Why do we choose to sit in the same sit everyday in class WHEN there is no assigned sitting? We can choose to sit in a different sit every class but don't.

I've noticed that older men, like 65+ have lovely handwriting. Maybe it's just the older men I know, but my grandpa has great cursive writing. I used to work at a hardware store, abd the older dudes there had great writing too. I think it was just mite important then with handwriting classes vs the typing then computer classes we have now.

maybe because we put emphasis on handwriting for girls and with boys we understand that they have "better" things to consume their time with

I've been told I write like a 19th century nun. Perfect cursive lol

I actually had rlly good handwriting in elementary school, but then I saw my friends (boys) all had terrible handwriting. I eventually came to the thought that handwriting doesn't matter and I just learned to write more efficiently without learning how to make it look better. My theory is that we're shaped by our surroundings, and since we usually have friends from the same gender, we adopt their mannerisms including handwriting. Maybe a girl might look at how good her friend's handwriting is and attempt to mirror it. And then someone tries to mirror her. This chain probably started with either gender roles or early development of motor skills, but at the end of the day, social groups might be the biggest factor

I'm female and my handwriting is also pretty bad most of the time, unless I'm really focusing on trying to make each letter look good. But I'm also left handed, and I do think there's a correlation between lefties and "bad" penmanship.

me btw I'm right handed and female with hand writing I sometimes can't even read

I've always found handwriting to be kind of an interesting thing to observe in relation to personalities. I've often found sloppier, more eccentric people (regardless of gender) to have slightly sloppier handwriting and have also noticed that "creative types" tend to have sloppier writing. Maybe it's because their thoughts are flowing too quickly for neatness of writing to be a priority?

people like my handwriting but when I look at it myself I'm like... ugh... anyone the same problem?

Actually, Cristen, even though your hand writing is sloppy, it still looks pretty feminine. I've noticed (generally) women have rounder, curvier, more slanted hand writing than men, and that men have straighter, stiffer, more angular hand writing than women. However, I haven't noticed much of a difference in legibility between the genders. You could say women have 'prettier' hand writing, but in the same sense, you could say men have 'more handsome' hand writing.

I am an exception to that rule as well. I took a lot of time to make sure my handwriting was legible and neat. I heard quite a few insults growing up from other boys how my handwriting was, "like a girls." However, that's just a compliment to me.

Interesting video. Men do tend to have messier handwriting nowadays but when they are exceptions to that, it's because they've made a conscious effort to have better penmanship, in spite of societal norms. Nuture definitely plays a role as men tended to have better handwriting in times before the typewriter--think scribes, engravers, and engrossers; it was their livelihoods and more opportunities were presented to men with good penmanship. And to expand on nature in conjuction with that, the neater handwriting of today found in women due to faster development of motor skills of the digits is parallel to the why men may have had better handwriting long ago--the movement for handwriting primarily came from the arm, rather than the fingers.

I'm a teacher and see the handwriting of many people on a daily basis. I do have to say that out of all the students I've had with nice handwriting, the most beautiful handwriting I've seen comes from the boys.

Im a female and my hand writing is atrocious! I would have to waste my own time to try to make my writing neater, its ironic because I draw VERY well. I have found that people with messy hand writing tend to think faster than they could jot down.

I'm left handed, and when I was a kid I had the worst handwriting. I even had a teacher tell me to redo my homework because she couldn't read it at one point! When I entered middle school, I was determined to have handwriting that was just as nice as other girls I knew. So I practiced and practiced nonstop, until I finally came up with a "style" of writing that looked a lot nicer than my real handwriting. It looked a lot like disney letters, and when I tried out my new "style" of handwriting for homework, my teacher complimented my handwriting in her grade report! What I found most interesting was that I literally adapted an entirely new "style" of handwriting that wasn't my initial "real handwriting". Almost as if I grew up just naturally drawing realistic sketches, and then one day finding out that I'm a natural cartoonist. It took awhile to try to set my disney-handwriting as my default....but at 21 years old, it is. I always get compliments on my writing now! Although, sometimes when I'm writing for a long time for personal notes, my old chicken-scrap handwriting likes to show itself....never really going away.

I'm an illustrator/ graphic designer and my handwriting has always been really neat because I saw letters and alphabet, from an early age, more like little draws that I wanted to copy as accurately as possible and organized them on the page so that they were also nice to look at.

