Boy, there’s a YouTube video for everything! Yes, I hold my pen that way, and was taught in first grade to hold it that way. When my husband holds it the other way, it looks so awkward…
When I used to hold my pen with the thumb crossed over (“fist” like), the index finger still guides the pen. It’s just more difficult.
I know people who advocate using the large muscles of the arm to move a pen, thus moving the entire hand rather than the fingers. They have a point, it is the way people write on a blackboard, but I do think fine control is useful. But using the large muscles does have the hand moving constantly, which might have been a useful concept. I would write a few letters, then slide my hand a little, and write a few more, rather than keeping my hand moving.
The video is entirely inadequate for lefties. Tilt the paper? Maybe say why? How about advising that the hand should be below the line of writing, which is especially important for lefties? How about suggesting that letters be tilted toward the right for righties and the left for lefties? I was told to tilt my paper the other way, but they made it more difficult to tilt letters the way the examples showed, so I stopped. I got ink smudges on my writing hand all my life.
Writing on a blackboard is very different from writing on paper though. It’s vertical. Of course it has to be different.
The lefties issue is a different one, and I’m clueless about it.
I’m just saying it’s not weird or too sweeping or ableist to say there’s a right way to handle X. There’s a right way to hold a baseball bat, a baseball, a golf club, a bow, an arrow, a hammer, a screwdriver, etc etc etc. Fingers are amazing tools, and as for the thumb – we wouldn’t be here without it. Of course there are particular skills that need to be taught.
I must have learned how to do it correctly, because according to that video I do, but I can’t remember learning it. I do remember seeing my dad write (he was a lefty) and he grasped the pen properly, but he curled his hand back toward himself with the butt of the pen facing away when he wrote, which looked awkward, but he had brilliant penmanship nevertheless, particularly his cursive (which is hardly seen nowadays).
Ophelia @4 Exactly so. I had to learn the proper technique to use many tools. One that sticks out is a splitting maul, which takes a good amount of practice, and another is a tennis racket (I never learned to golf, but I understand it’s very technical). A pen is just another tool at the end of the day.
I’m in complete agreement that there are “correct” (perhaps “better” or “more efficient” might suffice) ways to do things, including holding a pen, and they should be taught. I was almost entirely not taught, and I suffered because of it. I didn’t mind the original point, it just sparked some bad memories and I commented on it.
I do find it mildly irritating when I see things (videos, for instance) about “You are doing X wrong”. Most of the time they aren’t about something being “wrong”, just different, and this other way has some advantages for some cases or some people. Sometimes the suggested way is drastically better for most people, such as the pen holding. A lot of them mistake “can be used this way” for “obviously was deliberately designed to be used this way”.
I get irritated at people (for instance) holding a canoe paddle in a weird way (“wrong” I think is appropriate, given the design of the paddle), and at the misuse of words; I sometimes comment on such things, and I sometimes get raked over the coals for being overly picky.
Ya I wasn’t arguing with you, just expanding on the point or points.
There are some skills where precision is vital…skills I don’t have, pretty much. String instruments are probably one, right? Cello? I never learned any of those skills. Engineering. Carving.
I learned to make pie crust when I was seven, and the first thing my mother showed me was how to hold the rolling pin correctly. It does make a lot of difference.
Tying shoelaces. I was the youngest kid in my family and I remember my older sister and brother teaching me to do it. I even remember how oddly difficult it seemed at the time. (I was only 25.) You…make…this…loop with one lace and you have to HOLD it while you bring the other lace around – oh my god do you think I’m a physicist or something? Who can do this???
It’s very similar to using chopsticks. I had a real time with it, but one night in San Francisco when I was 12, my aunt and uncle took me to a restaurant in Chinatown that does not provide flatware. I had no choice, and once I grasped it, I realized how similar it is to holding pencil. One stick is held steady, and the other pivots with the pointer finger as a guide.
Necessity helps learn something, like learning how to say “Where is the bathroom” in a different language to English.
As for the left-handed writing, I knew someone who was taught to write in the way that twiliter describes above – kind of a claw that points back toward the body. He ended up teaching himself to write with the paper rotated 90 degrees, so that he was writing vertically with the hand in a more relaxed position. I wonder if the predominance of left to right written language is related to the predominance of right-handedness (seems plausible, but I would defer to an authority). Interestingly, his name was Dexter, which I find amusing.
