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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

Mirror writing enables lefties to not smudge the ink (no ballpoint pens back then).

I'm left handed, and was educated in a country where using a fountain pen is required until middle school (at least it was when I was growing up).

Every time there was a smudge on a piece of work, my 2nd grade teacher would tear it apart and make me do it all over again. I usually finished way before the other kids anyways, and even doing that I was still usually done before the others.

I can write really neatly now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How did you achieve that? I ended up writing "overhand" (mirrored in the plane of the nib from the right-hand method), so the edge of my hand was always on top of the work. I ended up using blotter paper to avoid resting directly on the already-written ink.

> Every time there was a smudge on a piece of work, my 2nd grade teacher would tear it apart and make me do it all over again

Ah, the brutal conformism of education :(

Yeah, pretty much something like that. My hand tends to be higher above what I write, and I avoid contact with the paper as much as possible. I also use blotting paper.

Some inks dry faster too, so it's worth trying a few different ones.

I still mostly use a fountain pen for taking notes, which gets me a lot of weird looks at work (first for taking notes on paper, then because of the fountain pen).

I don't remember much of the Arabic I learned, but I mastered the script because I found writing English-in-Arabic-script so much easier as a lefty that I wrote a lot of my notes that way.

This comes up when I practice calligraphy as well. I'm right handed and if I'm doing an LTR script (like English), I can manage fairly well without a guard sheet but if I'm doing something like Arabic, I need to be way more careful since my hand will be on top the fresh letters I write. That, apart from the lack of good instructional material, is probably why I moved away from Arabic calligraphy although I really love the form of it.

Medieval Arabic scribes would turn the paper on its side and write from top to bottom to avoid exactly this problem. It's why Arabic numerals are sideways compared to European "Arabic" numerals.

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