I was facilitating a vocational training course and the topic of Handwriting came up. One of the participants shared that they would really like to improve their handwriting. They know how to write, but just feel that their writing is too messy and illegible. Once this young man had made this admission, many others also wanted to get on the band wagon. So this became one of their workplace training goals.
This was interesting to me, as I also feel that I have messy handwriting, and often admire those, including my own daughter, who has beautiful handwriting. Clearly we are all born with our own style of writing, but with practice we can improve it.
Even though, in today's society, we type into a computer or a mobile device to communicate in the written form, we still need to write in many instances. Health and Safety requirements have us filling out forms, the Doctors, or Dentist want us to hand write details. Also, having just come back from an overseas trip, the airports still have us filling out declarations by hand!
And so, I decided to look around for some helpful resources that were going to enable this young man to reach his goal of becoming a neater hand writer. Of course, the benefits are huge and far reaching. There is a lot of room for miscommunication, errors, mistakes and loss of productivity when people can't understand what is written on a piece of paper and have to take a wild guess!
Below are some teaching materials that I used in that situation. Includes a PowerPoint presentation and worksheets.