Heli @12 Yes, and my dad could also write backwards, and would sometimes read car names backward when we were driving: Ovlov, Caitnop, Drof, etc. He had an eccentric perspective on things.
Mike @11, Chopsticks is a good one, I’m still not great at it. I do remember finally not holding a fork in my fist though, it took some trauma for me to submit to that one. I had to be watched. :D
I, too, learned to write “the wrong way” and it’s been a handicap ever since. I have no recollection of the process — maybe 60-odd years later children are more closely supervised when they learn that skill?
I taught myself to use chopsticks, and it isn’t quite the Chinese way, but it works well enough. Pretty much like holding the viola da gamba bow (Sackbut will know what I mean).
I do, actually, even though I don’t play gamba. If I decide to take up a string instrument, though, that’s my choice.
Re holding a fork: there are two main grip styles for hand tools, that I saw usefully referred to as the “precision” grip and the “power” grip. (Think of the two ways one can hold a screwdriver.) I always held a fork in the “power” grip and never really noticed there was another way to hold it until a fairly small number of years ago (well past the age of 45). I’ve mostly become used to holding a fork or spoon in the “precision” grip now, but it’s a conscious effort.
I can use chopsticks adequately, although I hardly use them these days. I learned as a kid. I had a game involving picking up various shaped objects using chopsticks, and I used to play it with my friend who is Asian and very skilled with chopsticks. It was hardly a competition, he was so much better than I was it was pathetic.
I wonder if the predominance of left to right written language is related to the predominance of right-handedness
No; animals have handedness. It may be to do with brain asymmetry.
I think the question was the other way around: whether the predominance of left-to-right language is a result of the predominance of right-handed people.
I, for one, see nothing objectionable in referring to something as a wrong way to do/use a thing when:
– it is suboptimal for most people, or
– it is suboptimal for most users, or
– it is suboptimal in the implied context, or
– a more optimal method is well known, or
– a more optimal method is part of the design intent.
(This list is not exhaustive, by the way.) For instance, holding a baseball bat one-handed is not the right way. It is the right way for a one-handed person, and it’s usually the right way to hand one to another person, but it is not the right way to hold a baseball bat. The default context that gives the sentence meaning is not “for all possible baseball bat holders in all possible worlds, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances without exception.” If that were the default context, we’d never be able to say anything about anything that wasn’t analytic, a priori, necessary, and linguistically invariant. Anything else would require hemming and hawing, a tedious enumeration of potential divergence from absolute universality.
I wonder if the predominance of left to right written language is related to the predominance of right-handedness
I don’t think so. Writing systems come in all directions–left-right for the Latin, Cyrillic, and some other alphabets; right-left for the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets*; vertically going from left to right (Mongolian) or right to left (Chinese, Japanese, at least traditionally). Some languages used to be boustrophedon (literally “ox-turning”)–left to right on one line, then right to left on the next. Keep in mind that pen-on-paper writing is a relatively late development–if you’re carving letters on stone, or wedging cuneiform in clay, or painting graffiti on a wall in Jerusalem, you don’t run into the same issues that you do with a pen.
*Other languages written with the Arabic script include Farsi and Urdu.
I don’t know exactly what Nicole Wetsman’s qualifications are for her assertions about handedness in animals, but for the moment I don’t believe it, because it contradicts what Michael Corballis, a real expert who devoted much of his career to studying handedness, said in his book “The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind”.
Unfortunately I no longer have the book, because I lent it to someone at work and never recovered it. (I didn’t try all that hard to get it back as she is left-handed with a professional interest in such matters, whereas for me it was just general interest).
Anyway I wrote a review of the book at Amazon (it’s no longer there as I have deleted all my Amazon reviews), which I’ll quote in full in lieu of trying to remember what Corballis said:
Most people are right-handed, though with a substantial minority of left-handers: this is such a familiar feature of human existence that we rarely think about it at all (especially if we are right-handed), and now that schools no longer try to force left-handers to write with the right hand, the psychological and emotional problems that this once produced have become a distant memory. Michael Corballis, however, thinks about handedness a great deal, and has devoted a large part of his career as a professor of psychology to studying it.