Girls are typically more likely to have more detail in their movements before boys. Why? Toys. Girls often are given toys with little parts like dolls that have joints and small clothing. Boys are typically given toys that only require pushing and other large movements. Not saying this is always the case, but it does often lead to fine tuned motor skills being developed faster for girls. They're taught to use their fingers for small things whole boys are taught to use their whole fist for large things.

I'm a neat freak, but my handwriting is sloppy af

I was reading about an article on how kawaii formed and according to the article girls used to make they're handwriting "cuter" as a form of rebellion against tradition. Eventually their handwriting became so hard to read that it was banned so girls started wearing less traditional more modern clothing because they couldn't make their writing cute. A lot of men don't like kawaii and kawaii related styles so women and girls did it to show that they didn't need men and to almost make themselves less attractive.

I have a question: where did all the gender-specific activities start? In school, I was REQUIRED to take home ec (and boys were neither encouraged nor discouraged for that class), and NOT ALLOWED to take shop classes (again, boys were free to choose on that, too), due to my gender (of course, those rules were abolished as soon as I graduated). Where did that mindset (of "girls can only do girly junk") start, and how is it possible that it still managed to make such an impact on lives, even as recent as the late naughties?

I "naturally" had very sloppy, virtually illegible, handwriting. My 5th grade teacher, Mrs G, thought this was unacceptable in a young lady, and kept me after school every day for A MONTH for remedial lessons. 20 years later I thank her for that, because my printing and cursive are frequently complimented as beautiful. The thing is, when I'm not paying attention or taking my time, my handwriting looks like little more than chicken scratch. Nature AND nurture, all in one!

I had a friend in highschool with the most beautiful handwriting, and often wondered how did he do it. One day I noticed that he wrote "backwards" of what I was used to, meaning the way he traced the letters was the other way. I had some unconsistent (still have) handwriting, and I tried to do it backwards too, and it worked! The letters looked very simmilar to his and certainly neater. When I'm bored I try to trace letters in a different order and it changes a lot how handwriting looks :)

I *LOVE* Cristen's random singing. :D

I am so happy there is a video on this!

I'm known in my school for always using fountain and calligraphy pens to write my notes and assignments in the most beautiful, readable handwriting (so they say hehe). My handwriting actually changes depending on what I'm writing with, what colour ink I'm using and wether I actually care about the assignment. My default handwriting is round and uniformed cursive. Fountain pens actually make cursive writing easier and more beautiful. They're kind of my trademark. IN FACT! I ACTUALLY GOT A NEW WATERMAN PEN FOR CHRISTMAS YAAAYYY I'M SO EXCITED IT WAS MY GRANDFATHER'S AND IT WAS A LIMITED EDITION FROM THE 1980'S AND IT'S SO GORGEOUS OMGGGG YES

I am a girl and when I was in the 9th grade I wrote an anonymous note to my teacher in what was supposed to be an anonymous question box about how several things he did were very offensive, he spent the next 20 mins trying to figure out who wrote it and being super angry(very mature, I know) and the only conclusion he could reach was that the person had probably disguised their handwriting and that the person was defiantly either female or male. He was a real detective that one.

I have messy handwriting. I was always to concerned with getting as much written down before the teacher changed the slides or before I lost a thought to bother focusing on whether anyone but I could read my writing. I just wanted to make sure it was written. Bonus skill: I write my most private journal entries in cursive because my cursive is even more unreadable to the untrained eye.

My handwriting completely changes according to my mood, the pen I'm using, the quality of the paper... and who I'm writing next to. When I was 16 living in England my handwriting was very round and neat-ish in general, but when I moved to France, where they teach children to write in cursive right from infant school and therefore peoples' writing tends to be curlier, my handwriting completely changed, and now it's both fancier and messier than it used to be.

The end of the video was my favorite part, thank you Cristen

It’s a matter of attentiveness, you tend to have neat handwritting to please yourself and people around you. Just like talking, writting is a part of communication like how you would give a speech in a pleasant manner to captivate your audience.

