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Despite seeing it millions of times in pretty much every picture book, every novel, every newspaper and every email message, people are essentially unaware of the more common version of the lowercase print letter "g," Johns Hopkins researchers have found.
Most people don't even know that two forms of the letter -- one usually handwritten, the other typeset -- exist. And if they do, they can't write the typeset one we usually see. They can't even pick the correct version of it out of a lineup.
[...] Unlike most letters, "g" has two lowercase print versions. There's the opentail one that most everyone uses when writing by hand; it looks like a loop with a fishhook hanging from it. Then there's the looptail g, which is by far the more common, seen in everyday fonts like Times New Roman and Calibri and, hence, in most printed and typed material.
Source: http://releases.jhu.edu/2018/04/03/jhu-finds-letter-weve-seen-millions-of-times-yet-cant-write/
(Score: 2) by Marand on Saturday April 07 2018, @01:04AM
If it makes you feel any better, I often have the same problem despite learning cursive and being able to read it fine. If it's written well, it's fine, but what I noticed is that cursive has this weird "dialect" problem, where nearly everybody writes in their own custom version, with subtly (sometimes greatly) different letter shapes and odd little shortcuts. And the variations themselves differ from person to person, too: sometimes print characters get mixed in; sometimes the cursive letters only marginally resemble what they're supposed to; sometimes the letters are crammed together so tightly it looks like a bunch of curly loops with no meaning; and sometimes it's written at such an extreme left- or right-leaning slant that all the letters only barely resemble what they should.
Worse still, it's usually not just one thing. No, it's a mix-and-match of multiple variations, making someone else's cursive handwriting practically a foreign language, no matter how neat it is. Sure, some of it still happens with block print, but it seems like less of a problem overall for some reason. Might be because block print clearly distinguishes individual characters, compared to cursive's emphasis on writing entire words in a single long stroke. The latter makes it harder to determine where one letter ends and another begins, and probably also encourages sloppiness. Yes, when it's well-written, cursive has that pretty flowing lettering look to it, but making long sustained strokes like that is much harder to do neatly compared to short, decisive pen movements, and I think it makes the writing of people that don't hand-write constantly much worse compared to occasional block print usage. I'll admit that's just speculation on my part, but there are similar problems trying to draw long strokes with many curves vs. single decisive strokes when sketching, so it seems reasonable to me that similar difficulties occur when putting pen strokes to paper for a different purpose.
Only somewhat related, I've always had poor handwriting (both print and cursive), and it got worse as I started typing more than writing, but I eventually figured out that I could improve my printing greatly by focusing on accurately creating letter shapes instead of focusing on the words to write. Basically, I treat it more like "drawing" the characters instead of writing the words. It changed how I write and made a huge improvement to my legibility.