Because we don’t think about it much at all, we don’t usually notice that bias towards right-handness is a specifically human characteristic. Although animals may prefer to do some actions with one foot rather than the other, they show no consistent bias. To find a comparable case we need to go as far afield as to parrots, which generally prefer to pick up bits of food with their left feet, while standing on their right.
I usually regard discussion left-brain and right-brain specialization as the sort of science that belongs in popular magazines, to be read, perhaps, while waiting for a dental appointment, but otherwise to be treated with the same disdain as signs of the zodiac. Unlike signs of the zodiac, however, lateral specialization of the brain has a perfectly serious aspect, and Corballis makes a strong case that strong handedness in humans is related to an apparently quite different special characteristic of humans, their capacity for language.
I was in Israel a few years ago and it occurred to me that writing a right-to-left language might be easier for lefties than for righties. In so happened that I was in the office of someone discussing a book he was writing when a colleague of his came in. I noticed immediately that the colleague was left-handed, so I asked him. He said he hadn’t thought about it, but thinking about it there and then he thought I was probably right. Probably more true for Arabic than for Hebrew, because Hebrew consists of separate letters, whereas Arabic is all joined up. However, for the moment I haven’t found a left-handed Arabic speaker to ask. (We have had plenty of North African students in the lab, but it has never occurred to me ask one of them the question, especially as I’ve never noticed if one of them is left-handed.)
The woman who has been cutting my hair for more than five years is left-handed, but although I usually notice if someone is left-handed it took me about five years to notice it in her case. I was puzzled at that, but then I remembered that I mainly see her in the mirror, and the woman on the other side of the mirror is right-handed.
I remember positioning the pen and hand and paper becoming an issue when I learned cursive, (way) back in grade school (1970s). To get letters slanting to the right like they were “supposed to”, I had to do the curl the hand around and point the top of the pen away from me (like others decribed above). Of course, I got the ink smear on the hand. And ink smears on the paper, which the teacher would complain about. If I positioned the paper and my hand like righties did (technically, mirror image of it), my letters would slant to the left, but no ink smears. And the teacher would complain about my letters slanting the wrong way.
I settled for my letters slanting the wrong way. It felt more comfortable when writing.
Very interesting. I may see if a copy of that book is available somewhere.
I had a lefty hair stylist, and I noticed immediately. We had many discussions about handedness. She complained about how difficult it is to get lefty barber’s scissors; she, like many of us, had to make do with righty scissors much of the time.
Arabic speakers writing lefty are likely more difficult to find in part because of strong cultural prohibition against left-handedness (“unclean hand” and all that). I don’t know if it’s any better now, but if treatment of women and apostates is any indication, probably not by much.
My grandmother was a very proper English woman who would not let my left handed father eat with his left hand, and he told me that it was difficult for him to learn to use a fork in his right hand. He learned to use the fork in his right hand, but proper etiquette (according to my grandmother) also dictated that he use the knife in his right hand to cut the food, then switch the fork to his right hand to eat, both using his non dominant hand. I remember my grandmother scolding me also for using the knife in my left hand to cut my food (I am somewhat ambidextrous) and skipping the switch from knife to fork maneuver. I was able to conform to her rules when I was young, and did the old switcheroo, but now I just use my left hand for cutting. It’s a wonder that my dad wasn’t made to write with his right hand as well, knowing how strict my grandmother was about manners. Being left handed back in the day wasn’t an easy thing, it was regarded more as a handicap.
My father was also forced to change hands. Not a good idea.
I used to do the fork-knife-switch thing, and I found it uncomfortable to eat with a fork in my right hand just so I could cut with my dominant left. Some years ago I taught myself to cut (at the table only!) with my right hand, keeping the fork in my left all the time, and that has worked out well. It gets slightly confusing when I’m going to cut something smallish for serving, and my brain oscillates between “big thing to be cut using big knife in left hand” and “small thing to be cut using small knife in right hand” modes.
Ha! My first thought when I saw this: “Uh-oh, this must have blown up on the girlguiding post”.
