I remember a left-handed teaching assistant with extremely consistent/neat handwriting; she solved this problem by rotating the page 90deg counter-clockwise, writing 'bottom-to-top' rather than left-to-right, and 'down' the page to the right.

I've never seen anyone else do that, but it certainly worked. Though I remember wondering why not rotate it the other way, so 'down' becomes left and hand wouldn't pass over the previous line either.

I have actually read that turning it 90° clockwise and pushing towards your body is a known method of left handed writers, though it was (unfortunately) never taught to me. It makes sense as it eliminates all the smearing problems. Your left hand moves away from the written letters and lines exactly as you write them. Like it happens naturally for a right handed person writing "normally".

However, I guess the problem is that it basically means you have to learn writing the letters in a completely different way and most 6 year olds will not be able to come up with that themselves.

Edit:

> Left-to-right alphabets can be written smudge-free and in proper "forward slant" with the left hand if the paper is turned 1⁄4 turn clockwise (90 degrees to the right), and the left hand is drawn toward the body on forward strokes, and left to right on upward strokes (as expressed in directionality of the text). It is also possible to do calligraphy in this posture with the left hand, but using right-handed pen nibs.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peo...

Funny, that unlocked a memory for me. I distinctly remember my middle school crush writing with the page pretty much sideways, top to bottom, like you describe. Now it makes sense why!

Well, if the girl I think of is not the crush of @andrepd, I can add another person to that list.

I, although also left-handed, never wrote like that, I did the "wrist-bending" instead.

I solved the problem the same way, but I'd never heard of anyone else who came up with this solution, either, until today.

Ball-point pens are fairly useless too, When you're a lefty uou push the pen rather than dragging it so it clogs up. Gel-ink pens has made my life so much better.

Wow. Decades and I didn't realise this was why I and ball point pens don't agree.

Now I finally realise why left-handed people were so often forcibly re-taught to be right-handed in school in 20th century. It always seemed so pointlessly cruel! But with only fountain pens available, it must have been the only choice.

Edit: this also makes me wonder how the hell Ben Yehuda revived Hebrew without ballpoint pens.

As a right-handed person imagining writing left handed, I think the minimal inconvenience of learning to write with the other hand sounds like it far outweighs a lifetime of smeared ink. I don't think it would cause me too much inconvenience to switch hands and I would hardly call it cruel.

>I don't think it would cause me too much inconvenience to switch hands and I would hardly call it cruel.

As a left handed person, I'd recommend you give it a go for a few months, I think you'll find it a good bit harder than you might think - although you're probably not handwriting pages of text all day anymore, so whether it's a fair comparison I don't know.

I certainly found it quite tortuous to be forced to do things with my less (forgive the pun) dextrous hand: it takes constant conscious effort, like a wasteful background process. And that's not to mention the psychological effect of, as a child, being scolded because the most comfortable & natural way of doing something is "wrong".

Edit: Wikipedia has an interesting section on other consequences of forced conversion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl...

Thinking abstractly, it doesn't seem to be cruel indeed. But I'm not left-handed, and people I know that are and have experienced it have called it such; I'm not sure whether it's the practice itself or just the common everyday teacher cruelty, but having experienced the latter myself, I wouldn't want to have one more reason to be otherfied by them.

I would kindly ask you to not hold such an opinion on a topic you clearly say you have no experience of. Your argument is akin to asking homosexuals "just not be gay". You don't switch your dominant hand merely by attempting to use the other one; at best that makes you roughly ambidextrous.

I wonder how Arabs managed writing with a fountain pen.

Right-handed Arabic writers have very much the same problems as left-handed latin writers. That Arabic is written left to right seems to come from chisel based writing.

> Although it is hard to pinpoint why Arabic is sinistroverse, it has been theorized that before the papermaking process emerged in China, the Arabs used chisels to engrave the ideas and concepts they wished to manifest on stones. Due to its longevity, stone was preferred over leaves, skin, bones and shells. Considering most of the “writers” [and individuals in general] were right-handed, they would use their right hand to hold [and carve with] the chisel and the left hand to hold a hammer. Such direction is more natural because it involves an outward motion and is, therefore, easier to perform from a motor point of view. A left-to-right motion would have been counterintuitive, especially with the risk of personal injury involved.[1]

However, as another comment mentioned there are techniques that solve the smearing and awkward hand-position by rotating the paper. I would not be surprised if those are taught more widely for Arabic as 90% instead of 10% of writers face that problem.

[1] https://www.pangeanic.com/knowledge_center/arabic-right-to-l...

The writing direction in Arabic, Hebrew and other Semitic writing systems has been inherited from the Egyptian.

So any hypothesis about the origin of the right-to-left direction must discuss only how the tools were used for the Egyptian hieratic (written with brushes) and hieroglyphic (carved with chisels) writing systems.

Maybe it was easier to carve hieroglyphs in that direction, but I am not aware of anyone testing this hypothesis in practice.

I'm right-handed and I would certainly hold the hammer in the right hand.

I was also a bit confused by this. For fine motor control, right handers will use the right hand, not the left. The hypothesis is garbage.

You two are right. Reading it again I think I corrected the mixed up hands in my head. While they say the chisel is in the right and the hammer in the left, everything else depicted paints the opposite picture in my head.

If you hold the hammer in the right and the chisel in the left, you swing the hammer from the right to the left with the chisel tilted to the right. Thus the natural writing direction (outward from the swing) would be right to left. Swinging your hammer from the right and moving to the left would mean writing in the opposite direction of the force used to write single letters.

So, if the hammer is in the right hand and chisel in the left means a right-to-left motion and makes a left-to-right motion counterintuitive.

I would think that the "fine motor control" would be in holding the chisel, not the hammer. But you find the same pattern for violin or guitar -- "right-handed" playing has the right hand holding the bow or strumming, while the left hand does the fingerings. The fingering is absolutely more difficult; but I think (from my own experience) the main thing is which hand is in control: The bow and the strumming causes the sound to come out, so that's what the right hand wants to do. That's how I feel about using a chisel too.

You need to put chisel in a right place, than strike it with a hammer. So once the chisel is in place, the only thing the left hand does is holding chisel, which is not hard at all.

Think of it as a nail: if you need to hammer in a nail in exactly the right place, you put the nail into exact position holding it with a left hand, then strike it with force using hammer in the right hand. And if you ever did this you know that the tricky part is hitting the nail the right way, so you don't bend it.

Gotta learn that mirror script like da vinci