To be clear, I’m not discussing vertical signage involving the Latin Alphabet such as this since I’m mainly discussing formatting entire book passages, sentences or even paragraphs of information in that manner in which Chinese, Japanese or Korean allow for that kind of writing orientation found in novels (chapter books) like this:
I’ve shared a excerpt from the first chapter of a book I’ve finished reading in Japanese, but the same writing format works for both Chinese and Korean. Is it because their characters look more “squarish” as they’re logographic meaning the orientation isn’t rigid allowing flexibility on being read either top to bottom vertically or left to right horizontally?
…rotate the page ninety degrees and write with your left hand: vertical text, right-to-left…
Do you think lefties write backwards? :D
…some do, but most either rotate the page ninety degrees to write vertical text right-to-left or they cramp their hands and smudge the paper…
(not to mention that pushing your writing implement is generally much rougher on both the tool and the paper surface; pens clog + jam, pencil tips break, and paper tears much more frequently)
Lol wut? Are you serious? Have you met a leftie?
(look left to mouse, looks down at sideways notebook, looks back to display)
…so here’s the thing: ergonomically, we hold and manipulate writing implements around 135° from the writing surface, which most-smoothly draws across the page at that oblique angle, pulling your hand outward, back of pen and and hand first, fingers and writing tip last, character strokes moving center-out and top-down so we can see what we’re writing and avoid smudging everything with our hand…left-handed or right-handed, that doesn’t change, and although some lefties struggle to contort their hand around top, stabbing into the paper at an acute 45°, it’s an awkward, uncomfortable, smudgy mess fighting against both ergonomics and mechanical advantage of the pen-and-paper…
…righties write accordingly, pulling the pen out-and-down, but if we rotate the page 180° (90° clockwise from a left-handed perspective) lefties do exactly the same, pulling the pen out-and-down, it’s just that text flows along the down-axis and the rows flow on the out-axis…
…another way of looking at it is to take that japanese text above and rotate it 90° counter-clockwise: now it flows left-to-right, top-to-bottom…sure, in either case one might counter that the letters are sideways but that’s just a matter of convention in how one interprets the rotated glyphs; book spines are still perfectly legible…
I have been a leftie my entire life as well, and none of that matches my experience. I certainly don’t wear out my pens and rip up pages.
My hand position puts my hand below the line, so I am not smudging my fingers across the text anyway, and other than being mirrored, is exactly how gripping the pen was taught to all of us at school. The wrist is relatively neutral, and the pen is angled down from the line.
This is my handwriting, forgive the camera angle, and the poor cursive, I don’t handwrite much beyond scribbling notes:
https://streamable.com/v7l92z
…and your face / torso is where the camera is?..if so, you’re writing vertically in columns, right-to-left; that’s how i write left-handed, but we’ve actually rotated the page 90º clockwise, and if we angle the page just a bit more ergonomically we’re literally upside-down from the right-handed paper position…
(maybe you’re super-immortal)
(and as for rare lefties who just write backwards instead, here’s the most-famous example)