Anyway, I’m left handed. I hold the pen “correctly” but I write diagonally up the page at a 45 degree angle. I got cramp just contemplating trying to write with the paper rotated the way the video suggests. Of course I tried it anyway. Might as well try and write with my foot to be honest! If I must write horizontally, the letters slant “the wrong way” , I assume it’s because it’s easier to pull the pen towards your hand than to push it away across the paper. I also assume that’s why the opposite slant is considered the correct one – it’s what comes naturally to right handed pen users. If I just squiggle on paper randomly, I start on the right. If I’m drawing, which I did endlessly as a child, I start on the right. Drawing an animal? Start with the head, and it faces right. I can write backwards without much trouble, so pfft to Leonardo da Vinci (although when you look at my backward writing in a mirror, it does look like a 6-year-old did it, complete with the odd backward s).
Re. shoelaces – I had trouble with that too. I think it was because everyone overcomplicated it, trying to teach me the way they thought I would do it as a weirdo lefty and then getting in a mess themselves. It’s not hard, just face the leftie, demonstrate how to do it, let them mirror it.
Cutlery was never really a problem but my (right handed) brother holds his knife and fork the wrong way round, for reasons we have never adequately cleared up.
And finally, scissors. I didn’t know there was such a thing as left handed one’s until I was offered a pair in my late teens at school. I was thrilled! Then I discovered that my left hand didn’t know how to use scissors, so that was that. Now I groom dogs and my right hand is my scissor hand, although when things get tricky, usually trimming the right paws, my left hand gets a bit itchy and goes “let me try!” so I am pondering getting maybe getting one pair of lefty scissors.
My twin grandchildren are both right-handed. However, they learned how to hold a pencil at very different speeds. My granddaughter got it right very quickly without help, when she was about 4. Her brother continued holding it like a dagger for at least a year afterwards.
It was difficult to find lefty scissors when I was a kid. The one I had was poor quality. It had a tendency to fold the paper rather than cut it. SO I use righty scissors with my left hand. It did take a bit to figure out how to position paper and scissors to cut on a line, though.
And there’s all the instruments and equipment made so that in order to operate them correctly you have to operate them righty.
And people complaining about the mouse being left on the left side of a shared computer. My reply to that quickly became “move it back yourself, you lazy bum.”
Boy, there’s a YouTube video for everything! Yes, I hold my pen that way, and was taught in first grade to hold it that way. When my husband holds it the other way, it looks so awkward…
Because it IS awkward. As the video points out, the forefinger guides the pen. The fist can’t do that. See also: knitting.
When I used to hold my pen with the thumb crossed over (“fist” like), the index finger still guides the pen. It’s just more difficult.
I know people who advocate using the large muscles of the arm to move a pen, thus moving the entire hand rather than the fingers. They have a point, it is the way people write on a blackboard, but I do think fine control is useful. But using the large muscles does have the hand moving constantly, which might have been a useful concept. I would write a few letters, then slide my hand a little, and write a few more, rather than keeping my hand moving.
The video is entirely inadequate for lefties. Tilt the paper? Maybe say why? How about advising that the hand should be below the line of writing, which is especially important for lefties? How about suggesting that letters be tilted toward the right for righties and the left for lefties? I was told to tilt my paper the other way, but they made it more difficult to tilt letters the way the examples showed, so I stopped. I got ink smudges on my writing hand all my life.
Writing on a blackboard is very different from writing on paper though. It’s vertical. Of course it has to be different.
The lefties issue is a different one, and I’m clueless about it.
I’m just saying it’s not weird or too sweeping or ableist to say there’s a right way to handle X. There’s a right way to hold a baseball bat, a baseball, a golf club, a bow, an arrow, a hammer, a screwdriver, etc etc etc. Fingers are amazing tools, and as for the thumb – we wouldn’t be here without it. Of course there are particular skills that need to be taught.
I must have learned how to do it correctly, because according to that video I do, but I can’t remember learning it. I do remember seeing my dad write (he was a lefty) and he grasped the pen properly, but he curled his hand back toward himself with the butt of the pen facing away when he wrote, which looked awkward, but he had brilliant penmanship nevertheless, particularly his cursive (which is hardly seen nowadays).