As a girl with very messy handwriting (at least you were able to mix in cursive, Cristen. They made us write most of our stuff in cursive between 3rd and 6th grade along with two papers in 7th and 8th grade and I can't even read my own cursive) I have legible handwriting but it is very straight and print-like, which really makes it look masculine. What I think it's related too, and whenever I say this people look at me like I'm crazy, is artistic ability. Everyone I know who doesn't have neat handwriting, also can't draw worth a crap, stay in the lines while coloring, cut straight, or really do much of that kind of thing. It's probably related to those fine-motor skills. When I was a small child, I would rather be outside running around than inside coloring. Whenever I have to do something like folding and everyone else is doing it really well and fast and I'm sitting there slowly making it look like crap, I joke that I never did those little kid arts and crafts.

My male friend, Jalen, has the smoothest colonial (print, non-cursive ) handwriting, I have ever seen! Very detailed and just amazing! And he is 6 2", on the football team, and I am memorized at reading his notes in Journalism class.

I have somewhat messy hand writing but it is more "girly" with lots of loops and curves. I did however purposely change my hand writing. I liked the way a teacher wrote her Ys with long loops and so I starting writing my Ys like that too and it translated into how I wrote the rest of my letters. I also changed how I wrote my Zs and 7s by crossing them mid bar after I saw a friend's writing.

I'm a guy and I write in cursive. What I want to know is why can girls be tomboys but guys can't be feminine?

I'm definitely an exception to the handwriting rule. As far as the nurture aspect goes, handwriting was a huge deal for girls/women in the past. Handwritten letters were the only way to keep up with friends and family. Since we don't use snail mail anymore, I would think that it would begin to even out a little bit now that handwriting isn't as necessary anymore. If it doesn't, then we'll at least have a direction for future research.

"Exotic" would be a huge compliment to me, damn.

There's a bunch of studies that show a relation between personality and handwritting. Like big or long letters mean that that person is outgoing. Or how smaller, more symetrical letters mean that that person is more reflexive or shy. Guys are usually all over the place while girls tend to be more reflexive, so there's that. And that adds up to different things like if the person is left handed or right handed, how they were taught to grab a pencil, etc, etc.

I'm a girl with really messy hand writing too! I was always known in my class for having such unique handwriting that people would be able to tell which assignment was mine from the writing. I think this because when I was first learning how to write I held the pencil with a fist and didn't learn any other way until grade 5 but the same style of writing stayed with me.

Look up "Palmer Method of Penmanship" Hand writing skills were taught from 4 to 12th grades in all schools everyday, at least 1/2 hour per day up until about 1940. Back then all public records were done by hand so the must be legible! Very few people had typewriters. My Dad had great handwriting.

I feel hand writing is 'inherent' from parents teaching, I was taught by my mum, dad and other realtives and see certain words containing the same letter has different patterns (i.e - my forming of 'one' is a direct copy of my mothers, but my capital C's look like my brothers), also depending on mood, interest and urgency of the task my style varies widely :)

From where I come from (Vietnam), strict handwriting practice/training starts since elementary school. A lot of people also force their kids initially to use their right hand. The result is vietnamese students will have immaculate and neat cursive ( I'm talking like printed cursive) writing. But as we grow up, it will eventually turn into scribble cuz we'd never get work done :)

oh god im stuck watching your videos!! awesome advices thank you! :D

I'm really impressed by your improv singing.

My handwriting hasn't changed almost since I learned how to write; it looks like a fourth-grader's! I never really understood how people developed different handwriting, since we all learned through tracing in handwriting books, but I suppose finger length and the way people hold their pencils makes sense. Also, my mom told me when she was in seventh or eighth grade, she spent her entire summer training her handwriting to look better, and to this day she has some of the clearest, nicest handwriting I've seen!

When I was in High School, There was a friend of mine named Larry that had THE MOST Beautiful handwriting Ive ever seen. Very Feminine , loopy..etc I was so jealous of his handwriting. Conversely, there was a guy in my class named Tom Means, who had the most "TECHNICAL, ENGINEERING, -TYPE" handwriting as well. I swear, when he wrote his name "TOM" the "T"s were like .. PERFECTLY 90 degree angles and the "O" was almost a perfect circle. He wrote like a type writer I was Jealous of his handwriting too *giggles*

There was this kid in middle school who held his pencil in a complete fist (pencil out the pinkie end like a toddler), but had beautiful printed handwriting. I used to try to have nicer handwriting, but somewhere in high school/college I realized I could take faster notes if I just scribbled. Unfortunately, my writing is difficult even for ME to decipher, but I get it all down.

