dot the i with a heart

January 16, 2010 7:52 PM

Why do younger women have bubble or circle style handwriting and older women do not?

There seems to be a shift occurring in the mid 70s early 80s with this. What caused it?

posted by asockpuppet to Grab Bag (28 answers total)

Gah, I hate that handwriting. I know that it was practically enforced at my school to have loopy, ridiculously cartoonish handwriting as a girl who would be interested in EVER having any of your notes read by any other girl. I blame the fall of strict handwriting classes to be the cause of the terrible penmanship we have today. Myself included*.

*I do not have ridiculous loopy handwriting, instead I can hold my head high with a hybrid of cursive and script which is painful to most.
posted by banannafish at 7:55 PM on January 16, 2010

I was looking at my mom's high school yearbook recently, and was surprised to see that a bunch of girls had this kind of handwriting which I associate with people my age. My mom graduated from high school in the mid 70s, so assuming these girls learned to write around 5-8 years old, it's been happening at least since the early 60s.
posted by Ashley801 at 7:59 PM on January 16, 2010

I'm going to go with the old 'they grew out of it' approach.
Qualifications: I see slightly less of it in college than I did in high school.
posted by lhude sing cuccu at 7:59 PM on January 16, 2010

Because it was fashionable to write "cute" back then amongst teenage girls, particularly in junior high. Individuals w out of it and now there's not much "fashion" in handwriting, I imagine-- it's all cuteness in texts etc.
posted by Maias at 8:03 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

This is so weird; I was literally just thinking of this earlier today! I remember being in grade school in the late '70s and early '80s, and the official style of cursive handwriting we were supposed to learn changed dramatically in the space of a couple of years. In 3rd or 4th grade we were being taught the more old-fashioned, angular style of cursive, then around 5th grade it changed abruptly to a very simplified, bubble-shaped style that seemed like half-cursive and half-printing. From what I observed, most girls tended to like the bubbly cursive style (though I recall thinking it was sort of ugly, and so my handwriting tended to be a little more old style -- I was a rebel, Dotty, a loner), while most boys just seemed to revert to printing instead.

Anyway, so I guess that's why there's a rough age division -- if you're over 40, you were trained to write in one way, while if you're under 40 you were trained to write in another. And while I think that it's true that a good deal of it is an affectation of girls and teenagers "writing cute," I do actually still see it with some frequency among a number of my female colleagues who are in their 20s and 30s.
posted by scody at 8:06 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't know why it exists in the first place, but I think its ubiquity is largely based on adolescents being easily influenced by others/external ideas, and one girl sees another girl's handwriting like that, then imitates it, then some girl sees hers, imitates it, and so on. Like weapons-grade pandemonium said, a meme.

Spitballing/speculation/totally-not-hard-evidence-based ideas: I think "handwriting analysis" stuff (which I'm not into, but know a little about) would also say it references confidence and openness, which are qualities that I think adolescent girls want to portray in social situations. Circles and swirls are a huge symbol/influence in the mythologies of women throughout history. They symbolize connection and community, and the social world is such a huge part of being an adolescent (especially girls).
posted by so_gracefully at 8:12 PM on January 16, 2010

You have not seen my mum's handwriting (it is all circles).
posted by Sutekh at 8:13 PM on January 16, 2010

Well, for what it's worth, I'm 25 and I have never had bubbly handwriting, nor have any of my close friends I grew up with. I have seen it before but it's not some universal thing.
posted by Nattie at 8:26 PM on January 16, 2010

When I learned to print, from my parents and then in kindergarten, I did not have bubbly writing. When I was in middle school I did. Then I don't really know about high school. Now I don't have bubbly writing. In fact, my printing has gotten worse and usually looks like that of the stereotypical messy 12-year-old boy. (I never became adept at cursive and always hated it, so I never ever use it, I don't even sign my name, I just sign my initials and scraggly bits after).
I think it's a social thing. You write more "girly" in adolescence to fit in, but not everyone keeps that style of writing.
posted by ishotjr at 8:43 PM on January 16, 2010

Based on my own experience it has something to do with the amount of free time you have. Taking notes and doing homework in middle and high school meant a lot of "write for 2 minutes, wait for 10, repeat," and there wasn't anything to do but mess with your handwriting. I never went through the bubbly phase, but my handwriting definitely changed about 6-7 times when I was a teenager simply because I was bored. You always wanted to have a cool writing style when you passed notes around, after all.