Ophelia @4 Exactly so. I had to learn the proper technique to use many tools. One that sticks out is a splitting maul, which takes a good amount of practice, and another is a tennis racket (I never learned to golf, but I understand it’s very technical). A pen is just another tool at the end of the day.
I’m in complete agreement that there are “correct” (perhaps “better” or “more efficient” might suffice) ways to do things, including holding a pen, and they should be taught. I was almost entirely not taught, and I suffered because of it. I didn’t mind the original point, it just sparked some bad memories and I commented on it.
I do find it mildly irritating when I see things (videos, for instance) about “You are doing X wrong”. Most of the time they aren’t about something being “wrong”, just different, and this other way has some advantages for some cases or some people. Sometimes the suggested way is drastically better for most people, such as the pen holding. A lot of them mistake “can be used this way” for “obviously was deliberately designed to be used this way”.
I get irritated at people (for instance) holding a canoe paddle in a weird way (“wrong” I think is appropriate, given the design of the paddle), and at the misuse of words; I sometimes comment on such things, and I sometimes get raked over the coals for being overly picky.
Ya I wasn’t arguing with you, just expanding on the point or points.
There are some skills where precision is vital…skills I don’t have, pretty much. String instruments are probably one, right? Cello? I never learned any of those skills. Engineering. Carving.
I learned to make pie crust when I was seven, and the first thing my mother showed me was how to hold the rolling pin correctly. It does make a lot of difference.
Tying shoelaces. I was the youngest kid in my family and I remember my older sister and brother teaching me to do it. I even remember how oddly difficult it seemed at the time. (I was only 25.) You…make…this…loop with one lace and you have to HOLD it while you bring the other lace around – oh my god do you think I’m a physicist or something? Who can do this???
It’s very similar to using chopsticks. I had a real time with it, but one night in San Francisco when I was 12, my aunt and uncle took me to a restaurant in Chinatown that does not provide flatware. I had no choice, and once I grasped it, I realized how similar it is to holding pencil. One stick is held steady, and the other pivots with the pointer finger as a guide.
Necessity helps learn something, like learning how to say “Where is the bathroom” in a different language to English.
As for the left-handed writing, I knew someone who was taught to write in the way that twiliter describes above – kind of a claw that points back toward the body. He ended up teaching himself to write with the paper rotated 90 degrees, so that he was writing vertically with the hand in a more relaxed position. I wonder if the predominance of left to right written language is related to the predominance of right-handedness (seems plausible, but I would defer to an authority). Interestingly, his name was Dexter, which I find amusing.
Heli @12 Yes, and my dad could also write backwards, and would sometimes read car names backward when we were driving: Ovlov, Caitnop, Drof, etc. He had an eccentric perspective on things.
Mike @11, Chopsticks is a good one, I’m still not great at it. I do remember finally not holding a fork in my fist though, it took some trauma for me to submit to that one. I had to be watched. :D
I, too, learned to write “the wrong way” and it’s been a handicap ever since. I have no recollection of the process — maybe 60-odd years later children are more closely supervised when they learn that skill?
I taught myself to use chopsticks, and it isn’t quite the Chinese way, but it works well enough. Pretty much like holding the viola da gamba bow (Sackbut will know what I mean).
Helicam @12
No; animals have handedness. It may be to do with brain asymmetry.
https://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/do-other-animals-show-handedness/
Ophelia, I’m glad I’m not the only one who found shoelace tying HARD. Thanks for the laugh.
Oops, Helicam, sorry. I think I got your point backwards.
Never mind.
I do, actually, even though I don’t play gamba. If I decide to take up a string instrument, though, that’s my choice.
Re holding a fork: there are two main grip styles for hand tools, that I saw usefully referred to as the “precision” grip and the “power” grip. (Think of the two ways one can hold a screwdriver.) I always held a fork in the “power” grip and never really noticed there was another way to hold it until a fairly small number of years ago (well past the age of 45). I’ve mostly become used to holding a fork or spoon in the “precision” grip now, but it’s a conscious effort.
I can use chopsticks adequately, although I hardly use them these days. I learned as a kid. I had a game involving picking up various shaped objects using chopsticks, and I used to play it with my friend who is Asian and very skilled with chopsticks. It was hardly a competition, he was so much better than I was it was pathetic.