My handwriting. Stranger, "Holy mackerel, are those Egyptian hieroglyphics?!?!" Egytian, "???"

i'm a lefthanded guy with pretty nice handwriting, or at least others say that to me. i used to have unreadable handwriting though. the clue is to find a handwriting that you like and try to copy it. first you do it slowly so your hand can memorize it, and then you speed it up a bit, until you're at a confortable speed. i used to do it with the handwriting of my neighbour in class because she had gorgeous handwriting.

Cristen, do you mind sharing links to studies you specifically refer to? Sometimes I'm really interested to know more :)

As a girl, I violate the norm because my print is absolutely terrible. In elementary school, they really tried to help make it better by giving me paper with raised lines and everything, but it just didn't work. Interestingly enough, though, my handwriting is pretty nice when I write in cursive, though.

I use my left hand to write, however I found out recently bc someone dared me to use my right hand that I can write nearly as neatly with the right as the left. So I was wondering if it is possible to be born ambidextrous, or just right handed or left handed, or is it just how people taught us and it doesn't matter. Also why do we read left to right while some other coulters go right to left?

Hi Cristen! So I was recently asking about my birth and what not, and my dad mentioned I had "Witche's Milk". I was confused, and almost didn't want to ask what it was. Can you explain this? Is this going to effect my life?

You have a Great Video, that is very Educational. And you're a great Hostess of your subject matters. And you present yourself as honest,and with light humor! ☺☺

The best handwriting I've seen has always come from guys, especially where cursive comes into play, but...that's just me. ^_^'

I noticed there's been no comments(that I've seen at least) from ambidextrous people so I thought I'd weigh in. As a young girl in school I was taught use your right hand to write so I used it, but it never looked like "girls handwriting" even when I tried to copy my friends handwriting. But now as an adult I can have beautiful and perfect writing with my left hand and when writing with my right hand I can write almost as fast as I'm thinking but with horrible part cursive, letters capitalized wrong, and words missing type handwriting that I can read fine but not many other people seem to be able to, ha! Also note that I have ADHD and sitting still and writing is Not something my brain likes. The eye-candy that is Cristen, however, my brain loves! Keep up the great work this show is awesome :D

I feel significantly more intelligent watching your channel! Thank you for the thought-invoking videos and possible conversation starters!

How do you do research for your videos?

I'm lefthanded girl and my handwriting changes from girly to boyish and messy when I start to write faster (usually when I'm taking notes on lectures). Sometimes it looks strange when I can see a big difference on the same page. Cristen, I have a question for you - I don't know if it's a common thing but I learn really fast when I write something on paper but when I'm taking notes on my laptop I remember much less. Why is that? Is that common?

Does the same thing happen in those who use logo-graphic systems like in the use of chinese characters or japanese kanji? Or is it more like girls are more likely to use straighter lines to make up the character and boys have messier lines?

I learned to write with separate digits and back in my home land my writing was considered ugly :p Here in Belgium people learned cursive and a lot of people say my writing is nice and clear even though I still see it sloppy. I'm sure it's most correlated with creativity but also with cultural beauty canons when it comes to arbitrary decide what's a nice hand writing and what's not :)

My standard handwriting is in uppercase. The letters that are SUPPOSED to be uppercase take up the full line, and the letters that are supposed to be lowercase taking up a half line. This is because when I'm just quickly scribbling down a note, I find my messy all-caps to be easier to read than my messy cursive. However, if I slow down and take my time at it, my cursive can be passable. I just couldn't do it to take down notes in a meeting because I'd be focusing too hard on what I was writing. :P

I think sometimes it's whether you take the *time* to make your handwriting nice. When I was younger (I'm female) I remember really making an effort to make it clear for teachers etc, but once I was older and was only really writing notes for myself then my writing became much more of a scrawl haha - I was told once that because it was so spidery it looked like a "mad genius' writing"... I took it as a compliment. Also, I've noticed that (though it's all over the place) my writing tends to slant to the left as opposed to the apparently more common right - do you think there's anything to Graphology (study of handwriting)? Or is it just that we write (in English anyway) from left to right?

I know when I was in grade school, the girls would compare handwriting and share tips on making it cuter (or just watch other people write and incorporate their favorite bits) and I didn't see the boys doing that. I wonder if that experience is more broadly true. I could see that kind of competition and awareness of the forms of the letters being a personal touch or a fashion choice making for much "nicer" handwriting.

