on handwriting and habit

The five ways people take notes

Everyone has a way of taking notes, and you can usually tell what it is the second you open their notebook. Writing that spills into the margins, pages color coded before the first sentence is done, an index with a key at the front, a single line of black ink running down the page, a notebook that's still empty months after it was bought. They all look pretty different, and they all say something about the person holding the pen.

So we put together a quick quiz around those habits. Your notes can say a lot about your handwriting, sometimes more than the letters themselves. If you color code everything, you probably write with more control than you think. If your notebook is still blank, you're likely a more careful writer than you realize, you just haven't given your pen much of a test yet. It takes about two minutes and there are no wrong answers.

The Margin Scribbler, the Color Coder, the Bullet Journaler, the One-Pen Minimalist, the Blank Page Starer. Those are the five results. None of them are a problem to fix. A Margin Scribbler gets ideas down before they disappear. A Bullet Journaler can find a note from months ago in seconds. What changes between the types is where handwriting practice actually helps: steadier letter height for someone writing at speed, or just the nerve to fill the first page for someone who keeps buying notebooks and never starting them.

Whichever type you land on, the fastest way to change how a page looks isn't trying to slow down and write "neater." It's short, guided practice on the actual letterforms, a few minutes at a time. That's what the rest of this app is built for.