Hah, that's actually why I want this. I'm a lefty, and that pretty much guarantees sloppy handwriting. I like how using fonts makes it look so much cleaner. The only problem I had before reading this was that the results were too clean.
I refute your claim that being left-handed pretty much guarantees sloppy handwriting.
My parents are both left handed. Mum’s handwriting is very classically neat according to a standard form with fairly wide letters. Dad’s is not classically neat, favouring taller letters and shapes more angular than rounded, but it’s definitely tidy and very legible.
Another of the neatest writers that I know is left-handed. (And female. I have observed a moderately strong correlation—though by no means uniform—between classically neat handwriting and being female.) I can think of several other left-handed people that I know, but I don’t know their handwriting. My left-handed grandmother’s handwriting is neat in the fairly illegible cursive style of the era, but she does it with her right hand since they beat left-handedness out of you (in handwriting at least) in those days.
(Fun fact: I and my seven siblings are all “failures”. Consensus seems to be something like 20% chance of a child of two lefties being left handed, so the probability of all eight of us being right handed was somewhere around 17%.)
Women have better hand-eye coordination. And that also makes them better welders. At least, that's what the grizzled old guy that taught me how to weld said.
Do you actually push instead of pulling for English as a leftie? I ask because you definitely don't need to "push instead of pull" for RTL languages if you're right-handed (though I'm not suggesting nobody does; I'm sure some fraction of people do), so it's hard for me to see why that would be true for left-handed folks in English.
Look at the angle of the pen/pencil when a right handed and a left handed person is writing. The lefty is indeed pushing the point into the paper. Right handed people drag it.
The lefties who try not to push it curl their wrists into that weird lefty-pose. That way does allow them to drag it. I don't do that, thankfully. It looks pretty bizarre, because writing shouldn't require such acrobatics.
I think I miscommunicated my thoughts, but I was neither trying to say there aren't left-handed folks who push, nor that there aren't ones who pull with a weird pose. Rather, I was wondering if these are actually needed, or if one could do it differently (yet comfortably). Because I believe for LTR and RTL languages, people comfortably write with their right hands holding the pen at basically the same angle regardless of the text direction. Compare [1] with [2] for instance. In both cases the pen tip points to the "north northwest" (so to speak), yet the languages go in opposite directions.
I worked in Riyadh for a while. When it came to numbers, since they would generally be writing in Arabic, they'd leave a gap, and then write Western numbers LtoR, before going back to the start of the number and continuing on RtoL in Arabic. That's when it hit me that people who write Arabic push the pencil in the same way that lefties push it in LtoR languages.
Interestingly I didn't see even one adopt the Lefty-hook hand with their right hand. Unfortunately I never noticed anyone there writing Arabic left-handedly. And I watched for it on purpose, because I was genuinely curious about that.
One thing though, is that Arabic letters are formed in a different way than Western letters are. I suppose Western cursive gets close - but cursive is where lefties push the pencil most, and where writing begins to suffer. (Yes, as per other comments, there ARE lefties who can be tidy. But that's like saying there are grandma's out there that can't cook. Of course you can find examples if you look for them.)
Incidentally, I don't do the lefty-hook thing either. But I'm well aware of it since it is part of so many lefty jokes, and I have seen quite a few people who do it.
The other problem lefties face, that impacts writing clarity, is that when writing in a school binder, those rings are exactly where your wrist needs to be pretty much half the time.
Of course the answer is to write on paper outside the binder, and then turning the paper to a good angle works well enough. But that doesn't help when it comes to coil books, etc, which doesn't impact righties, but does impact lefties.
Not sure that’s true, I used to work with a right-handed Pakistani person who was fully bilingual in Urdu and English and they claimed their handwriting was neater in Urdu than English. I couldn’t tell because I can’t read Perso-Arabic.
Although it’s also possible that RTL writing systems like Perso-Arabic are designed in such a way that it’s ergonomic for the right-handed majority of the population to write in.
It’s an interesting topic, wonder if there are any papers on it
I think it is easier because the length of unbroken long lines isn't as long as in cursive Western writing. So they aren't push-hop-push-hop their way through long unbroken lines like we are. Lefties often prefer printing for exactly that reason. It's slower, but at least they can read it after.
Maybe you want to try a fountain pen? For me my handwriting legibility differs greatly between using it compared to a ballpoint. I don't like the scratching or more pressure needed when using ballpoints.
It’s a lot of work and effort. Imagine writing at 0,1x speed. And then there’s those who give feedback on drafts who keep pushing for even more effort on the penmanship.