Re: shoelaces
Super-fast way to tie Shoelaces – Numberphile
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPIgR89jv3Q
Ooh yes how could I forget about chopsticks – I never learned to use them and it’s my secret shame.
It’s a damn good thing I learned how to hold a pen early.
I think the question was the other way around: whether the predominance of left-to-right language is a result of the predominance of right-handed people.
… as you noted in your later reply. Never mind.
I, for one, see nothing objectionable in referring to something as a wrong way to do/use a thing when:
– it is suboptimal for most people, or
– it is suboptimal for most users, or
– it is suboptimal in the implied context, or
– a more optimal method is well known, or
– a more optimal method is part of the design intent.
(This list is not exhaustive, by the way.) For instance, holding a baseball bat one-handed is not the right way. It is the right way for a one-handed person, and it’s usually the right way to hand one to another person, but it is not the right way to hold a baseball bat. The default context that gives the sentence meaning is not “for all possible baseball bat holders in all possible worlds, at all times, in all places, and under all circumstances without exception.” If that were the default context, we’d never be able to say anything about anything that wasn’t analytic, a priori, necessary, and linguistically invariant. Anything else would require hemming and hawing, a tedious enumeration of potential divergence from absolute universality.
I don’t think so. Writing systems come in all directions–left-right for the Latin, Cyrillic, and some other alphabets; right-left for the Hebrew and Arabic alphabets*; vertically going from left to right (Mongolian) or right to left (Chinese, Japanese, at least traditionally). Some languages used to be boustrophedon (literally “ox-turning”)–left to right on one line, then right to left on the next. Keep in mind that pen-on-paper writing is a relatively late development–if you’re carving letters on stone, or wedging cuneiform in clay, or painting graffiti on a wall in Jerusalem, you don’t run into the same issues that you do with a pen.
*Other languages written with the Arabic script include Farsi and Urdu.
I don’t know exactly what Nicole Wetsman’s qualifications are for her assertions about handedness in animals, but for the moment I don’t believe it, because it contradicts what Michael Corballis, a real expert who devoted much of his career to studying handedness, said in his book “The Lopsided Ape: Evolution of the Generative Mind”.
Unfortunately I no longer have the book, because I lent it to someone at work and never recovered it. (I didn’t try all that hard to get it back as she is left-handed with a professional interest in such matters, whereas for me it was just general interest).
Anyway I wrote a review of the book at Amazon (it’s no longer there as I have deleted all my Amazon reviews), which I’ll quote in full in lieu of trying to remember what Corballis said:
I was in Israel a few years ago and it occurred to me that writing a right-to-left language might be easier for lefties than for righties. In so happened that I was in the office of someone discussing a book he was writing when a colleague of his came in. I noticed immediately that the colleague was left-handed, so I asked him. He said he hadn’t thought about it, but thinking about it there and then he thought I was probably right. Probably more true for Arabic than for Hebrew, because Hebrew consists of separate letters, whereas Arabic is all joined up. However, for the moment I haven’t found a left-handed Arabic speaker to ask. (We have had plenty of North African students in the lab, but it has never occurred to me ask one of them the question, especially as I’ve never noticed if one of them is left-handed.)
The woman who has been cutting my hair for more than five years is left-handed, but although I usually notice if someone is left-handed it took me about five years to notice it in her case. I was puzzled at that, but then I remembered that I mainly see her in the mirror, and the woman on the other side of the mirror is right-handed.
Leftie here.
I remember positioning the pen and hand and paper becoming an issue when I learned cursive, (way) back in grade school (1970s). To get letters slanting to the right like they were “supposed to”, I had to do the curl the hand around and point the top of the pen away from me (like others decribed above). Of course, I got the ink smear on the hand. And ink smears on the paper, which the teacher would complain about. If I positioned the paper and my hand like righties did (technically, mirror image of it), my letters would slant to the left, but no ink smears. And the teacher would complain about my letters slanting the wrong way.
I settled for my letters slanting the wrong way. It felt more comfortable when writing.
PS
I hold pens and pencils like they show in the video.
And there’s like a slight dent in the side of my left middle finger (finger number 3) where pens and pencils rest against it.
