Part 9: Shifting Your Style—Angles, Weight and Emphasis
Bringing flair to your everyday script.
Up until now, we have focused on keeping our letters beautifully balanced and grounded. But as we step closer to personalising our script, we can start experimenting with adding slant and weight directly to our text using simple adjustments.
The easiest trick to change the entire look of your writing without changing how you move your fingers is simply to tilt the book or paper you are writing on:
Keep it straight: Leaving your notebook perfectly straight on the desk naturally leads to upright, structured block printing or clean, modern scripts.
Tilt the top left corner down: If you are right-handed, gently angling the top of your page to the left automatically tilts your hand. This is the ultimate secret to creating beautiful, handwritten italics—giving your letters a gorgeous, classic forward slant without straining your wrist.
Tilt the top right corner down: If you are left-handed, a slight twist of the page to the right gives you that exact same fluid, relaxed motion to achieve that effortless italic slope.Once your page is angled perfectly to your liking, we can use our regular everyday pen to build structural variety into our notes. Just like a computer text editor, our hands can create three essential weights:
Manual Bold: Write your chosen word normally, then slowly trace over your downstrokes a second or third time. Doubling the width of those specific lines makes important words pop off the page with deep emphasis.
Handwritten Italics: Pair your paper tilt with slightly stretched-out letters, and let them sweep forward with an elegant forward slope. Italics are perfect for gentle text, quiet thoughts, or quoting a loved one.
A Heartfelt Underline: Never underestimate a clean, deliberate line directly under a word. Use a ruler or guide, draw it slowly, and use it to firmly anchor your main message.