Cristen, what kind of lifestyle do people have the highest 'happiness levels'? And are more successful relationships ones that are more tumultuously happy or constant but maybe less heightened in this way?

I'm left handed and people tell me all the time I have beautiful hand writing, then when I tell them I'm a lefty they're so shocked. I guess I'm suppose to have awful writing.

In elementary I was in an all-girls school, and there, I had one of the worst handwriting of the class. Penmanship was actually graded, so as an honor student, it was always the reason why my final average would drop, and I wouldn't ever find myself in the top spots of the honor roll. But when I was in high school, I noticed how other people write, and I simply came around to copying their styles of handwriting, forming my own style that looked a bit like how they wrote. My cursive looks a lot like my mom's, my grandma's, with a mix of what the cursive looks like in textbooks when I was a kid. My freehand looked a lot like how my chemistry teacher wrote, and sometimes how my sister wrote, and how this one classmate of mine did too. But my capslock looks mostly like how my mom writes. So now, I have the neatest handwriting ever and when I was new at work, when I'd write my co-workers a note, they'd say like "is this really your handwriting because it looks like a font".

When I was younger I had shitty handwriting that my father actually sat me down for hours of a day trying to make me write neat saying "successful people have nice readable handwriting" My brother never got this because he's always had neat "girly" handwriting and he's like "macho man." I still have the same style in my writing but because of those lessons I write smaller and take longer, in print ( I use to love writing in script until I realized I write messier).

I have honestly experienced more of a social pressure to have pretty handwriting like the rest of the girls, as my handwriting was messy for most of my early childhood. It actually reached the point that the summer before 5th grade, I took up a journal, and wrote very slowly in my neatest handwriting everyday before I went back to school. I'm not sure if it was necessarily a bad thing, but looking back on it, it definitely correlated with gender-based expectations..

Can you do a video on the origin of popular idioms in our daily language

bad handwriting is correlated with intelligence. So there's that... (just a joke, jeez)

I remember cliques of girls in second or third grade consciously trying to mimic each other's handwriting, just like they all wore the same clothes and hair styles. One girl had really round, bubbly letters. I guess one of her friends thought that was pretty, and next thing you know, there were six girls in the class with nearly identical penmanship. So there was some peer pressure at work (at least in our class) to have neat handwriting.

I study paleography (book history), in particular pre-modern hand written material. My teachers both think that they can identify from the shapes of the letters when a medieval book (especially in the blackletter script) has been written by a female scribe. It's hard to prove, as much of the provenance of the particular books that we study have been lost, but it's plausible, as we know from other sources that there seem to have been a significant amount of female scribes in the middle ages.

I’m a guy and I have very feminine hands. My teacher calls me a perfection master. Haha. 😛

I never thought about handwriting (girls vs. boys) before, but now that I think about it, I would think it would have more to do with how your taught to write. My mother taught all three of her kids to write basic words before we started kindergarten. And she demonstrated writing certain letters, like a and r, differently than what is taught in school. My oldest brother and I write similarly with a few slight differences but my youngest brother writes exceptionally neater than the both of us. Confusing, Right? especially when all three of us are right handed

I''m a guy (southpaw, yeah) and I've always had not-bad handwriting and managed to avoid using cursive for a really long time. Once I misunderstood a teachers suggestion to write smaller, and started practising writing small. Like, really small. I eventually got to a point where I could write so small, you could barely tell there were words unless you had a magnifying glass, and it would still be legible (of course I wouldn't do that for important stuff, but it was handy for keeping notes nobody else could read). As far as girls vs boys, I did notice that while boys would lose marks for having indecipherable handwriting, girls would get a lot more praise for writing "beautifully".

I believe that handwriting can sometimes give warning signs of stress on the eyes. when I was growing up I kinda had ok handwriting. fast forward into my later school years, age 16 I discovered that I need glasses due to screen stress. basically I'm short sighted, and my handwriting went from really big to small then settled down. So I'm going to ask, is it possible to spot the warning signs of eyesight problems early such as needing glasses from when it's a chance to monitor how fat it's progressed?

Bunnyloved!!I love this new phrase!!

if someone what be a different sex then they wear give at broth is ok for them to express the grinder fillings?

i've noticed that male artists have similar handwriting, all capitals, in printed letters, rather than script. my hand writing (as a woman) changes depending on what surface i'm writing on, what pen/pencil i'm using. as a kid, i LOVED using all capitals, i guess because i felt like EVERYTHING was important.

