When I was a kid, my parents made me do hand writing exercises. I had to fill whole sheets of paper with slashes and slinky loops.

I’m very confused.

Does anyone still use handwriting in university?

I thought handwriting was done with, honestly.

Also my handwriting is dogshit and I got 2 degrees ral quick.

Obviously one of them in literature.

I wouldn’t worry about it.

Practice.

Taking notes during lecture helped. Not only does it help cement the information in your mind, it is practice writing legibly enough it can be studied later. You could practice this now, before school starts, by watching something like Khan Academy.

If your major sends you to the whiteboard often, that will help a lot, too. You will naturally improve as you do it out of necessity. Practice on the board until you can write a straight line of consistent text that doesn’t droop or curve down as it goes along.

I second the suggestion for calligraphy in a script you like.

Perhaps practice by trying to quickly write down song lyrics as you listen? I think that’s when I first started to improve.

Pay attention to your classmates who can take good notes quickly. I made a friend who found my writing to be glacially slow, so I watched how they wrote to learn some tricks.

Sorry if some of these won’t help until you’re in, but don’t worry about it too much. I’m sure your handwriting will be markedly improved by the end of even the first year.

It’s a motor skill. Consistent deliberate practice will yield results.

Write very very slowly. Practice all the specific movements for all letter combos. Only allow your speed of writing to increase if the quality doesn’t suffer.

It’s literally exactly like playing piano to your brain.

I used to have really bad chicken-scratch printing and I wanted to improve.

The exercise that really stuck out for me was to find a font I liked in a book on calligraphy and started practicing the alphabet.

Before I started practicing, I didn’t pay much attention to how I was forming a letter, I’d just draw it - and it would look messy. Once you start looking at each letter as a discrete number of strokes you start paying attention to the small parts and the whole looks much better.

If you’re really lucky, you’ll find a guide with arrows showing which way to draw each stroke. Super helpful. Note that this font uses a fountain pen, so it’ll look different with a standard ballpoint:

• handwriting is pretty much pure muscle memory – regardless of which direction you head, it’s going to require practice to learn a new style and practice to break old habits
• cursive was based off of drawings (copperplate etchings), not writing, which is why it comes across as hard to read and feels artificial
• italic is an older style out of the Renaissance that has the advantages of being based off of writing, is far more legible, looks just as elegant, and (with practice) can be faster than both print and cursive
  • Rosemary Sassoon and G SE Briem, Teach Yourself Better Handwriting
  • Gunnlaugur SE Briem Handwriting
    • Free books

My handwriting isn’t very good, and I recently finished university. I avoided handwriting any time I could by typing things out and printing them off as needed, pretty much the only time I had to submit handwritten work was on exams, and for those I mostly just wrote a little slower than I usually would to make it a little neater (enough to be legible by others if they make some effort).

I never experienced exams I did at the university I went to (in the US) being marked off because they couldn’t read it, and I think the TAs that did most of the grading (students from higher years or graduate students) probably aren’t mean enough to take off points from a fellow student just for “bad handwriting.” Whoever was grading my exams was probably annoyed at having to read my writing, but I didn’t really encounter any big problems.

Depending on where you’re going, you may not need to worry about it much. When I was in postsecondary education, there wasn’t much handwriting required. And I graduated 13 years ago; certainly things have gone more online since then. You might want to check with a current student in your field of study at your university and see what the handwriting requirements are. Make sure to ask whether cursive is a dealbreaker.

If it is something you’re going to need to work on, there’s really no getting around it: you’re going to need to practice. Cursive or print, you’re going to need to practice it. Get a big notebook, and something to write (hopefully something you’re actually interested in), and just start writing. Transcribe a TV show as you’re watching it. Copy a book line-for-line. You get good at the things you do a lot, and so you’re going to have to write a lot.

Also, I would recommend slowing down. My handwriting is great when I’m writing slowly but can be terrible when I speed up if I don’t pay attention. Slow down to start; if it’s still not legible, slow down even more. Make sure you aren’t practicing your existing bad habits. Then, as you practice, be deliberate: focus on each individual letterform, and as you become more comfortable writing legible letters, try to pick up the pace.

There are other things that you might find help you out: try practicing on wide-ruled paper, rather than college-ruled, for instance. Try a pencil or pen which moves more roughly across the page, for more tactile response. Make sure your pen or pencil is making strong, clear marks so that it’s obvious what legibility issues are your hand (and not just a bad implement).

You can change your writing style; I have, on a couple of occasions. It just takes practice.

Have you considered a career in medicine? (/s)

I work in IT so YMMV; Functionally, outside of k-12 education I have not really needed handwriting skills. If I don’t have a working keyboard available, something has gone very wrong

As long as you can read it, speed would probably be the priority over legibility.

id suggest finding a style you like online, print off a few pages of text thats fairly large. then trace the original to train your hand where and how to move. then practice without tracing.

No clue if it would actually work, but thats what i did when i got into calligraphy