Note taking was much more intense in college so I dropped into one style of handwriting and eventually switched to a computer. But then last semester I had to hand write notes for one class that moved very slowly. I'd completely forgotten how strong the urge was to mess with my handwriting when I was bored like that.
posted by lilac girl at 8:45 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

I learned to write in the 1980s and I remember really liking the look of the two bubbliest writers in my class (like this) and deliberately copying their handwriting. I still have fairly squat writing, but now I aim for less cute, more architectural.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 8:46 PM on January 16, 2010

Why do younger women have bubble or circle style handwriting and older women do not?

Probably for the same reason that guys never seem to have this kind of handwriting (younger or older). Because it's cutsey and infantile.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 8:57 PM on January 16, 2010 [3 favorites]

The reason it didn't happen before the 1970s, in the US at least, was that many (perhaps most) kids had handwriting classes in elementary school and their written assignments were graded on handwriting as well as content.

I am 45 and my eldest female cousin is 60. She never had the bubble-handwriting, because it wasn't allowed in her school when she was a kid. My female cousins who are my age and a few years older all went through a bubble-handwriting stage (my cousin Amy dotted the letter i with a heart, no less), and so did most of my friends.

Eventually you grow out of it because you don't want to look like a 13-year-old girl doodling on your Lisa Frank binder. I think everyone I know had gotten over bubble-handwriting by the time they were seniors in high school; my high school yearbook doesn't have any bubble-writing in it, but my junior high yearbook is Bubble City.

(I did not have bubble-handwriting, because I was Queen Dork, so of course my handwriting was this illegible pseudo-uncial nonsense influenced by Tolkien and the Book of Kells. My teachers were merciful in not just shooting me on the spot.)
posted by Sidhedevil at 8:57 PM on January 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

Probably for the same reason that guys never seem to have this kind of handwriting

The boy version of this is what people call "serial killer handwriting"--weird, straggly mix of printing and cursive, sometimes with capital letters in the middle of words for no reason (especially "R").
posted by Sidhedevil at 9:12 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

As a grader of things written by people born in the late 80s and (gasp) early 90s, the bubble writing continues but not at the level it was at when I was in school (late 80s - 90s).

But kids just don't write much anymore. Heck, I don't write much anymore.
posted by k8t at 9:34 PM on January 16, 2010

Bubbly handwriting is cute, but a lot of work. Any person who spends a few decades writing longhand will eventually gravitate to a much less energetic style of cursive.
posted by The Light Fantastic at 10:15 PM on January 16, 2010 [1 favorite]

My female cousins who are my age and a few years older all went through a bubble-handwriting stage (my cousin Amy dotted the letter i with a heart, no less), and so did most of my friends.

My little brother did this for a while - I attribute this to not only having a classic girl's name (been in in the top 200 girls names in the US for 40 years and Top 100 for 10 years in Australia, Scotland, Canada, Ireland and Wales) but being a sensitive lad who mostly hung out with girls for the entirety of high school. His style is rather less cutesy now but retains a certain curvature.

My hand writing? Bubbly for about 3 months, pseudo-Celtic style crap for another few months but always returns to horrifically messy printing with hints of cursive.
posted by geek anachronism at 10:49 PM on January 16, 2010

Am I the only one who thinks that graphology is sorta persuasive, and that this type of handwriting reflects a certain kind of personality? I remember noticing as a kid (early 90s) that girls with bubble handwriting seemed to have a consistent set of traits: girlish, outgoing and sociable, pliable, cutesy ranging from sweet to giggly to outright airheaded. Bubble handwriting never seemed to belong to those who were: intense, or socially awkward, or aggressive, or reserved, or intellectual, or masculine. I think there are reasons to suspect that handwriting is mostly unconsciously generated and that the hand reflects something about the individual mind. Most of us learned to write print and cursive from textbooks offering the Palmer method, which encourages standardization to a certain set of forms-- and yet people end up with recognizably distinct handwriting styles anyway. Graphology smells like a pseudoscience (in the library of congress call number system it's shelved right next to phrenology and astrology) but I've always had fun noting how handwriting gives you a vivid and intuitive sense of a person. You can often predict things about a person from their handwriting (gender being one of the most obvious). Incidentally, for anyone who's interested in the cultural history of handwriting analysis, I recommend Handwriting in America by Tamara Plakins Thornton, which is one of my favorite scholarly books.
posted by ms.codex at 11:19 PM on January 16, 2010 [6 favorites]

In my primary school years, my handwriting tended to mirror that of the teacher's. Now it's a lean and loose scrawly thing, but in Grade 4 it was Bubble City.
posted by emeiji at 1:16 AM on January 17, 2010

Jane Elliott:

I'm going to give you a really valuable piece of advice. Get over cute!