My handwriting is weird. I an left-handed, but I was never told to slant my hand when learning to write. The result is that I make vertical, unslanted characters that tend to shrink and scrunch as I go along the page. Also, I did calligraphy for a long time (which I was terrible at, because most scripts assume a right hand), so I have the influences of that mixed in (Large capitals, full loops, long tails, and A's that look like this --> a).

Hi, I've been following your videos for a while and really enjoy them. I've been trying to think of a question for a while and finally came up with one! Sticking on the gender roles, why is a short hairstyle typically seen as a boys one, and long hair is for girls? I wanted to get my hair cut short for years but my parents would never allow me because they said I'm too much of a tomboy already.

I, a 20 year old woman, am often complimented by both male and female peers on my handwriting. But no one sees my personal notes or my lecture notes from class (which I write very quickly), both of which are basically unreadable unless you are me. I think my habit of writing out the alphabet in both uppercase and lowercase letters in both cursive and print is probably the reason for my handwriting being generally good. My parents are both exceptions to the trend. My mother writes in a messy scrawl of near - cursive while my dad (a left handed man) writes in easily readable block letters.

I picked up my hand from my father, who is an electrical engineer, so my writing is block caps (large cap for the first letter and small caps for the rest of the word) and very legible. I bet I gave the SAT ACT graders a headache when they got to the "uses proper capitalization" bit.

I'm a girl, and like you tried to "prettyfy" my handwriting growing up and it never worked. The thing about me is my handwriting changes every time I write, sometimes it's actually nice, most of the time it's terrible... my husband on the other hand has traditional guy handwriting, yet it has a sort of beauty to it, you can read it well, tell a guy wrote it, but it is SO MUCH neater than my own or many males that I have seen.

I think everything is ususally a combination of nature and nurture.

But, your so good at singing I wanted more!

Personally, I'm ambidextrous (not sure if that really matters). But on both of my hands, my index finger actually curves into the rest of my fingers. More so on my right than my left, there's a very noticeable gap between my index and middle fingers because of said curve. I think it's more prominent on my right because when I was a child, being ambidextrous, my teachers trained my right hand to write. I usually always had neater handwriting as a child. Then I was forced into a Catholic school. Cursive was mandatory at the time and most of the other girls would write in a "cuter" cursive fashion, while my cursive was more like people used to write during the time of fountain pens. Which is why I own and carry around a fountain pen. :D

My handwriting sucks, I was taught to write right handed, but when I take the time to write with my left hand it's about as neat as my right handed handwriting (without having spend years practising it in school) so I might have benefited from it if someone would have thought about me teaching me left handed. My twin sister is left handed and she has beautiful handwriting. But she uses a completely different technique, both for writing and drawing. I sketch, she makes straight lines all in one go. If and when I take the time to use her technique for writing (it takes longer and I really can't be bothered as long as it's legible) both my right hand and left hand writing improve dramatically. But it's so slow. This brings me to a question though. I am ambidextrous (seeing as I learn new things with both hands equally well) but when I was a kid everyone handed me stuff (like scissors and hammers) into my right hand so I just used that hand. Over the years I've started doing more things with two hands, but it's really hard to delearn the reflex of doing most stuff right handed. Some rare things that I learned to do with my left hand instead of my right (like catching) are equally hard to reflexively do with my right hand. The question this poses to me is: How bit a percentage of the population is born ambidextrous, but learned to do most stuff with the right hand and thus became right handed. Shouldn't there be a lot more people out there who can write and draw with both hands, but because no one ever thought of teaching them they never learned to get the full potential out of their gift. I know of someone who was tested and was shown to be slightly more right handed (like a few percent) and so they raised him right handed. To me that's a huge waste of potential. Even if you prefer one hand slightly, shouldn't you at least get to try out both hands if you can use them almost equally well?

