgery the most important skill they have is how they write with their pen, not how they use their knife. Wooooooow. I'm at a loss for words. It's clear you're elderly or something, because that's just something an old person who is unable to accept change would say. Handwriting is nigh useless these days.

Are you planning on being a doctor?

from http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1578074,00.html

Monday, Jan. 15, 2007
Cause of Death: Sloppy Doctors
By Jeremy Caplan

Doctors' sloppy handwriting kills more than 7,000 people annually. It's a shocking statistic, and, according to a July 2006 report from the National Academies of Science's Institute of Medicine (IOM), preventable medication mistakes also injure more than 1.5 million Americans annually. Many such errors result from unclear abbreviations and dosage indications and illegible writing on some of the 3.2 billion prescriptions written in the U.S. every year.

To address the problem—and give the push for electronic medical records a shove—a coalition of health care companies and technology firms will launch a program Tuesday to enable all doctors in the U.S. to write electronic prescriptions for free. The National e-prescribing Patient Safety Initiative (NEPSI) will offer doctors access to eRx Now, a Web-based tool that physicians can use to write prescriptions electronically, check for potentially harmful drug interactions and ensure that pharmacies provide appropriate medications and dosages. "Thousands of people are dying, and we've been talking about this problem for ages," says Glen Tullman, CEO of Allscripts, a Chicago-based health care technology company, that initiated the project. "This is crazy. We have the technology today to prevent these errors, so why aren't we doing it?"

One of the reasons is that doctors haven't invested in the needed technology, so it's being provided to them. The $100 million project has drawn support from a variety of partners, including Dell, Google, Aetna and numerous hospitals. "Our goal long-term is to get the prescription pads out of doctors' hands, to get them working on computers," says Scott Wells, a Dell vice-president of marketing. Google is designing a custom search engine with NEPSI to assist doctors looking for health data. Insurance companies such as Aetna have pledged to provide incentives for physicians using e-prescription systems.

Although some doctors have been prescribing electronically for years, many still use pen and paper. This is the first national effort to make a Web-based tool free for all doctors. Tullman says that even though 90% of the country's approximately 550,000 doctors have access to the Internet, fewer than 10% of them have invested the time and money required to begin using electronic medical records or e-prescriptions.

By providing doctors with free tools and support—and perhaps a little prodding from the big insurers who pay the bills—the NEPSI alliance hopes to encourage a quickening in adoption of electronic prescribing. Because the new program is Web-based, no special software or hardware is required, and NEPSI says the new system takes 15 minutes to learn. Sprint plans to give away 1,000 web-enabled phones to be used to transmit e-prescriptions and to demonstrate the technology's ease of use. To keep pharmacies plugged into the new system, SureScripts, which links pharmacies around the country much like the national ATM network connects banks, will handle the e-prescriptions traffic from doctors to the country's 55,000 pharmacies.

Automation should eliminate many of the errors that occur when pharmacists misunderstand or misrecord medication names or dosages conveyed messily on paper or hurriedly by phone. Given that there are more than 17,000 pharmaceutical brands and generics available, a spoken request for Celebrex, for instance, can be mistaken for Celexa, or a notation requesting 150 milligrams of a drug might be read as 1500. In electronic systems, drugs and dosages are selected from menus to prevent input errors, and pharmacists don't need to re-enter information.

SureScripts CEO Kevin Hutchinson says one key to reducing medication errors is to get the most prolific prescribers to transition to electronic processing. "Not a lot of people understand that 15% of physicians in the U.S. write 50% of the prescription volume," Hutchinson says. "And 30% of them write 80%. So it's not about getting 100% of physicians to e-prescribe. It's about getting those key 30% who prescribe the most. Then you've automated the process."

Wider adoption of e-prescribing could lead to further efficiency in medical record keeping, which many believe is vital to both improving health care delivery and lowering costs. "Electronic prescribing could be an on-ramp for physicians beginning to use a full-featured electronic medical records system," Hutchinson says. "That's the holy grail."
 
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Jake123

Banned
/sigh

Okay, Sabbath. You win. I should kill myself because I have no future, there's no hope for me because I have bad handwriting. My life is over. In fact I should cut off my hands, I'm completely useless anyway right?

Seriously I don't know what your obsession with handwriting is, it's not that big of a deal. For your information, bad handwriting is a sign of high intelligence.
Maybe it's because we live in different countries or something, but no one uses handwriting here anymore. It's inefficient and can easily be misinterpreted. I think you're still stuck in the past or maybe it's just the UK.
If you have good handwriting that's great, but don't try to make others feel bad because they don't have your calligraphy. It's demeaning.

I have carpal tunnel so no matter how much I try my handwriting will never be neat. Does it matter to me in the least or anyone else? Nope. The ability to write isn't about handwriting. Typing is the exact same thing, except instead of manually using the archaic ink and paper to form the letters, you tap on keys. There's no difference.
 

sabbath

Banned
Do you know what I think is even more important than good handwriting? good manners. Being able to disagree with someone without calling them names or insulting them.
 

Cassandra Evers

New member
I also have a bad handwriting after having a long time using a computer and not manually writing using a pen. Bad handwriting really affects once performance on job and also affects the test results.
 

Rxqueen

Well-known member
I have pretty bad handwriting too...especially if I'm anxious and I'm a pretty nervous person. If you care about it that much try to practice your writing in a notebook or something like someone else said. Personally I don't think it matters....if someone says something bad about your writing then they're probably anal assholes anyways...
 

mismeek

Well-known member
i have really nice handwriting..but only because I pratice alot...maybe thats what you should do.
 

Quiet Angel

Well-known member
My handwriting has always been very small. Probably not helpful for the elders who happen to read my material, right? I'm assuming it's small because I was nervous about others peering over at my paper to see if I made any grammatical mistakes/spelling errors/etc. Maybe, but I'm not sure.
 

SplosionDude

Active member
Thanks to everyone who replied. It's nice to know there are tonnes of people out there who also have bad handwriting lol

It didn't turn out like I thought it would in the end. She didn't actually mention anything about my handwriting. I guess it was just my SA getting me worked up over having my handwritten work 'judged'.

Cheers again.
 

Brightinfinity

Active member
My handwriting is legible if you hold it like four inches from your face. Sure, it's pretty neat, but it's also tiiiiny.
Apparently people with smaller handwriting tend to be more shy and reserved, or less self-confident, so my having tiny handwriting makes complete sense.
 

Ignace

Well-known member
Yeah, I got alot of comment on this too. But they just can't stand I'm the fastest writer of the class, that's why it sucks sometimes.::p:
 

mummylala

Well-known member
My hand writing is really bad too. In order to undertand it I probably have to write in Capital letters and then it still doesn't make sense.

My hubby has handwriting like this, he has to write in capital letters for most people to understand it, he says he couldnt care less what it looks like as long as it can be understood by other people
 
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