ACB @ 25
Very interesting. I may see if a copy of that book is available somewhere.
I had a lefty hair stylist, and I noticed immediately. We had many discussions about handedness. She complained about how difficult it is to get lefty barber’s scissors; she, like many of us, had to make do with righty scissors much of the time.
Arabic speakers writing lefty are likely more difficult to find in part because of strong cultural prohibition against left-handedness (“unclean hand” and all that). I don’t know if it’s any better now, but if treatment of women and apostates is any indication, probably not by much.
My grandmother was a very proper English woman who would not let my left handed father eat with his left hand, and he told me that it was difficult for him to learn to use a fork in his right hand. He learned to use the fork in his right hand, but proper etiquette (according to my grandmother) also dictated that he use the knife in his right hand to cut the food, then switch the fork to his right hand to eat, both using his non dominant hand. I remember my grandmother scolding me also for using the knife in my left hand to cut my food (I am somewhat ambidextrous) and skipping the switch from knife to fork maneuver. I was able to conform to her rules when I was young, and did the old switcheroo, but now I just use my left hand for cutting. It’s a wonder that my dad wasn’t made to write with his right hand as well, knowing how strict my grandmother was about manners. Being left handed back in the day wasn’t an easy thing, it was regarded more as a handicap.
My father was also forced to change hands. Not a good idea.
I used to do the fork-knife-switch thing, and I found it uncomfortable to eat with a fork in my right hand just so I could cut with my dominant left. Some years ago I taught myself to cut (at the table only!) with my right hand, keeping the fork in my left all the time, and that has worked out well. It gets slightly confusing when I’m going to cut something smallish for serving, and my brain oscillates between “big thing to be cut using big knife in left hand” and “small thing to be cut using small knife in right hand” modes.
Ha! My first thought when I saw this: “Uh-oh, this must have blown up on the girlguiding post”.
Anyway, I’m left handed. I hold the pen “correctly” but I write diagonally up the page at a 45 degree angle. I got cramp just contemplating trying to write with the paper rotated the way the video suggests. Of course I tried it anyway. Might as well try and write with my foot to be honest! If I must write horizontally, the letters slant “the wrong way” , I assume it’s because it’s easier to pull the pen towards your hand than to push it away across the paper. I also assume that’s why the opposite slant is considered the correct one – it’s what comes naturally to right handed pen users. If I just squiggle on paper randomly, I start on the right. If I’m drawing, which I did endlessly as a child, I start on the right. Drawing an animal? Start with the head, and it faces right. I can write backwards without much trouble, so pfft to Leonardo da Vinci (although when you look at my backward writing in a mirror, it does look like a 6-year-old did it, complete with the odd backward s).
Re. shoelaces – I had trouble with that too. I think it was because everyone overcomplicated it, trying to teach me the way they thought I would do it as a weirdo lefty and then getting in a mess themselves. It’s not hard, just face the leftie, demonstrate how to do it, let them mirror it.
Cutlery was never really a problem but my (right handed) brother holds his knife and fork the wrong way round, for reasons we have never adequately cleared up.
And finally, scissors. I didn’t know there was such a thing as left handed one’s until I was offered a pair in my late teens at school. I was thrilled! Then I discovered that my left hand didn’t know how to use scissors, so that was that. Now I groom dogs and my right hand is my scissor hand, although when things get tricky, usually trimming the right paws, my left hand gets a bit itchy and goes “let me try!” so I am pondering getting maybe getting one pair of lefty scissors.
My twin grandchildren are both right-handed. However, they learned how to hold a pencil at very different speeds. My granddaughter got it right very quickly without help, when she was about 4. Her brother continued holding it like a dagger for at least a year afterwards.
re: scissors.
It was difficult to find lefty scissors when I was a kid. The one I had was poor quality. It had a tendency to fold the paper rather than cut it. SO I use righty scissors with my left hand. It did take a bit to figure out how to position paper and scissors to cut on a line, though.
And there’s all the instruments and equipment made so that in order to operate them correctly you have to operate them righty.
And people complaining about the mouse being left on the left side of a shared computer. My reply to that quickly became “move it back yourself, you lazy bum.”