How many people with AS had/have difficulty with handwriting

Post Reply New Topic

My dad was very stressed out that I could never write clearly and he even made me practice many times. I still can't write very clearly unless I do so VERY slowly with underlines.

He knows why I can't write well now.

The most creative comment I ever received on my handwriting was that is resembled Early forms of cuneiform.

I couldn't write print or cursive very well until around age 13. It was a real struggle, between the boredom and the hand fatigue I'd get.

For some reason, a lot of my motor skills problems cleared up around 13. To see me knit lace with tiny yarn and write legibly now, you'd never know that I ever had problems tying my shoes or holding a pencil or pen for more than 2 minutes without fatigue.

Some interesting replies posted here.

I actually have quite neat handwriting now but that's due to a school system that emphasised the importance of being able to write by hand. Seems a little redundant to me now, considering that the only time I ever write by hand is during exams.

I hate it. It hurts to write after 30 minutes because I am left handed. I also can't express my ideas fluently by hand, but I can on a word processor.

This made me laugh because a family member often says something very similar about my handwriting (that it is like a spider dipped in ink has crawled over the paper).

I can't remember having problems when I was very young (it was some time ago..) but remember struggling with cursive at secondary school & starting to write in block capitals (which is how i've written ever since for the past 20+ years). I remember loving my typewriter as a kid & finding it much nicer/easier to type than write.

I find writing exhausting , physically & mentally, typing helps, but if I'm writing anything long, I feel it necessary to check over it many times & that can be really exhausting too. I find communication in general difficult & exhausting though, & filling forms in is just horrible.

my spelling was worse than my handwriting and my handwriting was DREADFUL, still is too.

My hand writing has always been pretty bad but now it is just horrible from lack of use.

My handwriting is terrible, but I attribute this to being left-handed.

I seem to be mostly left-handed and left-eyed, though I prefer to use my right hand to throw balls and my right foot to kick.

One issue with my writing is the way I hold my pen. For some reason, only this way seems to work; all other ways, it seems like my hand and arm aren't strong or coordinated well enough to do and no effort or intervention has changed this; the way I do it, though, tends to produce cramping in my wrist. Basically, I tuck my thumb into a fence, with both the thumb and palm of the hand curling around the pen; the pen emerges from between my middle and ring fingers. The side of my palm opposite my thumb rests on the surface and my arm is nearly straight out, bent inward just a little. As I write, I drag my fist across the paper.

When I was in outpatient therapy, a lot of the people there (who had bipolar disorder) wrote in a very similar way, except that they were right-handed and instead of tucking their thumbs in, they stuck the thumb out, parallel to the other fingers, so that only their palm wrapped around their pen. I have yet to see anyone else who writes exactly like me.

My writing is utterly atrocious and hand-writing, even for a brief period, is painful.

Although people (including myself) say I'm a talented writer, I have to type pretty much everything, since my handwriting is virtually illegible and looks like that of a 7 or 8 year old. I've never been any good at it, I think it might have actually gotten worse lately. Sometimes I can't even read my own writing.

I have horrible handwriting that even I can't reread at times - I am at college and type all my notes.

I would make a wonderful doctor. I have the handwriting down pat.

But seriously, my handwriting is atrocious. You can either look at my ugly print, or my slightly-better-looking-but-even-worse cursive. Which sucks, because I prefer writing in cursive.

Mom claims that my handwriting is better than it was, but I still have a hard time believing that.

For someone with the triple whammy of being a left-handed college grad with Aspergers, my handwriting actually isn't all that bad. My cursive has gotten pretty bad due to lack of practice, but back when I used it in elementary school it was almost impeccable (could have been the perfectionist in me). My print went a little downhill in college when I would try to keep up with lectures, but all things considered it's still reasonably neat and legible...

Last edited by jly88 on 30 Jan 2014, 11:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

My handwriting has always been less than ideal. I changed schools many times, which also didn't help - different schools in different countries used slightly different styles. Today I will print if I have to, otherwise I will type it up on the computer. I also struggle to read cursive - I remember my first year English class in high school and the teacher wrote the weekly vocabulary words on the board in cursive, and I would sometimes write down the wrong word and wonder why I can't find it in the dictionary.

I was actually surprised when Palm Pilots (using Graffiti) and Pocket PC PDAs (using the built in recognition) could read my writing fairly accurately.

Today I had an essay in school and when the teacher passed close to my desk and saw what I was writing, she said "Clare, please, write in a way I can understand"