<p>My son has ugly printing and cursive writing. I am wondering if his writing score(s) will be lower because of this? I have heard that it is not supposed to "matter" but I can't help but think that the readers will subconsciously think an essay is "not as good" simply because it is more difficult to read. (After all, if an essay is more difficult to read, it would seem that it hurts the "flow" of the reading and dilutes the essay's strengths.)</p>
<p>My son also says that his writing gets even worse when he's nervous -- such as when writing any test essay. Yikes -- as if there could be worse writing.... :(</p>
<p>Also, does anyone have any advice about improving his writing rather quickly? I'm not looking for beautiful results, just modest improvements.</p>
<p>My opinion is it does matter. If you were an essay grader, grading hundreds of essays each day and spend only two minutes on each, you'd have a headache when you see bad handwriting.</p>
<p>If it can be read at first glance by an average teacher, it will have no effect. However, AP graders do not try to find points admidst unreadable handwriting. If a word is not legible the grader will most likely skip it.</p>
<p>If I were an AP grader I would prefer ugly but legible printing to overly curvy cursisve.</p>
<p>well as they said it doesn't matter if the handwriting is ugly....it has to be legible....if its not then it CAN hamper your scores...i have a very ugly writing too but atleast its quite legible!! :)</p>
<p>i think having messy handwriting is better than having trendy or super girly handwriting. if i was a grader id be more prejudiced against someone the latter.</p>
<p>It's definetly a problem if your handwriting is completely illegible. Otherwise, I don't think they'll mark you down too much and give you the benefit of the doubt that you are indeed spelling all those words right.</p>
<p>For some reason, son's messy writing even looks WORSE once his paper is scanned into a computer (which is how the readers receive them). We saw what his SAT essay looked like after it was scanned and we were shocked when we saw that it looked much worse that way (we didn't even know his writing COULD look worse than it does, but it did.) Honestly, when we viewed the essay (scanned), it looked like he wrote with a piece of charcoal!!</p>
<p>SAT essays look best when done in a hard-lead mechanical pencil. They look very bad when written in a dull soft-lead pencil. Maybe your son should try writing his essay with a drafting pencil.</p>