Photo source: Fonts.com

The most important ones to know for the purposes of improving your everyday handwriting are:

Cap Height: The height of capital letters from the baseline to the top of the letter.

X-height: The height of lowercase letters such as c, not including ascenders and descenders.

Ascenders: The part of a lowercase letter that extends above the x-height (b, d, f, h, k, l, t)

Descenders: The part of a letter that descends below the bottom of the x-height.

Bar: The horizontal stroke on letters (A, H, R, t, e, a)

Baseline: All letters sit on this line

Learn more about the entire anatomy of a character here.

3. Practice with a writing activity you enjoy.

Journaling

Write down song lyrics

In your Bullet Journal or planner

A ‘fun book’ such as the 642 things to write about

Writing letters (Kara has some good resources; you can also write to me, I usually write back :))

Random acts of kindness by writing sweet notes on sticky notes and leaving them around town

4. Find an alphabet and emulate it.

Pinterest is a good resource for this. It might be trickier to find an alphabet for regular handwriting, but if you find other alphabets, you could take inspiration from them and add some of their nuances to your handwriting.

5. Join the #RockYourHandwriting challenge.

Challenges are awesome because you get a level of camaraderie and encouragement that you'd have a difficult time finding elsewhere online. Everyone that participates cares about their handwriting and in tidying theirs up. This drive creates for an awesome atmosphere of support and understanding.

The #RockYourHandwriting challenge in particular is one that Kara, Jessica, Dee, and I came up with to help, inspire, and support you in your everyday handwriting journey! This challenge has been extremely popular and effective in not only motivating others to improve their handwriting, but also to gain new friendships, pick up nuances from each other, and root each other on.

It is a wonderfully active and supportive community in which we grow stronger with one another and in our own skills. It is an amazing thing to find so many people interested in the same objective and I am very proud of all of you and am eagerly cheering you all on!

6. Practice, practice, practice.

Handwriting is one of those things that we tend to settle into and unless we actively and consistenly work on improving it, it won't improve at all. If you really want to neaten up your everyday handwriting, then you're going to need to practice.

To help you in your quest of improving your handwriting, I created a few handwriting printables to help you out!

Free Handwriting Printables:

Since most notebooks these days have 5mm spacing, it makes sense to practice on a guide that will help you improve your handwriting under these conditions. Based on this, I created a few printables with small handwriting in mind.