F:
Aha, o.k.

Jane Elliott:
Now, I'm absolutely serious about this. Get over cute, because you'll be cute until you are about 45. And then at 45, you won't be cute any more, you'll just be an old braud. There'll be whole bunch of 18 to 40 year olds there who are cuter than you are. And at that point, you'll say "I want that promotion". And somebody will say to you "Well, let's see, I don't think of you as qualified, I just think of you as cute".

And then you're going to howl "sexism". Females, get over cute! Get competent! Get trained! Get capable! Get over cute! And those of you who are called Patty and Debby and Susy - get over that, because we use those names to infantilize females. We keep females in their little girl state by the names we use for them. Get over it! If you want to be taken seriously, get serious! Get over it!

And by and large, with age and experience, people do.
posted by flabdablet at 1:42 AM on January 17, 2010

data point: german university girls (women?) tend to have the bubbly handwriting.
posted by ennui.bz at 5:21 AM on January 17, 2010

I tried out the bubbly handwriting thing to fit in with the other girls. As someone mentioned upthread, girls pass(ed) notes in class and if you want your note read, you bubble.

I suspect this will die out with the rise of the text message and the fall of the handwritten note.
posted by crazycanuck at 6:33 AM on January 17, 2010

For the very low-variation in heights, not necessarily with hearts on the i (but often enough with open dots,) I think the term used in graphology and handwriting guides is 'garland'.

I hate it. I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns. It is indeed cutesy. I immediately drop someone's intelligence down a few rungs if the only correspondence I have with them is by paper and that's how they write. I'm aware it's unfair of me, but goddamn, it's unreadable and the roundness seems so...inefficient.

As a woman who attended school in the mid-80s-early-90s, I went through two phases: faux-Copperplate and quasi-Fraktur style. My teachers counted themselves lucky that I typed reports as much as possible.
posted by cobaltnine at 6:37 AM on January 17, 2010

Gah. Somewhere around middle school pretty much every girl I knew developed a tall-bubble style of writing: no slant, very rounded letters, but more like ovals than circles, and very short tops to letters like b, d, f, l, t and very short tails to g, j, p, q, etc.

Graphology breaks letters into "zones" - the rounded parts of letters are the middle zone, the tall parts are the upper zone, and the tails are the lower zone. The upper zone represents imagination, intellect, aspiration; the middle zone represents social life and the everyday, and the lower zone represents sexuality and physical and material desires.

Graphology may or may not be bunk, but as an unpopular middle schooler it gave me enormous pleasure to secretly know that these bubble-girls apparently had no imagination or desires, just big old bubbly mundane social lives.

I see women in their 20s and 30s with bubble handwriting. Interestingly enough, it seems to be more common among women who are in sales or other client-facing jobs. The women I know with techy, creative, or academic jobs often don't write remotely bubbly.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:45 AM on January 17, 2010 [1 favorite]

Datapoints: girls had bubbly handwriting some 30 years ago, and from what I can tell, 8-13 year holds have it still.

I always assumed that it was a reflection of better motor skills in younger women, but that's a theory, so maybe not.
posted by seanyboy at 7:40 AM on January 17, 2010

The bubbliest handwriting I ever saw was a student of mine. Student was male.

I personally have the, uh, serial-killer handwriting mentioned above. (I'm female). YMM, obviously, V.

(I should note that I have this stereotype of handwriting in my head too, quite firmly; I never read names when grading homework, but everytime I graded this male student's homework, I was convinced while reading it that the writer must be one of the (very few) girls in the class. I wouldn't figure out the bubbly handwriting went with him until I recorded the grades. This wrong perception persisted for most of the semester, even though I graded papers every week and should have been reminded; also interesting because it made me wonder why I had any idea whatsoever of a student's gender while grading their work, and what sort of bias it might introduce.)
posted by nat at 10:09 AM on January 17, 2010

Maybe the handwriting is the way it is because girls like to draw flowers.
Or maybe girls like to draw flowers because it's like girl handwriting.

God Damn.
Stereotyping is hard.
posted by seanyboy at 3:59 PM on January 18, 2010

I suspect this will die out with the rise of the text message and the fall of the handwritten note.

I suspect you'll find the same people using analogous constructions in text messages for much the same reason.
posted by flabdablet at 3:50 PM on January 19, 2010