How come I have about 5 different types of handwriting? I don't know why it even changes. Sometimes it's round and neat, the next minute it's messy, then it's all fancy and swirly. I just don't get it. Please answer this - I'm honestly really curious :) thanks

I’ve never regarded women’s handwriting as “neater”. I see it as more “bubbly” and tends to all be similar. Which I would correlate with conformity to group expectations and being impressionable socially. I love the wording of it making the assumption that what females do is a “good thing” (ie being “neater”)

I'm a lefty and I (in my opinion) have a pretty nice handwriting, but my hand usually smudges the words which make it look bad. But I've adjusted to writing with a turned paper so that my arm is in a 90 degrees, smudge-free :)

Cristen, loved the video. I totally relate to the bad handwriting. My mom loves to remark about my ugly handwriting. Which is funny, because I can't read hers! I feel like in my case it was a lack early hand-eye coordination. Through training I developed it, but it was maybe too late. I also have a question. I don't enjoy kissing. I understand the biology of it (partly thanks to you!) and I accept that. "Swapping spit" isn't the problem. I was under the impression kissing is arousing or pleasurable. To me, it's about as pleasurable as putting my hand on my bf's arm. It's just... physical contact. Due to the emotions involved in kissing, I don't mind doing it. All I can figure is 1) either me, my bf, or both of us don't know how to kiss/we're doing it wrong 2) kissing isn't what media lead me to believe or 3) my lips aren't an erogenous zone for me. Probably 1. Could I get some help?

Nice topic! I'm an exception to this rule. My handwritting is sloppy even when I'm doing it pretty. One of my classmates says that she can only copy my notes with me by her side because she can't understand tones of words ( and sometimes neither can I). In portugal we have a tradition that at the graduation from the University you get to write something for the graduating person on a "fita" wich is a piece of fabric where we write something meaningfull and she said she's going to writte something like: " And the infinite hours we spent deciphering your handwriting" because it's really that bad :P It has allways been like this. In elementary school my teachers would complain to my mother all the time to make me do my handwritting prettier, and it never sticked.

I've worked in a kindergarten class for over a year and I have to say that at that age their is no noticeable gender difference in hand writing. There was a vast improvement of handwriting from the beginning of the school year to the end, but there is a lot of importance put on improving hand writing in early grades. Around the 3ed or 4th grade kids start to take computer/typing classes and improving or maintaining good handwriting slowly becomes less important. Once kids go to middle school and beyond (in my experience) it is assumed that the majority of students regardless of gender have illegible handwriting and papers a required to be typed.

Gasp! I am a woman with a hormone imbalance and no matter how hard I try, my handwritting is legible on my best days! I wonder if others with estrogen/progesterone issues like PCOS and Endometriosis also have less clean handwriting? Obviously I don't think that is the sole reason but maybe there is something there???

I think this is basically the sum of many things. As you said girls develop faster than boys do, so your general rate of develop could and probably does affect your handwriting then your childhood education plays a big role, if you were forced or guided towards improving your overall neatness when writing you still hold that in future life in most cases, also the expectations of society and the need to fit in - it's not expected of boys to have a beautiful calligraphy but most girls compare their handwriting with each other (others just don't care) and get complements on it. What else? Well personality obviously is the thing that makes your calligraphy yours so if you are careless, messy, rushed and so on that shows. And things like the way you hold your pen, left-handed or right-handed, type of pen and paper, dyslexia or other problems. A study says that people with faster thinking skills try to write to the rate they think and so it ends up looking bad I would add that your education or if you spend all day writing (like a journalist) plays a role too. Am I forgetting something?

Something else I noticed when I was younger was how closely my handwriting mimicked my father's. My dad has more "feminine" big loopy cursive writing and my cursive follows the same pattern. My brother on the other hand (no pun intended) has more spiky handwriting that sort of looks like my mom's.

Really enjoyed this video! I think we should talk about being left-handed and all the stereotypes that go along with that. I am a woman, left-handed, and my handwriting could be neater. Is there a reason for my unfortunate handwriting because I am left-handed? Thanks!

In my experience as a teacher I can tell you it is a mixture of everything. I believe girls have better hand writting (in general) because it is expected of them, but also because their Fine motor skills are more developed. And they might be more developed because we usually give girls coloring pencils, paint, beads to play with. Some boys have great fine motor skills because they like these activities, and some girls dont because they dont. Being left handed is a big reason to have a bad handwritting, mostly because you were probably taught by a right handed person. And of course... some kids just seriously dont care, and some do... that is a big factor too.

For me it depends how much effort I'm putting into what I'm writing. For example if I'm writing notes for class I'm more likely to make it neat so I can read it when I go back to it whereas if I'm writing something that isn't that important I just scribble it, also if I'm writing about something that interests me I will write it neatly and I will put more effort into it whereas if it's boring or uninteresting I will probably not try as hard to make my handwriting neat.