Ask HN: How do I improve my handwriting?

I won't say I hacked it, but I did improve my handwriting. It took deliberate practice over a period of months.

I'm right-handed, though, and so for English and other left-to-right languages my experience is different than yours will be. I have noticed that my boss (left-handed) writes top-to-bottom which may be a useful trick for you. She has the top of the page turned to her right and essentially writes the characters "sideways" as she goes down the line. This may help with the way you hook your hand (you wouldn't have to focus on changing your hand position, just the direction of movement as you write and how you draw the characters).

When I was a child, I had to do what we called at home "les pages d'écriture" ("the writing pages"). Before I was "allowed" to go out and play (a figure of speech, I had every liberty to roam anywhere), I had to write the alphabet on ten pages, following a canonic form. All had to look good, no cheating or I had to write two good pages for one bad page.

This is the "process" my siblings enforced with me, as our parents enforced with them before I was born.

I had new teachers in primary school accuse me of not being the one who did my homework because it was an adult's handwriting. I had to write in front of them to disculpate myself. My handwriting now is not fabulous, but it's legible.

My point is that you can find a canonic form and go at it as you would everything. Systematic improvement, tight feedback loop, continuous corrections.

PS: The "process" was adapted and writing was just a part of it: I had to read texts from books and magazines, look up words I didn't understand in a dictionary (Larousse 89), write them down and learn them, then write a summary of the text, and present it in front of one of my siblings, my sisters (oral summary) and they would test my understanding (the articles were from Science & Vie and dealt with science and engineering, the books were classics in French, and I would try to the best of my ability to summarize and reason by analogy and share my mental model).

This started before going through K-12 and was in addition to homework.